administrative process, as a political offender, to the village of Varnavin in the province of Kostromá. This was not regarded by the authorities as a particularly severe punishment; but Schiller, finding enforced residence in an unfamiliar village to be irksome and tedious, and having no further confidence in petitions, changed his location between sunset and dawn without asking leave of anybody—in other words, ran away. About this time the Tsar issued a poveléinie, or command, directing that all administrative exiles found absent from their places of banishment without leave should be sent to the East-Siberian province of Yakútsk.[1] When, therefore, a few months later, Schiller was rearrested in a part of the empire where he had no right to be, he was sent by étape to Irkútsk, and the governor-general of Eastern Siberia was requested to put him under police surveillance in some part of the territory named in the Imperial command. Governor-general Anúchin, who had then recently come to Irkútsk, and who had not had time, apparently, to familiarize himself with the vast region intrusted to his care,[2] directed that Schiller be sent to the district town of Zashíversk, which was supposed to be situated on the river Indigírka, a few miles south of the arctic circle. A century or a century and a half ago, this
- ↑ This Imperial command was issued on the 2d of April, 1880, and was intended to discourage attempts on the part of political exiles to escape. In the hands of local police officials it was soon made an instrument for the punishment of politicals who incurred their hostility. The first time, for example, that an obnoxious exile went two hundred yards beyond the limits of the village—perhaps only into a neighboring forest to gather flowers or berries—he was arrested upon the charge of attempting to escape and immediately banished to the province of Yakútsk—the wildest part of northeastern Asia. It made little difference whether the charge rested upon any basis of fact or not. In the latter part of the year 1880, a political named Peter Mikháilovich Volokhóf—an acquaintance of the Russian novelist Korolénko—was banished to the province of Yakútsk for an alleged attempt to escape from Archángel. As a matter of fact he had never even been in Archángel, much less attempted to escape from there.
- ↑ Eastern Siberia has an area considerably greater than that of the United States and Alaska taken together, and most of the vast territory of Yakútsk is as wild and unsettled as the northern part of British North America.
