river Léna.[1] If the Government had been satisfied with the deportation of these two young women only, there would have been nothing unusual or particularly noteworthy in the case; but it went much further than this. The family of the two exiled girls consisted of a father aged about seventy, a mother aged fifty-five or sixty, and two younger sisters fifteen and sixteen years of age respectively.
After the banishment of Véra and the other elder sister to Eastern Siberia, all the remaining members of the family were exiled by administrative process for a term of three years to a village near the sub-arctic coast of the White Sea in the province of Archángel. As long as their term of banishment lasted they received a small monthly allowance from the Government for their maintenance, and so managed to exist; but when, in 1882, they were informed that they were at liberty to return to Nikoláief, and that their allowance would no longer be paid to them, they were left without any means of support in the place where they were, and had no money with which to get back to their home. They wrote a piteous letter to Véra in Mínusínsk, describing their sufferings and their almost helpless situation, and Véra, upon receipt of it, determined to make her escape, return to European Russia, and there, under an assumed name, earn money enough, if possible, to bring her aged parents and her two younger sisters back to their home in Nikoláief. Her attempt to escape was successful, she reached European Russia in safety, and began, in the city of Kiev, her search for employment. Failing to get anything to do, she used up, little by little, the small sum of money that she had brought with her from Siberia, and at last, to escape starvation, she was forced, in despair, to give herself up to the police. She lay for some months in
- ↑ Véra was first banished in 1878 to the village of Velíki Ústia in the European province of Vólogda. When, about a year later, her sister, with twenty-seven other political offenders, was tried by court-martial in Odéssa and sentenced to forced colonization in Kírensk, Vêra was rearrested and exiled to Mínusínsk.
