Note 134 — 1896

A peasant of the province of Kharkov in the district of Sumsk, Peter Vasilevich Olkhovik. Refused military service October 15, 1895, at recruiting, in the city of Bielopolie, province of Kharkov. Was sentenced by the Vladivostok military court to three years in a disciplinary battalion. The letters of Olkhovik to his relatives and acquaintances about his refusal were published by The Free Press, 1897, England, and in 1906 in Russia by Obnoblenia (and were confiscated). Influenced by Olkhovic, the private, Cyril Sereda, also refused military service, with whom Olkhovic became friendly on the steamer on the way to Siberia, where he was appointed for service. Both of them were turned over to the Irkutsk disciplinary battalions. Tolstoi’s letter to the commanding officer of the regiment, in which he asks him “as a Christian and as a kind man to have pity on these people ...” was printed at first also in The Free Press and afterwards in various publications in Russia. (See the Complete Works of Tolstoi, published by Sytin: subscribed edition, Volume XX, popular edition, Volume XXII.) On the effect that Tolstoi’s letter produced on the officer of the regiment, Tolstoi himself wrote the following in a letter to P. A. Boulanger, March 29, 1898: “Recently I was surprised, and very pleasantly, by a letter from a man exiled administratively from Verkholensk, who writes that the commanding officer of the disciplinary battalion in Irkutsk openly told Olkhovich and Sereda that my appeal for them saved them from corporal punishment and shortened their sentence. Let a thousand letters pass in vain: if but one has such a result, then one ought to write unceasingly.” The fate of P. V. Olkhovich was as follows: From the disciplinary battalion he was exiled for eighteen years to the district of Yakutsk, where he lived together with the exiled Dukhobors until 1905, when together with them he went to America. At the present moment he is living in California.