the way, but who cannot conveniently be tried or convicted in a court of justice. If the "Russian Resident of Eastern Siberia" will read attentively the works of Tarásof, Sergéyefski, Maxímof, and Anúchin, he will find that administrative exile has been not only a recognized, but a well established, method of dealing with certain classes of offenders ever since the seventeenth century. In the reign of the Emperor Nicholas, for example, nihilism had not been so much as heard of,—the very word was unknown,—and yet men and women were being exiled to Siberia by administrative process, not in hundreds merely, but in thousands, and not only by order of the Tsar, but by order of the administrative authorities, by order of the ecclesiastical authorities, by order of the village communes, and even by order of private landowners. Most of them, it is true, were not political offenders; but they were none the less entitled to a trial, and they were all victims of the system that the "Russian Resident" says was brought into existence half a century later, "in a time of terrible necessity, as the only possible means to counteract the nefarious doings of those dark conspirators," the nihilists.
The careful and exhaustive researches of Anuchin in the archives of the chief exile bureau [Prikáz o Sílnikh] at Tobólsk, show that between 1827 and 1846 there was not a year in which the number of persons sent to Siberia by administrative process fell below three thousand, and that it reached a maximum, for a single year, of more than six thousand.[1] The aggregate number for the twenty-year period is
- ↑ The precise figures are as follows:
1827 . . . . 6,326 1837 . . . . 3,976 1828 . . . . 5,613 1838 . . . . 4,077 1829 . . . . 3,509 1839 . . . . 4,552 1830 . . . . 3,377 1840 . . . . 4,683 1831 . . . . 4,050 1841 . . . . 4,125 1832 . . . . 3,395 1842 . . . . 3,737 1833 . . . . 3,371 1843 . . . . 4,067 1834 . . . . 3,134 1844 . . . . 3,741 1835 . . . . 3,618 1845 . . . . 3,184 1836 . . . . 4,469 1846 . . . . 2,905 Total 79,909 See "An Investigation of the Percentages of Siberian Exiles," by E. N. Anúchin, chap, ii, p. 22. Memoirs of the Imperial Russian Geographical Society, Statistical Section, Vol. III, St. Petersburg, 1873.
As an evidence of the trustworthiness of Mr. Anúchin's statistics, it is only proper to mention the fact that, for the great work above cited, the author was awarded the Constantine medal of the Imperial Russian Geographical Society
