RUSSIA. 



765 



was posted forbidding outsiders to enter the 

 buildings without permission of the school 

 authorities. The students held indignation 

 meetings, and the governing body decided to 

 expel a number. The director was mishandled 

 in the course of the dispute. The professors 

 sympathized with the students. The agitation 

 spread to the University of Moscow, when all 

 the students in the academy were arrested and 

 a list of demands was formulated, as follows: 

 1. Autonomy of the universities and superior 

 schools, according to the statute of 1863; 2. 

 Complete freedom of teaching ; 3. Admission of 

 Jews with the same rights as other students ; 4. 

 Free access to the universities without distinction 

 of belief, nationality, social rank, or sex ; 5. Free- 

 dom of meeting and recognition of the students' 

 societies ; 6. Establishment of a students' court 

 or council ; 7. Abolition of police inspection aiid 

 authority ; 8. Reduction of fees to the scale of 

 1863. The students of Dorpat, Warsaw, St. Pe- 

 tersburg, Kharkoff, Kieff, and Odessa held mass 

 meetings to demand the restoration of autonomy 

 and subscribe to lists of grievances of the same 

 tenor as that of the Moscow students. The 

 movement began to spread beyond the universi- 

 ties, when the students were incarcerated by 

 hundreds and expelled from the schools. It took 

 the form of a constitutional agitation for free 

 institutions. Pamphlets printed on secret presses 

 or smuggled from abroad demanded the aboli- 

 tion of the autocratic power of the Czar. These 

 were scattered in churches, tea shops, and rail- 

 road cars, or left in letter boxes, without the 

 police being able to detect the persons engaged 

 in the distribution. The agitation was kept up 

 by the circulation of portraits of Alexander II, 

 the emancipator of the serfs and projector of 

 constitutional reform, until the sale of the pict- 

 ures was prohibited. The Agricultural Academy 

 and the University of Moscow and the Techno- 

 logical Institute at St. Petersburg were closed for 

 several weeks. From the first named 58 students 

 were excluded ; from the Moscow University, 

 55 ; from the St. Petersburg University, 22 ; from 

 the Technological Institute, 25 ; from the School 

 of Forestry, 15 ; from the Veterinary Institution 

 in Kharkoff, 17. 



Siberian Atrocities. In the beginning of 

 1890 the newspapers of Europe gave the details 

 of a cruel massacre of political prisoners in East- 

 ern Siberia. About 30 persons of both sexes 

 who had been exiled by administrative order 

 were at Yakutsk, the last station before crossing 

 the mountains and snowy plains to Verkhoiansk 

 and Kolimsk. The acting gpverner, Ostashine, 

 refused to advance a sufficient allowance of 

 money to enable them to procure food for the 

 journey, and made a change in the rules that re- 

 duced the quantity of provisions that they were 

 allowed to take. A collective petition to the au- 

 thorities being treated as seditious in Russia, 

 they each signed a letter protesting that the new 

 orders would entail suffering on all and death 

 to the weak, and went in a body to the office of 

 the provincial administration to present their 

 remonstrance. The governor, vexed at these 

 proceedings, was determined to treat them as 

 rebels against his authority. They were ordered 

 not to show themselves again at the Government 

 Office, but to assemble on the morrow at the 



house of the exile Notkine, where they would 

 get their answer. In the morning a police officer 

 came with a command for them to accompany 

 him immediately to the office of the admin Uru- 

 tion. When they argued about the contradictory 

 nature of the orders ho left in anger, and im me- 

 diately afterward Cossack soldiers broke down 

 the doors and struck among them with tho 

 butts of muskets. Some drew their revolvers, 

 shots were fired and returned, one of the prison- 

 ers wounded the governor, who appeared on tho 

 scene, the soldiers drew up outside and fired into 

 the house, and when the deadly work was over 

 it was found that 6 exiles had been killed and 

 9 wounded. Gen. Ignatieff, the Governor of 

 Eastern Siberia, ordered a court-martial, which 

 found all the exiles guilty, except one, ami sen- 

 tenced 3 to be hanged and many others to long 

 terms of penal servitude. Contrary to the ex- 

 pectations that were entertained outside of 

 Russia, the persons who were responsible for 

 the butchery were not disciplined. Ostashine 

 was even rewarded for his energy by being made 

 permanent governor of the province. 



Not long after these events transpired, another 

 tale of horror came from Eastern Siberia that 

 produced a profounder impression in Russia. 

 The female prisoners at Kara had long com- 

 plained of the brutal insolence of the director, 

 Masukoff. Madame Soluzeff-Kovalsky, who was 

 to be transferred to Verkne-Udinsk, was dragged 

 from her bed, stripped, and clothed in a con- 

 vict's dress. Her companions entered a formal 

 complaint, and, receiving no answer, they ab- 

 stained in concert from food for eighteen days, at 

 the end of which Masukoff offered his resigna- 

 tion. This the Governor-General, Baron Korf, 

 would not accept. The women starved them- 

 selves again for a week, and were only induced 

 to take food by a false tale that the jailer had 

 been displaced. When they learned the decep- 

 tion they organized a third hunger strike, which 

 lasted twenty-two days, at the end of which Ma- 

 dame Nahyda Sihida went to the director and 

 slapped his face, after calling him a villain. Baron 

 Korf telegraphed orders to punish any act of re- 

 bellion with flogging. The male prisoners signed 

 a declaration, informing the authorities that they 

 would destroy themselves in a body if corporal 

 punishment was inflicted on any political pris- 

 oner. Although the surgeon declared her unable 

 to bear the punishment, Madame Sihida was 

 finally, by order of the superior prison authori- 

 ties, taken into the prison yard and beaten with 

 100 lashes, from which she died. Three of her 

 companions poisoned themselves to death, and 

 when the facts came to be known in the men's 

 prison all the 30 prisoners swallowed poison. 

 The convulsions of 2 who died warned the jail- 

 ers, who forced the rest to take emetics. 



Nihilistic Activity. The refugee propa- 

 gandists of Nihilism, after being expelled from 

 Switzerland, made Paris their headquarters. A 

 band of young persons, who had been studying 

 medicine and otner branches in the Swiss and 

 French schools, engaged in making bombs. Ex- 

 periments with explosives in the woods at Raincy 

 put the police on their track, and on May 29 

 simultaneous arrests were made of 13 individuals 

 named : Reinstein and his wife, Nakachizo, Ste- 

 panoff, Katchinzeff, Berdichevsky, Levoff, Orloff- 



