article upon the treatment of the Jews in Russia which was published in the Forum for August, 1891;[1] and, finally, the novels, stories, and sketches of the political exiles Korolénko, Máchtet, Staniukóvich, Mámin [Sibiriák], and Petropávlovski are known to every cultivated Russian from the White Sea to the Caspian and from Poland to the Pacific.
Morally, the Russian revolutionists whom I met in Siberia would compare favorably with any body of men and women of equal numerical strength that I could collect from the circle of my own acquaintances. I do not share the opinions of all of them; some of them seem to me to entertain visionary and over-sanguine hopes and plans for the future of their country; some of them have made terrible and fatal mistakes of judgment; and some of them have proved weak or unworthy in the hour of trial; but it is my deliberate conviction, nevertheless, that, tested by any moral standard of which I have knowledge, such political exiles as Volkhófski, Chudnófski, Blok, Leóntief, Lobonófski, Kropótkin, Kohan-Bérnstein, Belokónski, Prisédski, Lázaref, Charúshin, Kléments, Shishkó, Nathalie Armfeldt, Heléne Máchtet, Sophie Bárdina, Anna Pávlovna Korbá, and many others whom I have not space to name, represent the flower of Russian young manhood and young womanhood. General Strélnikof may call them "fanatics" and "robbers," and Mr. Gálkine Wrásskoy may describe them as "wretched men and women ... whose social
- ↑ In a report on the condition and work of the East-Siberian Section of the Imperial Russian Geographical Society for the year 1885, Mr. V. Ptítsin, a member of the Section's revisory committee, refers to the researches and labors of the political exiles as follows:"It is well known that the best work done, up to this time, in the East-Siberian Section of the Imperial Geographical Society, is the work of exiles — of such men, for example, as the Polish scientist Shchápof [an exiled professor of the Kazán University] and others. Almost all of the work done and the observations made at the Section's meteorological stations must also be credited to exiles. Why should not the Section gather about itself, for scientific work, all of the educated exiles in the province of Irkútsk and the territories of Yakútsk and the Trans-Baikál? There are among them many people of high cultivation and ardent love for science."— Siberian Gazette, No. 33, p. 1068. Tomsk, August 17, 1886.
