Already heavily populated with exiles, Yakutsk was seeing an almost daily influx of new arrivals. They came from all over the Russian Empire, from Moscow, from the Crimea, from Poland. Many of them were well educated, and most did not know what they had done to earn their term of banishment—which, often as not, was for life. Seldom had they even been charged with a crime; they had simply been issued an “administrative order” and sent east to live out their lives in a prison without bars. The land itself was harsh and vast enough to detain them. Their stories were beyond tragic, and they made
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