Leo Ivanof, had been virtually murdered by official cruelty and indifference, and two others had been reduced to such a physical condition that, to use their own word, they regarded themselves as "doomed." As these two sick men have since been "removed" to Berózof, Turukhánsk, or some worse place, they are, perhaps, by this time dead and out of their misery.
When an administrative exile has succeeded in solving the problem of personal maintenance, and when he is relieved from anxiety with regard to the necessaries of life, such as food, shelter, and clothing, he begins to feel the humiliating restraints of police surveillance and "controlled" correspondence. The officers whose duty it is to watch him are often men of degraded character and criminal antecedents. Many of the zasedátels, or chiefs of police in the vólosts, or districts, and a still greater number of písars, or district police secretaries, are common malefactors, sent to Siberia for felony, and taken into the Government service under assumed names at the expiration of their terms of forced colonization. The initials and places of residence of at least a score of these felons in police uniform have been published in the liberal Siberian newspapers. To men of this character are intrusted, in many parts of Siberia, the health, the honor, and the lives of refined and highly educated political exiles of both sexes, and it is not a matter for surprise if the latter are sometimes outrageously insulted and brutally treated. I personally know police officers in Siberia — and I now particularly remember two, one of them the chief of police in Minusínsk — whom I should hesitate to meet anywhere at night unless I had a revolver. Even in a comparatively well-governed city like Tomsk, the history of the police has been a history stained with acts of violence, outrage, and crime, including the arrest and imprisonment of innocent citizens by the hundred, the taking of bribes from notorious criminals, the subornation of perjury, the use of torture, and the beating nearly to death of pregnant
