arrested under the name of J. Jaks-Tyris and convicted of revolutionary activities, but managed to escape from a prison hospital in Suwałki in 1906. He was arrested again in May 1907 and sentenced to 3 years for anti-tsarist activities. Among his defenders in the Suwałki court were attorneys Alexander Kerensky, who, after the 1917 February revolution, was the head of Russian government, and M. F. Volkenstein, who employed V. Ulyanov (Lenin) back in 1893. In 1909, after authorities discovered that Mickevičius was the same person who escaped from prison in 1906, he was sentenced to an additional 8 years of katorga. He did his time in the Vilnius, Suwałki, Warsaw, and Vladimir Prisons until 1913. In 1913, to commemorate the 300th anniversary of the Romanov Dynasty, Tsar Nicholas II decreed the amnesty for certain non-violent prisoners. Mickevičius, as a political prisoner of non-violent nature, was released from prison and exiled to the Yenisei region in Siberia. In December 1913, Mickevičius escaped from the exile with fake documents. For several weeks in early 1914 he was in hiding in Latvia and Lithuania (count Nikolai Zubov offered him a hiding place in his Medemrodė estate, now in Agluonai village). There he prepared for his emigration and was authorized by Mykolas Biržiška to act abroad on behalf of the LSDP. With the help of local activists, Mickevičius crossed the border to Prussia and traveled to Austria with fake documents. In 1914 in Kraków, then part of the Austrian Grand Duchy of Cracow, he met Vladimir Lenin, the leader of the Bolshevik faction of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party. In 1914 Mickevičius became a member of Vilnis editorial staff. He stayed in Kraków until the beginning of the World War I and then emigrated through Switzerland to Great Britain. From 1914 to 1916, he lived in Great Britain. Mickevičius headed the LSDP chapter in Scotland. In 1915–1916, he edited Socialdemokratas and Rankpelnis in Bellshill, Scotland. In 1916, he left Great Britain for the United States where he lived until 1917. He joined the American Lithuanian Socialist Union (ALSU) and took over management of all major left press. He edited left wing science and literature monthly magazine Naujoji Gadynė in Philadelphia and newspaper Kova. Communist revolutionary In 1917, after the Russian February Revolution, Mickevičius was no longer a fugitive. He arrived from the United States to Petrograd (presently Saint Petersburg) and joined the Russian