Several young girls were condemned, not merely to exile, but to hard labour for from six to eight years for having given a socialistic pamphlet to one workman. A child of fourteen became a penal colonist for shouting aloud that it was a shame to condemn people to death for nothing.
A flagrant case was that of M. Annenkov, a landed proprietor, who proposed the health of the governor at a banquet given him by the nobility of Kursk. At the end he was bold enough to remark that he greatly hoped his excellency would devote more time to the affairs of the province. The following week a tarantas containing two gensdarmes stopped at his door; he was arrested, was forbidden to bid his wife farewell, and was conveyed as a prisoner to a distant part. Only after six months and the most urgent representations of influential friends was he again set free.
In the last decade of the reign of Alexander II, between 1870 and 1880, administrative exile was employed with unprecedented recklessness and the most consummate indifference to personal rights. Unlimited discretionary powers were vested in governors of provinces. General Todleben, in Odessa, banished all of the “untrustworthy” class without inquiry or discrimination, and sent into exile every one whose loyalty to the existing government was even doubtful. It was enough to be registered as a “suspect” on the books of the secret police, or to have been accused, even anonymously, of political disaffection. Parents who had the most honourable record of unblemished loyalty were exiled because their children had become revolutionists; schoolboys were exiled because they were acquainted with some of the disaffected and had failed to report the fact to the police; teachers were exiled for circulating copies of a harmless magazine; members of provincial assemblies, who claimed the right to petition the Czar for redress of grievances, were sent across the frontier; and university students, who had been tried and acquitted of a political offence, were re-arrested and exiled by administrative process,—all in violation of the most elementary principles of justice.
The majority of the administrative exiles were political prisoners, but all politicals were not let off with simple banishment. A considerable number of political offenders were sentenced to hard labour and also to penal exile. They did not live apart but were incorporated with the common-law criminals and subjected to precisely the same irksome treatment; they were equally deprived of civil rights, and could never count upon freedom absolute and unconditional. A few might in the long run be allowed to return to European Russia, at the intercession and with the guarantee of influential friends, but endless exile was generally their portion and a hard hand-to-mouth existence, with unceasing struggles to gain bread, for when nominally free they are still under police surveillance and do not easily find the means of a livelihood. They are worse off than when prisoners, for they are granted no government allowance and must fight for every kopeck under many disadvantages.
We come thus to the large class of the ssylny, those simply banished, whose liberty is forfeited, although they are not actually subjected to imprisonment; and with them must be comprised the emancipists, those who have completed their penalty but are not permitted to leave Siberia. Both classes are practically prisoners, although not within four walls perhaps. Their movements are restricted, and they are still held under observation within a certain area and must observe certain stringent rules of conduct. Their condition is only a modified form of imprisonment applicable to at least half of the entire number transported to Siberia.
A code of rules has been drawn up for all whom the law condemns to exile and enforced domicile, whether at home or in far-off Siberia. The pregnant word “banishment” is carefully excluded from these rules, and police surveillance takes effect on those “assigned to definite places of residence,” an expression euphemistically applied to the wildest and most remote regions of the empire. It is an obviously colourable suppression of true facts. The names of such places as the frontiers of Mongolia, the arctic province of Yakutsk, or the sub-tropical mountain districts of Central Asia are never mentioned, but there can be no mistakes as to the irksome character of the rules. It is a life of sufferance, of sometimes open arrest, and often of rigorously curtailed freedom of movement. The exile must remain where he is planted; to move his quarters he must give notice and obtain the consent of the police, to whom he must constantly report himself. His chosen place of residence is liable to visitation and search at any time of the day or night, and anything it contains may be removed; his correspondence, all letters and telegrams, inward and outward, may be read or withheld at all times.
The manner of the exile’s daily life is laid down with great minuteness, and the nature of his employments specified, chiefly in the negative sense. He cannot hold any position in the service of the state; he must do no clerical work for any society or institution; he must not promote, or serve with any company; he cannot act as curator of any museum; he must not give lectures or impart instruction as a schoolmaster; he must not take any part in any theatricals, and is forbidden generally to exercise any public activity. He may not embark in any photographic or literary occupation; may not deal in books, must not keep a tea house or grog shop, or trade in intoxicating liquors. He shall not appear or plead in court except on behalf of himself and his near relations, nor without special permission may he act as physician, accoucheur, apothecary or chemist. The penalty of contravening any of these regulations is imprisonment for terms varying from three days to one month. Exiles without means are granted a meagre allowance from the treasury, but it is withdrawn if they fail to obtain employment through bad conduct or laziness. The difficulty of getting a living under so many restrictions is not considered.
The exile’s life is full of irksome conditions. When, after a nearly interminable journey, he reaches his “definite domicile,” he must find his own residence with some reluctant householder who does not care to shelter a presumably dangerous political, subject at all times of the day or night to police visitation; and, moreover, the householder is expected to spy upon his tenant and report any suspicious circumstance. When at length he overcomes these irritating and causeless objections and rents a bare room, he has to settle the question of daily subsistence. His wife and family he has left behind in Russia, probably destitute, while he is here in Siberia without means, and with little hope of being able to secure them. He falls back on the government grant, no more than twelve shillings a month, and finds that it is utterly insufficient to provide him with the commonest necessaries of life. Rent, coarse food, meat, rye flour, a few eggs, “brick” tea and a little cheap tobacco exhaust his allowance and leave a substantial deficit, and this without spending a kopeck on washing, kerosene or medicine.
Naturally the exile seeks to supplement his inadequate income. His position is nearly hopeless. Possibly he has had the best education, is a graduate of the university, knows several languages, and is a skilful surgeon or practised physician. He does not, of course, expect to find in the wilds of Siberia as many openings for his trained intelligence as in St. Petersburg or Moscow, but surely there is room for an expert penman, a good accountant, a competent teacher, a fair musician? Yet he seems to have no chance to earn a few rubles, a few kopecks even, day by day. The regulations, quoted above, close every avenue, debar him from every employment but ordinary manual labour. He has never learned any handicraft; he cannot work as carpenter, shoemaker, wheelwright or blacksmith; he has no capital and cannot go into trade; he must not engage himself as driver or teamster, for he cannot leave the village to which he has been assigned. There is nothing left for him except to dig, but there is not an inch of land for him to cultivate. All the ground in the neighbourhood belongs to the village commune and has been already allotted to its members, so that any available land is so far distant that he would risk arrest by going there.
In this dilemma he petitions the government to relieve him of his restrictions, and permit him to engage in such a harmless vocation as teaching music, but he is referred to the rule forbidding it. To this refusal was once added the cruel suggestion that the starving and impecunious convict might hire himself out as a labourer to the king, his peasant, for half a dozen kopecks a day. The same answer was given to a petition from some political prisoners who begged to be allowed to occupy and cultivate a tract of government ground near their village.