Shamárin, Peterson, and I went to see Madam Dubróva the night after our arrival in Krasnoyársk, and found her living in one half of a very plainly furnished house in a respectable but not fashionable part of the town, about half a mile from our hotel. She was a lady perhaps thirty years of age, with dark hair, large dark eyes, regular features, clear complexion, and a frank, pleasant manner. Ten years earlier she must have been a very attractive if not a beautiful young girl; but imprisonment, exile, disappointment, and suffering had left unmistakable traces in her face. She greeted us cordially, expressed particular pleasure at meeting a traveler from the United States, regretted that her husband was absent from home, and began at once to question me about the political situation in Russia, and to make inquiries concerning certain of her exiled friends whom I had met in other parts of Eastern Siberia. A general conversation followed, in the course of which I had an opportunity to form a hasty but fairly satisfactory judgment with regard to her character. It was in almost all respects a favorable judgment. No one that was not hopelessly blinded by political hatred and prejudice could fail to see that this was a type of woman as far removed from "common burglars and thieves" as Charlotte Corday was removed from common murderers. You might possibly describe her as misguided, fanatical, lacking in sound judgment, or lawless; but you could class her with common criminals only by ignoring all the characteristics that distinguish a man like John Brown, for example, from a com-
when he described them to me as "nothing but common burglars and thieves." Madam Róssikova was represented to me by all the political exiles who knew her as a woman of high moral standards and self-sacrificing life. She was one of the young women who took part in the quixotic, but generous movement known as "going to the people," and lived for seven or eight months like a common peasant woman in a peasant village merely in order to see how that class of the people could best be reached and helped. As a revolutionary propagandist she was very successful, particularly among the Stúndists or Russian Baptists. She opposed terrorism for a long time, but finally became a terrorist herself under the influence of letters from her exiled friends in Siberia describing their sufferings.
