A volume might be written of these visitors. The share they have taken in the revolutionary movement is known, and their coming is often merely an assurance that hope still lives. The young women, intrepid figures, are significant not only of the long-continued struggle for political deliverance, but of the historical progress of womenkind toward intellectual and social freedom.
When Dr. W⸺ called upon me he was on his way to Sakhalin to join his wife after nearly twenty years’ separation. For participation in an act of violence against an official notorious for his brutality and disregard even of Russian justice she had been sentenced to death, but the sentence had been commuted to imprisonment in the Schlüsselburg fortress, whither she was conducted in heavy chains, and where she remained thirteen years. Later she was rearrested and sentenced to exile for life. She had been for five years in the frozen Siberian village of Sakhalin, when, in 1898, her husband, having seen their only son established in life and settled his own affairs, obtained permission from the government to join his wife in her exile.
In imagination I followed this cultured, impressive-looking man on his long journey with a hope that was almost a prayer that the reunited husband and wife would find recompense in their comradeship for all that had been given up and that the woman’s fine spirit would make up for whatever she might have lost through deprivation of stimulating contact with her own circle in the world.
My interest caused me to follow their subsequent history. A few years after Dr. W⸺ had joined his wife they were permitted to remove to Vladivostok. In 1906, after the October manifesto, there was a military revolutionary movement in Vladivostok. The governor gave the order to fire and Madame W⸺, who, with her husband, was watching the crowd, was killed by a stray bullet. Her son is now a lawyer in Petrograd. Although separated from his mother nearly all his life he shows his devotion to her memory and his sympathy with the cause by defending the “politicals” who come to him.
The settlement from time to time affords occasions for conference on Russian affairs between influential Americans and visiting Russians who entertain hopes of reform by other than active revolutionary methods and it has also given a hearing and found sympathetic friends for other unhappy subjects of the Czar.
Echoes came to us of the persecution of the Doukhobors, a Russian religious communistic sect, whose creed bears resemblance to that of the Friends. Like the active revolutionists, these people had suffered flogging, imprisonment, and exile, but in their case for espousing the doctrine of non-resistance.
In 1897, upon their refusal to take up arms, persecution again became active. The Russian press was forbidden to allude to the subject, but a petition was said to have been thrown into the carriage of the Empress when she was traveling in the Caucasus, where the Doukhobors had been banished, and her interest was aroused. By 1900 Tolstoi had succeeded in fixing attention upon their plight, and arrangements were finally made, chiefly through the efforts of Friends in England and America and the devotion of Aylmer Maude, for their settlement in Canada.
In order to raise funds for the emigration of these peasants to Canada, Tolstoi was persuaded to depart from his established principle and accept copyright for “Resurrection,” but the Doukhobors refused to benefit by the sale of a book which they did not consider “good.”
During the first years of their life in Manitoba things did not go well with them, and the House on Henry Street became the headquarters for some of their friends as they came and went from England. A young man who, under the influence of Tolstoi, had given up his commission in the army spent a winter in Canada helping them to lay out their farm lands.
When he visited us he paid full tribute to the sincerity of their religious convictions, but somewhat ruefully lamented the fanatical extremes to which they carried them. The Doukhobors, who believed that all work should be shared, voted against one person milking their single cow. “But the cow,” said the young ex-captain, “was not a communist, and went dry.”