RISK OF TRAVELLING IN RUSSIA.

Manawatu Herald, Volume XXX, Issue 3788, 13 February 1908, Page 3

RISK OF TRAVELLING IN RUSSIA.

You cannot enter or leave a city or town in the Russian Empire without reporting yourself to the police like a ticket-of-leave man, while you are forbidden to extend , tfie hospitality of your robf to your' - friend or, neighbour for a single night without first informing the police of yciur intentions and sending them your guest’s passport. Whether you are a Russian or a foreigner, you can no more spend a night in a hotel or change your lodgings even for twenty-four hours without communicating with the police, than you can bespeak rooms in the Winter Palace. Nay, you cannot possibly subsist for a week without a passport, which is, such an essential part of your being that Russian lawyers have defined a man as an animal composed of three parts —a body", a soul, and a passport. This passport you must have renewed once a year, unless you are a noble or an honorary citizen, and the process is as tedious and painful as moulting is to birds. A voluminous correspondence, and a pile of documents with copies, petitions, and fifteen supplements, was the result of the attempt of a mau named Dodinsky, in the Government of Smolensk, to .renew his passport some years ago. And yeirhis papers were in order, his conduct irreproachable, and his right to have his passport renewed was not even called in question. These obstacles and hritations make one’s soul weary of life, and explain why it is that in the course of one year in St. Petersburg alone,. 14,79 c) persons were arrested and imprisoned for not having complied with the passport laws. Many of these wretched creatures may be on their way to Siberia. .