RUSSIA. 



723 



Telegraphs. The state lines in 1884 had a 

 length of 101,697 kilometres, with 189,316 

 kilometres of wires. Including the railroad 

 lines, the Anglo-Indian line and others, the 

 total length of telegraphs in the empire was 

 109,778 kilometres, with 248,470 kilometres of 

 wires. The number of dispatches in 1884 was 

 10,471,084, of which 8,599,295 were paid in- 

 ternal messages, 595,774 official dispatches, 

 and the remainder international messages. 

 The receipts in 1884 were 35,371,696 francs ; 

 the expenses, 12,848,720 francs, exclusive of 

 2,400,000 francs expended in the construction 

 of new lines. 



Revolutionary Plots. In January, 1887, a band 

 of conspirators was discovered among the 

 cadets of the naval-school at St. Petersburg 

 and young officers of the navy who had re- 

 cently been students in the school. Within a 

 few weeks many arrests were made among the 

 students of the military academies and officers 

 in the army who had received their commis- 

 sions within a year or two and were posted in 

 various parts of the empire. The trials that 

 had taken place recently showed that Nihilism 

 had spread to an alarming extent among the 

 officers of the army and navy. In February 

 and March a large number of persons of the 

 middle class were arrested ; also a general in 

 the army, a nobleman of high rank, and several 

 large land-owners, while others of his class 

 fled the country to escape arrest. These ar- 

 rests were made in consequence of what was 

 called a Constitutionalist conspiracy, which 

 had wide ramifications among the provincial 

 nobility and among army officers. The organ 

 of the conspirators was a lithographed periodi- 

 cal called the " Constitutional," which con- 

 tained extracts from famous writers on consti- 

 tutional law and political economy. The 

 statutes of the organization hound all the 

 members at a given signal to do their utmost 

 to subvert the existing Government and estab- 

 lish constitutional forms. The motto of the 

 society was ''The people, with the Czar or 

 against the Czar." Within a few weeks of the 

 discovery of the society and the wholesale ar- 

 rest of its members occurred the anniversary 

 of the murder of Alexander II, March 13, on 

 which the Czar with the imperial family in- 

 tended to assist at religious services at the 

 tomb of his father. Extraordinary precautions 

 were taken by Gen. Gresser, who had charge 

 of the police arrangements for the safety of 

 the Czar, because the German police agents in 

 Zurich had learned of an intended plot, and 

 the Berlin police had warned the St. Peters- 

 burg authorities. The detectives of Gen. 

 Gresser observed three suspicious characters in 

 a tea-house, one of whom carried a book, one 

 a traveling-bag, and one a paper parcel. These 

 men, who were students in the St. Petersburg 

 University, were followed, while the Czar was 

 warned to take a circuitous route to the cathe- 

 dral of the Neva fortress, where the services 

 were performed. In the crowd that gathered 



on the Nevsky Prospect to see the Czar pass 

 by were the three suspected persons, who were 

 arrested with three other students, who also 

 carried bombs disguised as opera-glasses and 

 rolls of music. Two of the suspicious articles 

 were found in their possession, and proved to 

 contain a large quantity of dynamite and some 

 bullets filled with strychnine. Before night 

 more than one hundred suspected persons were 

 taken into custody. The names of the students 

 who first incurred the suspicions of the detect- 

 ives were Andrejushkin, Graboff, and Gen- 

 eraloff. Many students of the Women's Higher 

 Educational Institute in St. Petersburg were 

 arrested, and the institution was closed. Two 

 women, one the wife of a general and the other 

 a doctor's wife, who had long been under po- 

 lice espionage, were arrested for their sus- 

 pected complicity in the plot. The rector of 

 the university, in an address to the students, 

 spoke of the connection of the conspirators 

 with the university as a disgrace, and the re- 

 mark was received with hisses. For taking 

 part in this demonstration about 300 students 

 were placed under arrest. Many of the officers 

 and others who had been lately arrested are 

 supposed to have been summarily tried and 

 executed. Of this band of conspirators, who 

 called themselves by the name of u Bleeding 

 Russia," some fifty weie arrested. They had 

 their bomb-factory in the cellar of a house on 

 the Neva, where they worked at night, and a 

 larger establishment at Paulovka, on the Fin- 

 land Railroad. The plot was concocted in 

 Vilna, from which place a part of the chem- 

 icals were brought. A man of Polish origin, 

 disguised as an officer, is said to have fired at 

 the Czar while he was walking in the park at 

 Gatshina, about April 1, and when the guard 

 instantly shot this man, another, who was a 

 military officer, is said to have fired from 

 another spot, and to have wounded the Czar 

 slightly in the arm. On April 6, when Alex- 

 ander again was driving through the streets of 

 the capital, a man and a woman were seized 

 by the police, presumably in the act of throw- 

 ing grenades at the Emperor's carriage, which 

 had been stopped by a man who stood in the 

 road waving a petition in his hand, and who is 

 supposed to have been a confederate. In April 

 482 officers of the army were transported to 

 Siberia for complicity in the attempts on the 

 Czar's life. On April 27 the trial of 15 per- 

 sons who were accused of active participation 

 in the plot of March 13 was begun in St. 

 Petersburg. Of the three bomb-carriers who 

 were first arrested, two were Cossacks from 

 the Kuban and one a native of Tomsk, Siberia. 

 Two of the accused were Polish noblemen 

 named Pilzousky and Lukashevich, three were 

 women, of whom two were graduates of the 

 St. Petersburg College of Midwifery, and the 

 third a school-teacher named Sered Yukora. 

 The other prisoners, except one who was a 

 pharmacist, were students of the university, 

 one of whom had received the gold medal of 



