Nevertheless, under a system of administration that allows an irresponsible official to punish at his own discretion, such results are not only possible but probable.
In the year 1874, a young student named Egór Lázaref was arrested in one of the south-eastern provinces of European Russia upon the charge of carrying on a secret revolutionary propaganda. He was taken to St. Petersburg and kept in solitary confinement in the House of Preliminary Detention and in the fortress of Petropávlovsk for about four years. He was then tried with one hundred and ninety-two other political suspects before the Governing Senate, found to be not guilty, and acquitted.[1] As there still existed, however, a possibility that he might be guilty on some future occasion, he was punished in advance by being sent as a soldier to a regiment then engaged in active service in the Trans-Cáucasus.[2] One would suppose that to be arrested without cause, to be held four years in solitary confinement, to be declared innocent by the highest court in the empire, and then to be punished with compulsory military service in Asia Minor for an offense prophetically foreseen, but not yet committed, would make a revolutionist, if not a terrorist, out of the most peaceable citizen; but Mr. Lázaref, as soon as he had been released from the army, quietly completed his education in the university, studied law, and began the practice of his profession in the city of Sarátof on the Vólga. He had no more trouble with the Government until the summer of 1884, when a police
- ↑ Official certified copy of the sentence in the case of "the 193," p. 8.
- ↑ This was a favorite method of Nicholas for the punishment of literary men and students whose opinions were too liberal for his taste. He compelled the gifted Russian poet Shevchénko to serve ten years as a common soldier, and kept him most of that time in the hottest and most desolate part of Central Asia—the district of Mángishlák. The talented novelist Dostoyéfski was also forced to serve as a common soldier after the expiration of his term of hard labor in the Omsk convict prison. I cannot now recall any case in which Nicholas insulted his own courts by punishing administratively persons whom they had just declared to be innocent, but such cases were common in the reign of Alexander II. Most of the prisoners acquitted by the Senate in the trial of "the 193" were immediately rearrested and banished by administrative process, or sent as common soldiers into the ranks.
