It is necessary in considering the people of Siberia to recall some of the facts of its history. We know that the Czars and their agents put “dangerous people” into cold storage in Siberia. And the thinker, the idealist, the protesters against the government were classed as criminals, and imprisoned with criminals. This, curiously enough, established a bond of fellowship between the most vicious cut-throats of the Empire and the highest-minded men and women it had produced. If a man or woman has spent half a lifetime in a stone cell where the temperature drops as low as eighty degrees below zero for merely daring to think of government, criticise it, and demand justice for the ignorant people, that man or woman is not going to worry about cruel methods in retaliation if freedom ever comes. And when such a political convict has been chained to a murderer for work, and lives in such a cell with a murderer, these two will join hands against the common enemy. Centuries were spent building up such hatreds. Why should we wonder at the cruelties practiced when the prisons were opened? I saw in Chita one of the old prisons. It was empty, with the cell doors hanging from broken hinges--hideous doors of planks painted a dull yellow, with small holes cut in them for passing in food, and the edges of the holes stained black with the grime of countless dirty hands which for unknown years had delivered food to prisoners. I got into this prison unexpectedly one cold day while seeking another prison--Semenoff’s military prison. And I wandered through it, and examined it in detail. Stone benches had served as beds--two to a cell. The remains of the sanitary appliances, if they could be described as sanitary at all, were most crude. I went into one of these cells and shut the door, and sat on the stone bench. The hole in the door, six inches square, gave scarcely any light from the corridor. I put my flashlight on the walls, and found them scratched on every inch with names, initials, and dates. One wall was covered with rows upon rows of scratches in the stone. At first I thought there had been a rude attempt at interior decoration, but the word for “years” was dimly revealed in many places. Every scratch represented a year spent by human beings in that stone grave! Dark, damp, terribly cold and full of vile odors though it was nearly a year since the prison had been emptied of its human misery, this cell in ten minutes told me more about Siberia than all the historians and diplomats and students of Russia could have told me in a lifetime of reading or lecturing. [Illustration: SIBERIANS CELEBRATING THE SIGNING OF THE ARMISTICE] [Illustration: ROOM IN HOUSE AT EKATERINBURG WHERE THE CZAR AND HIS FAMILY ARE REPUTED TO HAVE BEEN EXECUTED]