has no right to complain of the harvest. The so-called "propagandists" of 1870-74 did not resort to violence in any form, and did not even make a practice of resisting arrest, until after the Government had begun to exile them to Siberia for life with ten or twelve years of penal servitude, for offenses that were being punished at the very same time in Austria with only a few days—or at most a few weeks—of personal detention.[1] It was not terrorism that necessitated administrative exile in Russia; it was merciless severity and banishment without due process of law that provoked terrorism.
In the latter part of the reign of Alexander II., and particularly between the years 1870 and 1880, administrative exile was resorted to, in political cases, upon a scale never before known, and with a recklessness and cynical indifference to personal rights that were almost unparalleled. In Odessa, General Todleben, by virtue of the unlimited discretionary power given him in the Imperial ukáz of April 17, 1879, proceeded to banish, without inquiry or discrimination, the whole "politically untrustworthy" class—that is, to exile every person whose loyalty to the existing Grovernment was even doubtful.[2] The mere fact that a man had been registered as a suspect in the books of the secret police, or had been accused, even anonymously, of political disaffection, was a sufficient reason for his deportation to the remotest part of the empire. Parents who had never had a disloyal thought were exiled because their children had become revolutionists; school-boys who happened to be acquainted with political offenders were exiled because they had not betrayed the latter to the police;
- ↑ See the reference by W. R. S. Ralston to the trial of Austrian socialists at Lemberg in March, 1877. ["Russian Revolutionary Literature," by W. R. S. Ralston, Nineteenth Century, May, 1877, p. 413.] See also official report of the trial of Austrian socialists in Cracow, where the severest sentence imposed was one month of imprisonment. [Newspaper Golos, St. Petersburg, 1880, Nos. 122, 123, 125, 126, 127, and 128.]
- ↑ See the article upon Count Lóris-Mélikof in the Russian historical review Rússkaya Stariná for the month of January, 1889, p. 62.
