IN DARK SIBERIA.

Otago Witness, Issue 3014, 20 December 1911, Page 87

IN DARK SIBERIA.

REVOLT OF WOMEN STUDENTS. There are many preconceived notions about Siberia possessed by the man in the street, motions beginning with visions of murderous wolf packs—vide the elementary readers of our youth,—eternal snow, and over-persecuted convicts, saintly intellectual men passing most of their time under the knout, and tailing off into recollections of the general crop of misrepresentations that bestrew the two or three well-known books on the subject. But for the man in the street, as for any one who visits the land, it is startling to find that throughout the length and breadth of Siberia are to be met intellectual women whose interest in politics is as keen and as sincere, although not as ostentatious, as that of a Pankhurst or a Despard. —Silent Suffragettes.— Siberian women are of two kinds, the country peasant—poor, meagrely fed, shabbily dressed, a slave to a vodkasoaked husband, under mistress in a oneroom log hut, a breeder of children, allowed none but the trifling diversions of going to church and rolling and smoking cigarettes—and the town women. The town women, again, are Siberia's silent suffragettes. They do not shout, bounce, boast., beat the drum, or parade the streets in virginal white, but in the quiet of homes, in the class-rooms of the gymnasia and of Tomsk University, they are laying a foundation that must in time serve to lead one of the darkest of dark lands to the light. , After an extended stay in the barbarous Steppe villages last winter, I went to Tomsk for a week (says a correspondent of the New York World), most of which was put in at Tomsk University. The peculiar nature of these women was commented on by Professor L. L. Tovey, dean of the mining school of the Technology Institute. —What Women Study.— "The men," he said, "go in for applied sciences, but the women are particularly keen about the study of literature, Russian literature, and political economy. And the situation is pertinent because the two are relative. The history of Russia's political development during the past ibenturv, for example, -cannot be told apart from the novels of the time. Only the blindest ignorance will permit one to forget, the peasant sketches of Tur'gieneff while considering that great movement consummated by Alexander 11, the freeing of the serf 'in the early sixties of the past century. The development of Rus sian literature and the nation's political growth were concomitant. The study of political economy is the logical step.for a Russian after a souroe in his native literature. "These two, Siberian girls study often to the neglect of the other subjects on the curriculum. "' From the furthest western city of Sil»e.ia, Tcheliahmsk, to the hithermost JEast,' the Amur and pre-Amur districts, I found the same intellectual leanings among the women. In Blagoveschensk-on-Amur —a icdty that has the lowest gymnasia record for all Siberia, yet, according to Professor Tovey, furnishes the brightest scholars to Tomsk University—the girls care little for French or German, their elective language?., but have a marked passion for every Russian writer from

Ilarian to Gorky. And, more, they have their own opinions on Russia's political future, their own dreams and their own ideals —The Revolutionary Fever. — Femininity now and then foams, over. They can no longer suffer in silence. Adolescent fervour bursts out, not alone in i evolutionary talk, but even -in murderous assault. Tomsk still has a vivid recollection of the assassination of the military governor by a young girl four years ago in Vladivostok.' The story was told me by a youth who professed to have been a'party to the act. I repeat the account for what it ut worth: "We used to have secret meetings while I was ai Tomsk University, to talk over political affairs. Conversation was rabid, if not revolutionary, at times. Several girls attended the meetings, and were not behind us in the expression of their views. One night Ave discussed the military governor, whose recent rulings had embittered us. W? resolved that nothing short of death was his just due: But how that punishment was to be meted out we- did not resolve. Imagine our surprise, however, the next morning, when the govei'nor was shot at the railway station by a girl who had attended that meeting." The intellectual interests of the Siberian Woman, withal, are far from the dilettante. She dots not feed on intellectual ■sentimentality. Her dreams for development are n>t mere conclave trith the aristocracy of birth and finance. Politics is not on the curriculum of Siberia's finishing schools—and Siberia has such things. The study is hardly fashionable. The women are silent, of necessity, perhaps, but discreetly so. Moreover, their interest in these matters in no wise detracts from their interest in the h'>me, for if ever the better-class woman was mistress of her own house, it is in Siberia, the land where, legend says, the flowers have no fragr-mce and the women no love.