THE GEEAT SIBERIAN EOAD IN WINTER 375

beria for making an attempt, in connection with Madam Rossikova, to rob the Kherson Government Treasury. After the adoption of the so-called "policy of terror" by the extreme section of the Russian revolutionary party in 1878, some of the terrorists advocated and practised a re- sort to such methods of waging war as the forgery of Im- perial manifestos as a means of inciting the peasants to revolt, and the robbery of Government mails and Govern- ment treasuries as a means of procuring money to relieve the sufferings and to facilitate the escape of political exiles in Siberia. These measures were disapproved and con- demned by all of the Russian liberals and by most of the cool-headed revolutionists; but they were defended by those who resorted to them upon the ground that they [the terrorists] were fighting against tremendous odds, and that the unjust, treacherous, and ferociously cruel treatment of political prisoners by the Government was enough to jus- tify any sort of reprisals. Among the terrorists of this class was Madam Dubrova, or, as she was known before her marriage, Miss Anna Alexeiova. In conjunction with Madam Rossikova, a school-teacher from Elizabethgrad, and aided by an escaped convict from Siberia, Miss Alex- eiova made an attempt to rob the Kherson Government Treasury by means of a tunnel driven secretly at night under the stone floor of the vault in which the funds of the institution were kept. Judged from any point of view this was a wild scheme for young and criminally inexperienced gentlewomen to undertake; and that it ever succeeded at all is a striking evidence of the skill, the energy, the pa- tience, and the extraordinary daring that were developed in certain classes of Russian society at that time by the conditions of revolutionary life. Young, refined, and edu- cated women, in all parts of the Empire, entered upon lines of action, and devised and executed plots that, in view of the inevitable consequences, might well have daunted the

bravest man. The tunnel under the Kherson Government