A REVOLUTIONARY.

Colonist, Volume LII, Issue 12765, 11 April 1910, Page 4

A REVOLUTIONARY.

Katharine Breshkovsky was exiled to Siberia last month on a charge of belonging to the Social Revolutionary Party. This lady is sixty-eight years of age, and pri<<r to her trial she had spent two <years in solitary confinement in the fortress of St. Peter and. St. Paul, at St. Peterburg. When a young girl, she was taught by her father to dream of freedom for the Russian people, and she joined the central group of Liberatists in the capitai city. Six years later she married a nobleman, and they began to educate the peasants on their estate and to rouse in them the desire for constitutional government. The result of the efforts of husband and wife was to provoke the active hostility of the authorities. Madame Breshkovsky was then twenty-six years old. Her husbahd was not willing to proceed further along the path of revolution, and she therefore left him and went forth to preach to the peasants. "I went t6 Kieff,"-she has written, "joined a revolutionary group, and travelled from town to town spreading our ideas. '•' I put on peasant to elude the police and break down the peasants' cringing distrust. I dressed in enormous "bark shoes, coarse shirt, and heavy cloak. I used acid on my hands and' face; I worked and ate with the peasants; I learned their speech; I travelled on foot, forging passports ; I lived 'illegally.' " In 1874 Madame Breshkovsky was arrested. After a night in a "black hole," swarming with vermin, she was placed in a cell of a St. Petersburg - prison. She remained in the cell for two years, and her trial did not take place until 1878, when she was sent to Siberia.. She endured unspeakable horrors in Siberian prisons for many years. '.. After working in the mines and making an abortive attempt to escape 2 she, with other women, was thrown into a tiny cell. "For three years we did not breathe the outside air," she states. "We struggled constantly against the outrages inflicted on üb. After one outrage we lay like a row of dead women for nine days without touching food, until certain promises were finally exacted from the warder. The hunger strike was used repeatedly. To thwart it we were often bound hand and foot while Cossacks tried to force food down our throats." One woman who struck an official, aftor an intolerable insult, died under the lash. In .1896: Madame Breshkovsky was allowed to return to Russia, and she at once joined the Social Revolutionary Party, and entered vigorously into the fight for freedom. Her second sentence of exile is the result.