A RUSSIAN REFORMER.

Wairarapa Age, Volume XXXII, Issue 10038, 7 May 1910, Page 4

A RUSSIAN REFORMER.

In spite of the improvements that have been made in the conditions of life in Russia within recent years, the lot of the reformer still remains an extremely harsh one. The fate that has befallen Catherine' Breshkovsky, the Russian patriot, is indeed tragic. This noble woman, who is now getting on towards her seventieth year, and has given her whole life to the service of her oppre?sed countrymen, has been sentenced to perpetual exile in Siberia. To those who live in free and enlightened lands the history of Catherine Breshkovsky reads like a tragic romance. She is the daughter of a nobleman, and from her earliest childhood displayed a love of humanity. As a child she would frequently come home without her dress or coat, having "parted with it as a gift to some less fortunate peasant child. When she was 18, the serfs were liberated; but the terms were hard, the poorest land being given to them, and the price exacted being far in excess of the real value. The schools that were opened by reformers iika Catherine Breshkovsky to educate the peasants were closed by the Government whereupon the reformers decided to spread education secretly. They disguised themselves as peasants and worked side by side with the fommoD people in the fields, factories, and workshops. Catherine Breshkovsky was detected, and, with hundreds of others, was arrested and imprisoned for two or three years under inhuman conditions. Those who survived the terrible ordeal were sent tn Siberia to labour in the mines. There Catherine Breshkovsky was happy in a way, in spite of her misery, because she enjoyed the friendship of the cream of Russian woman• hood, girls of the noblest character, both intellectually and morally, who had also been exiled., Many of these died of scurvy induced through the wretched fare provided; but this great-aouled patriot nursed and cheered her suffering sisters to the last. When asked how she escaped the sickness herself, she_replied that she was too busy nursing the others? After a time she was transferred to a tiny village inhabited by aborigines under the Arctic Circle, and here she spent the hardest eight years of her life, as she was cut off from all intellectual companionship and rarely saw a civilised human being. However, she taught the children of the savages, and the courage that burned in her heart, in spite of all, may be gauged from her words to an English traveller passing through—"We may die in exile, and our children may die; but something will come of it at last!" After twenty long years ner term of exile expired, and she returned to Russia, to resume her work of teaching the peasants. In a few years betrayal followed, and she and a companion were arrested. To save him and in the hope that one victim might placate a revengeful Government, she pleaded guilty, and now goes into that exile froTi which there is little hope of her ever returning.