The power to send people into exile thus arbitrarily was vested in petty authorities, officers of gendarmerie, subordinate police officials, or mere executive orders countersigned by the minister of the interior and approved by the Czar. There is nothing new in this system. The people of Russia, from noble to serf, have never enjoyed the semblance of liberty; the Russian bureaucracy has wielded the unlimited power delegated to it by the autocratic Czar, and from the beginning of the eighteenth century twenty different classes of officials could employ “administrative methods” as a substitute for judicial process. The right was vested in governors, vice-governors, chiefs of police, and provincial bureaus, ecclesiastical authorities and landed proprietors. In addition to the power to send into exile, these various authorities could at their discretion confiscate property, brand, inflict torture and flog with the knout. Village communes had also the power to order the removal by exile of members who were worthless and ill-conducted, of whom their fellows were anxious to get rid.
Innumerable cases of oppression and injustice are on record of which a few may be cited. One of the most flagrant was that of Constantine Staniukovich, who was the son of a Russian admiral. He had been in the navy but had a fondness for literature and became a writer of plays and novels condemned by the censor as of “pernicious tendency.” But he continued to write and finally became the proprietor of a magazine. He was seized without warning and locked up in the fortress of St. Peter and St. Paul. His wife, who was at Baden Baden, heard nothing of his arrest, and found when she returned to St. Petersburg that he had mysteriously disappeared. She learned, after diligent inquiry, that he was in prison, and that his letters had been secretly tampered with, his offence being a correspondence through the post with a well-known Russian revolutionist residing in Switzerland. At length, after a long imprisonment, he was exiled by administrative process to Tomsk for three years. His magazine was discontinued by his absence and he was financially ruined. Neither wealth nor a high social position could save him from arbitrary treatment.
Another literary man, M. Berodin, was banished to Yakutsk, close to the Arctic Circle, because the manuscript of an article deemed “dangerous” was found in his house in St. Petersburg by the police. This was a spare copy of an article he had written for the Annals of the Fatherland, which had been accepted but had not appeared. When he was on his way to Eastern Siberia to expiate this horrible offence, the incriminated article was passed by the censor and actually published without objection in the same magazine, and without the alteration or omission of a single line. The exile read his own article, for which he had suffered, in the far-off place of his confinement.
The most monstrous instances of high handed proceedings are recorded. One unfortunate gentleman was exiled because he was suspected of an intention to put himself in an illegal situation, no more than a projected change of name. Another man was exiled and sent to Siberia because he was the friend of an accused person who was waiting trial on a political charge, and of which he was in due course acquitted. But the friend of this innocent man was deemed an offender, and was sent across the frontier. Such was the chaos of injustice, accident and caprice, that errors were constantly made as to identification. When the roll of a travelling party was called, no one answered to the name of Vladimir Sidoski. A Victor Sidoski was in the ranks and was challenged to answer. “It is not my name. I am another man, I ought not to have been arrested; I am Victor, not Vladimir,” was the answer. “You will do quite as well,” retorted the officer. “I shall correct the name in the list.” And Victor the innocent became Vladimir the prisoner. It sometimes happened that an arrest was made by mistake; the wrong man was taken and it was clearly shown, but no release followed. It was unsafe to take up the case of any victims of misusage. One lady who resented acts of manifest injustice was arrested and banished because “it was no business of hers.”
A young and skilful surgeon, Dr. Bieli, was shamefully ill-treated. Two women students at a medical college in St. Petersburg had been expelled on suspicion of “untrustworthiness,” and being anxious to continue their studies, had remained in the capital and had secretly become the doctor’s pupils. They were without passports in an “illegal” position and should have been handed over to the police. But Dr. Bieli shielded them until their visits to his house, generally at night, attracted the attention of the police, and it was thought that some political conspiracy was in progress. Arrests followed, the fatal truth came out, and Dr. Bieli was exiled to the arctic village of Vorkhoyansk. His wife was expecting her confinement and could not go with him, but travelled after him, starting on a journey of six thousand miles to be made in the rough jolting telyegas and enduring endless hardships. Her health broke down and gradually her mind gave way. But she bore up until the end of her trials seemed near, when she learned that a mistake had occurred in the place of her destination and that she must traverse another three thousand miles before she reached her husband. The sudden shock was fatal; she became violently insane and died a few months later in the prison hospital at Irkutsk.
The measure of administrative process has been defended by intelligent Russians who visit the blame upon the Nihilists and terrorists,—“a band so horribly vile that their crimes are beyond parallel.” A writer in a German periodical justifies this language by denouncing the bloodthirsty recklessness of the revolutionists who have not hesitated to use the assassin’s knife and dynamite bombs. To give local authorities power to banish the suspected was essential as a means of precaution, “the only possible means to counteract the nefarious doings of these dark conspirators.” Admitting, however, that the decision was unfortunate and has caused unspeakable misery, he says: “From the day this power was delegated no man knows at what moment he may not be seized and cast into prison or doomed to exile.”
He casts all the responsibility on the revolutionists, but in doing so, as Kennan says, puts the cart before the horse. Terrorist measures were the reply to grievous oppression. “It was administrative exile, administrative caprice, and the absence of orderly and legal methods in political cases that caused terrorism, not terrorism that necessitated official lawlessness.” Already the true facts are patent and thoroughly understood by the world at large. The so-called excesses of the revolutionists have not been committed, as the champions of the Russian government would have us believe, “by bloodthirsty tigers in human form at the prompting of presumptuous fancies,” but “by ordinary men and women exasperated to the pitch of desperation by administrative suppression of free speech and free thought, administrative imprisonment for years upon suspicion, administrative banishment to the arctic regions without trial, and, to crown all, administrative denial of every legal remedy and every peaceful means of redress.”
Already “the whirligig of time has brought its revenges.” Russia is wading through blood to the still far-off horizon which is at last dawning on a vexed and tortured people. The overthrow of despotism is approaching inevitably if slowly. The will of the people cannot be ignored or their aspirations checked and crushed by the old arbitrary methods of repression and coercion.
A whole volume might be filled with the detailed iniquities of the administrative process, which was so largely operative and so long before the oppressed people were goaded into retaliation. As far back as the early decades of the nineteenth century, statistics were gathered by a careful and industrious writer covering the period between 1827 and 1846 and showing the average number banished annually to be between three and six thousand, and the aggregate for the twenty years to be nearly eighty thousand. Beyond doubt in more recent years the numbers have steadily grown, although the exact figures are not available.
Kropotkin ably summarises the objects of exile: “Students and girls suspected of subversive ideas; writers whom it was impossible to prosecute for their writings, but who were known to be imbued with a ‘dangerous spirit;’ workmen who were known to have spoken against the authorities; persons who have been irreverent to some governor of a province or ispravnik were transported by hundreds every year.” The barest denunciation and the most casual suggestion were sufficient to afford a motive.