Page:Siberia and the Exile System Vol 2.djvu/52

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36
SIBERIA

their whole correspondence—including both letters written and letters received—to police supervision. [Sect. 29.]

Failure to submit to any of the rules set forth in Sections 11-29 shall be punished with imprisonment for a period of not less than three days nor more than one month. Administrative exiles who leave their places of banishment without permission may also be tried and punished under Section 63 of the Code providing for offenses within the jurisdiction of justices of the peace. [Sect. 32.]

Administrative exiles who have no pecuniary means of their own shall receive an allowance from the Government treasury for their support, and for the support of their families, if the latter voluntarily go with them to their places of banishment. This allowance, however, shall not be made to exiles who fail to obtain employment through bad conduct or habitual laziness. [Sects. 33-37.]

Administrative exiles and their families shall be treated in the local hospitals, when sick, at the expense of the Government. [Sect. 38.]

Administrative exiles who may not have means to defray the expense of return to their homes at the expiration of their terms of banishment shall receive aid from the Government, in accordance with the imperial order of January 10, 1881, unless special directions with regard to the return of such persons shall have been given by the Minister of the Interior. [Sect. 40.]

Such, in brief, is the administrative exiles' "Constitution." I have everywhere substituted the words "administrative exiles," "banishment," and "places of banishment," for the ambiguous or misleading expressions, "persons under police surveillance," "assignment to definite places of residence," and "places of domiciliation," which are used in the text; but in so doing I have merely given clearer expression to the real meaning of the Code. Men and women banished by administrative process are not known to Russian law as "exiles." They are pod-nadzórni, or "persons under surveillance," and their banishment is called by a euphemistic legal fiction vodvorénia, or "domiciliation" in "definite places of residence." It must, of course, mitigate the grief of a bereaved mother to learn from a perusal of this law that her only son has not been "exiled," but merely "domiciled" in