teachers were exiled for circulating copies of the Russian magazine Annals of the Fatherland; members of provincial assemblies were exiled because they insisted upon their right to petition the crown for the redress of grievances; and university students who had been tried for political crime and duly acquitted by the courts were immediately rearrested and exiled by administrative process, in violation of the most elementary principles of justice.
In December, 1879, a young revolutionist—a Jew—named Maidánski, was hanged in Odessa by sentence of a court-martial for having taken part in a conspiracy to assassinate a Government spy named Gorinóvich. His old father and mother, who lived in Elizabethgrad, came to Odessa to have a last interview with him before he should be put to death; but the authorities, instead of allowing the aged parents to see their condemned son, promptly arrested them both and sent them to Eastern Siberia by administrative process. They were nothing but poor illiterate peasants, and there was not the least evidence to show that they had encouraged their son's criminal activity, or even that they had been aware of it; but the opinion of the Government seemed to be that they deserved punishment for having brought such a son into the world. It may be thought, in the light of more recent events, that they were treated in this merciless way because they were Jews; but the Government, at that time, was dealing in precisely the same manner with orthodox Russians belonging to the educated and privileged classes.
In the late summer or early fall of 1879 two educated young women from Nikoláief—the sisters Livandófskaya—were exiled for political reasons to different parts of Eastern Siberia. One of them, named Véra, was banished by administrative process to Mínusínsk in the province of Yeniséisk, while the other was sentenced by a court-martial to forced colonization in the little town of Kírensk on the
