The Latest Siberian Tragedy.

Te Aroha News, Volume VII, Issue 480, 14 June 1890, Page 3

The Latest Siberian Tragedy.

(By Mr George Kennan.)

In the “Century” Mr G. Kennan writes upon the massacre of the political exiles in Yakutsk last' March. He says for ten months the whole Prussian press has been profoundly silent in regard to it; not because the Russian editors were ignorant of it, not because they regarded the shooting of defenceless men and the bayonetting of innocent women with indifference, but becaifse their mouths were stopped by the gag of the press censor. He says be takes and reads constantly four or five Russian periodicals, including the daily ‘Russian Gazette,’ of Moscow, the ‘Viestnik Europa,’ and the ‘ Oriental Review,’ of Irkutsk, which is publised in the capital of Eastern Siberia, only a short distance, as Siberian distances go, from the ecene of the Yakutsk tragedy. Not one word has appeared in any of the above-named periodicals in regard to this most aggravated case of cruel and unprovoked murder. How it Was Brought About. The affray in Yakutsk was not the result of the discovery of a secret ‘ nihilistic ’ printing-office, nor of an attack made by * desperate and dangerous ’ men upon their guards. It was the direct result of official stupidity and the indirect result of a cruel and unnecessary order issued by the acting governor of the province of Yakutsk, General Ostashkin (Os-tash’kin). That officer proposed to send twenty _or thirty administrative exiles into the Arcticregions, without proper equipment, and in parties so large that they would almost inevitably starve to death on the road, owing to the impossibility of procuring food. I know that region thoroughly. I traversed a part of it on dog-sledges in the winter of 186768, and I remember that, for a whole week my thermometer indicated temperatures ranging from forty to fifty degrees below zero, Fahrenheit. I nearly lost one of my men whocameinto camp at night insensible from cold; and, well fed and perfectly equipped as I was, I suffered intensely from incessant hardship and exposure. Into this polar wilderness, which I traversed with the utmost difficulty on dogsledges in 1867, Governor Ostashkin proposed to send twenty or thirty political exiles—two or three of them young girls—without an adequate supply of out proper equipment, and in parties so large that, in all probability, the half-wild Yakut drivers at the widely separated stations could neither feed them nor furnish them with transportation. When the exiles sent respectful petitions to Governor Ostashkin, asking merely that they be forwarded to their destinations, as they had previously been forwarded, in parties of two, a weak apart, and with proper food

and equipment, the governor sent a company of Cossacks, with loaded rifles, to I the house where the petitioners had assembled to await his answer, and directed the ofheers in command to take them to the police station. The Cossacks attempted to drive the bewildered exiles out of the house by pricking them with their bayonets and striking them with tho butt-ends of their guns. Resistance was offered by a few, who did not understand the moaning of this unexpected reply to their petition, and then followed the butchery that the London ‘ Times ' correspondent has described. Six of the politicals were killed outright, including one young woman bayonetted to death, nine were severely wounded, and all of the others were brutally beaten and maltreated. Death by Court-Martial. The survivors of the Yakutsk massacre were tried by court-martial, without benefit of counsel, upon the charge of armed resistance to the authorities, and all were found guilty. Three of them were hanged ; fourteen, including four women, wore condemned to penal servitude for life; five, including two women, weresent'to the mines for fifteen years ; lour boys and girls less than twenty-one years of age were condemned to penal servitude for ten years; and two others were sent as forced colonists to the Arctic villages of Verkhoyansk and Sredni Ivolynsk, in ‘ the remotest part of the province of Yakutsk.’ And this sentence the St. Petersburg officials say is an evidence of the ‘ unusual moderation ’ of the judges who composed the court - martial. A further proof of this ‘ unusual moderation ’ is furnished by the fact that the political exile Kohan - Bernstein, after receiving four severe bullet wounds at the time of the massacre, and aftor lying nearly five months in a prison hospital, was carried to the scaffold on a cob,bed and hanged by putting the noose round his neck and dragging the bed out from under him. If this is Russian ‘moderation,’ one might well pray to be delivered from Russian severity. One of the executed men, two hours before the rope was put round his neck, scribbled a hasty farewell note to his comrades in which he said, * We are not afraid to die, bub try you to make our deaths count for something—write all this to Kennan.’

To appeal to me shall not bo in vain. If I live the whole English-speaking world, at least, shall know all the details of this most atrocious crime.