The news of the revolution had reached across the vast stretches of Siberia. It was a moment of tense excitement. Bewilderment and then jubilation beset the exiles. An hour later began one of the strangest spectacles in modern history—the exodus from Siberia. It is estimated that a hundred thousand political exiles began their race back to Russia.
Traveling from the most inaccessible mines and settlements, they journeyed by sledge or trudged on foot to the nearest point on the Trans-Siberian railway. It was a race against time. The Spring thaw was approaching. If the exiles did not reach the railroad within two weeks the roads would be impassable. The wilderness would become a sea of mud. Far in the north, in the coldest settlements of the lower Lena, it would be impossible to move forward until the ice breaks on the river two months later.
The first large party consisted of one hundred and fifty political convicts and administrative exiles, including twenty members of the Jewish revolutionary band. The exiles were traveling in special cars and had been on the road continuously from March 24, five days after they first heard of the revolution.
The cars were met by a vast crowd at the railroad-station, which cheered them tumultuously. The returning exiles returned the cheers, but they were in a deplorable physical condition—shaggy, uncouth, unwashed, and extremely emaciated.
Many were crippled with rheumatism, two had lost hands and feet from frostbites, and one, who attempted flight a week before the revolution, had been shot in the leg when he was recaptured. He was lying in a prison-hospital when he learned that he was a free man.
Five days after the triumph of the revolution 6,000 exiles entered Irkutsk, but the vast majority were unable to proceed west, owing to the lack of rolling-stock. These encamped about the town and along the railroad, and at least a month will be needed before they can be sent home.
The crowds at Tyumen cheered the famous terrorist, Nicolai Anuikhin, who shot and killed the chief of the Petrograd-Warsaw Railway in 1906. His victim, General Fuchloff, was about to kidnap 400 railroad strikers and send them to Siberia.
Anuikhin, who introduced himself as "a released jailbird," is a gigantic, broad-shouldered, elderly man, with a gray imperial and an excited manner of speech. He said:
"After one year in European convict prisons I spent ten years in the Alexandrovsk prison, fifty miles from Irkutsk. This is the biggest convict jail in Russia and contained 12,000 ordinary criminals and about 500 political prisoners, mostly sentenced to life katroga, the severest form of Russian punishment short of death.