persons, but in 1878 and 1879, when the struggle between the police and the terrorists grew hot and fierce, exile by administrative process became a common thing, and people who were known to hold liberal opinions, or who were thought to be in sympathy with the revolutionary movement, were sent to Siberia by the score. If forbidden books, or copies of the "Messenger of the Will of the People," were found by the police in a young man's room, the fact was regarded as a sufficient warrant for his banishment. If an enthusiastic university student, inspired with an unselfish desire to do something to elevate the lower classes, ventured to open an evening school for factory operatives in the suburbs of St. Petersburg, he was sent to Siberia by administrative process. If a dozen or more young people were surprised together at night under suspicious circumstances, their names were recorded in the "untrustworthy" list of the police, and the next time the Government found it necessary to "take more vigorous measures for the preservation of public order," these unfortunate young men and women, who perhaps had assembled merely to read and discuss the works of Herbert Spencer or of John Stuart Mill, were arrested and sent to Siberia as conspirators. Friends and relatives of convicted revolutionists were banished by administrative process as a matter of course, and long before the assassination of Alexander II. six or eight hundred young people, representing all classes and all social grades, had been swept into the prisons by the drag-net of the police, and sent thence to Siberia by administrative process without even the pretense of a trial.[1] Before the end of the year 1889 there was hardly a town or large village in Western Siberia that did not contain administrative exiles, and there were whole colonies of such offenders in
- ↑ In 1882 the number of persons who had been dealt with by administrative process and were living under police surveillance was officially given as 1500. Most of these people were in exile. (Review of the "Rules Relating to Police Surveillance," in magazine Juridical Messenger, p. 557. Moscow, December, 1882.)
