Ministry of Justice, the Council of Ministers, and the Council of the Empire constitute a huge administrative maelstrom of ignorance and indifference, in which a "project" revolves slowly, month after month and year after year, until it is finally sucked down out of sight, or perhaps thrown by a fortuitous eddy of personal or official interest into the great gulf-stream current of real life.[1]
On the occasion of our first visit to Krasnoyársk, in the summer, we had not been able to find there any political exiles, or even to hear of any; but under the guidance of our new traveling companions, Shamárin and Peterson, we discovered three: namely, first, Madam Dubróva, wife of a Siberian missionary whose anthropological researches among the Buriáts have recently attracted to him some attention; secondly, a young medical student named Urúsof, who, by permission of Governor Pedashénko, was serving as an assistant in the city hospital; and, thirdly, a lady who had been taken to that hospital to recover from injuries that she had received in an assault made upon her by a drunken soldier. The only one of these exiles whose personal acquaintance we made was Madam Dubróva, who, in 1880, before her marriage, was exiled to Eastern Si-
- ↑ This natural history of a Russian "project" is not imaginary nor conjectural. A plan for the transportation of exiles in wagons between Tomsk and Irkútsk has been gyrating in circles in the Sargasso Sea of Russian bureaucracy for almost thirty years. The projected reform of the exile system has been the rounds of the various circumlocution offices at least half a dozen times since 1871, and has four times reached the "commission" stage and been reported to the Council of the Empire. (The commissions were under the presidency respectively of Sollohub, Frisch, Zubóf, and Grot. See Eastern Review, No. 17, July 22, St. Petersburg, 1882.) Mr. Kokóftsef, assistant chief of the Russian prison department, announced, in a speech that he made to the International Prison Congress at Stockholm in 1878, that his Government recognized the evils of the exile system and was about to abolish it. (See "Report of the International Prison Congress of Stockholm," by E.C. Wines, United States Commissioner, Government Printing Office, Washington, 1879.) That was thirteen years ago, and my latest Russian newspapers contain the information that the "project" for the reform of the exile system has been found "unsatisfactory" by the Council of the Empire, and has been sent back through the Ministry of the Interior to the chief of the prison department for "modification." In other words, this "project" in the course of thirteen years has progressed four stages backward on the return gyration.
