an official circular to provincial governors, the local authorities did not even take the trouble to make a report of political arrests to the Minister of the Interior.[1] If a man was taken into custody as a political offender, that, in many cases, was the end of it so far as an investigation was concerned. The fact that he had been arrested by mistake, or in the place of some other person, did not necessarily insure his release. The local authorities reversed the humane rule of Catharine II. and acted, in political cases, upon the principle that it is better to punish ten innocent persons than to allow one criminal to escape.
The above-cited case of the student Sidórski is by no means exceptional. In the open letter to the Tsar for which Madame Tsébrikova has recently been exiled to the province of Vólogda, the reader will find a brief statement of a similar case in which two brothers were banished by mistake in place of two other brothers of like name but of different family. The banished young men were the sole support of their widowed mother and a fifteen-year-old sister. When, at last, the blunder was discovered and the innocent brothers were permitted to return to their home, they found that their mother had died of grief and privation, and that, after her death, their child-sister had been sold by a boarding-house keeper into a house of prostitution. "What must have been the feeling of those young men towards the Government," Madame Tsébrikova asks, "when they came back and were informed of their mother's death and their sister's shame?" In the light of such facts terrorism ceases to be an unnatural or an inexplicable phenomenon. Wrong a man in that way, deny him all redress, exile him again if he complains, gag him if he cries out, strike him in the face if he struggles, and at last he will stab and throw bombs. It is useless to say that the Russian Government does not exasperate men and women in this way.
- ↑ Circular letter from the Department of Executive Police No. 159, November 4, 1878, in "Prison Circulars," p. 655. Ministry of the Interior, St. Petersburg, 1880.
