Henry Street Settlement (New York, N.Y.); Poor -- New York (State) -- New York
When Dr. W⸺ called upon me he was on his way to Sakhalin to join his wife
after nearly twenty years’ separation. For participation in an act of
violence against an official notorious for his brutality and disregard
even of Russian justice she had been sentenced to death, but the sentence
had been commuted to imprisonment in the Schlüsselburg fortress, whither
she was conducted in heavy chains, and where she remained thirteen years.
Later she was rearrested and sentenced to exile for life. She had been
for five years in the frozen Siberian village of Sakhalin, when, in 1898,
her husband, having seen their only son established in life and settled
his own affairs, obtained permission from the government to join his wife
in her exile.
In imagination I followed this cultured, impressive-looking man on his
long journey with a hope that was almost a prayer that the reunited
husband and wife would find recompense in their comradeship for all that
had been given up and that the woman’s fine spirit would make up for
whatever she might have lost through deprivation of stimulating contact
with her own circle in the world.
My interest caused me to follow their subsequent history. A few years
after Dr. W⸺ had joined his wife they were permitted to remove to
Vladivostok. In 1906, after the October manifesto, there was a military
revolutionary movement in Vladivostok. The governor gave the order to
fire and Madame W⸺, who, with her husband, was watching the crowd, was
killed by a stray bullet. Her son is now a lawyer in Petrograd. Although
separated from his mother nearly all his life he shows his devotion to
her memory and his sympathy with the cause by defending the “politicals”
who come to him.
* * * * *
The settlement from time to time affords occasions for conference on
Russian affairs between influential Americans and visiting Russians who
entertain hopes of reform by other than active revolutionary methods
and it has also given a hearing and found sympathetic friends for other
unhappy subjects of the Czar.
Echoes came to us of the persecution of the Doukhobors, a Russian
religious communistic sect, whose creed bears resemblance to that of
the Friends. Like the active revolutionists, these people had suffered
flogging, imprisonment, and exile, but in their case for espousing the
doctrine of non-resistance.
In 1897, upon their refusal to take up arms, persecution again became
active. The Russian press was forbidden to allude to the subject, but a
petition was said to have been thrown into the carriage of the Empress
when she was traveling in the Caucasus, where the Doukhobors had been
banished, and her interest was aroused. By 1900 Tolstoi had succeeded in
fixing attention upon their plight, and arrangements were finally made,
chiefly through the efforts of Friends in England and America and the
devotion of Aylmer Maude, for their settlement in Canada.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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