In every town of Russia, in every quarter of St. Peters burg, small groups were formed for self-improvement an¢ self-education; the works of the philosophers, the writing of the economists, the historical researches of the youn; Russian historical school, were carefully read in thes circles, and the reading was followed by endless dichussiond The aim of all that reading and discussion was to solve thy great question which rose before them. In what way coulc “they be useful to the masses? Gradually, they came t the idea that the only way was to settle amongst the people and to live the people’s life. Young men went into the villages as doctors, doctors’ helpers, teachers, village scribes! even as agricultural laborers, blacksmiths, woodcutters, an¢ so on, and tried to live there in close contact with the peasants. Girls passed teachers’ examinations, learned mid wifery or nursing, and went by the hundred into the vil lages, devoting themselves entirely to the poorest part 0! the population. | These people went without any ideal of social recon. struction in their mind, or any thought of revolution. They simply wanted to teach the mass of the peasants to read, tc instruct them in other things, to give them medical help, and in any way to aid in raising them from their darkness and misery, and to learn at the same time what were ie popular ideals of a better social life.
“When I returned from Switzerland, I found this mod ment in full swing.
XTil I HASTENED to share with my friends my impressions of the International Workingmen’s Association and my books. At the university I had no friends, properly speaking; I was older than most of my companions, and among young people a difference of a few years is always an obstacle to complete comradeship. It must also be said that since the new rules of admission to the university had been introduced in 1861, the best of the young men — the most developed and the most independent in thought — were sifted out of the gymnasia, and did not gain admit- ‘tance to the university. Consequently, the majority of my comrades were good boys, laborious, but taking no interest ‘in anything besides the examinations. I was friendly with ‘only one of them: let me call him Dmitri Kelnitz. He “was born in South Russia, and although his name was German, he hardly spoke German, and his face was South "Russian rather than Teutonic. He was very intelligent, 4 had read a great deal, and had seriously thought over what he had read. He loved science and deeply respected it, but, like many of us, he soon came to the conclusion that to follow the career of a scientific man meant to join the camp of the Philistines, and that there was plenty of other and more urgent work that he could do. He attended the university lectures for two years, and then abandoned them, giving himself entirely to social work. He lived anyhow, Leven doubt if he had a permanent lodging. Sometimes he would come to me and ask, “‘ Have you some paper?”’
and having taken a supply of it, he would sit at the corner of a table for an hour or two, diligently making a transla 304 MEMOIRS OF A REVOLUTIONIST tion. The little that he earned in this way was more than sufficient to satisfy all his limited wants. Then he would hurry to a distant part of the town to see a comrade or to help a needy friend; or he would cross St. Petersburg on foot, to a remote suburb, in order to obtain free admission to a college for some boy in whom the comrades were interested. He was undoubtedly a gifted man. In West- 4m Europe a man far less gifted would have worked his way to a position of political or socialist leadership. No such thought ever entered the brain of Kelnitz. To lead men was by no means his ambition, and there was no work too insignificant for him to do. This trait, however, was not distinctive of him alone; all those who had lived some | years in the students’ circles of those times were possessed of it to a high degree.
Soon after my return Kelnitz invited me to join a circle, which was known amongst the youth as ‘‘the Circle of Tchaykévsky.”” Under this name it played an important. part in the history of the social movement in Russia, and, under this name it will go down to history. “Its mem- bers,’ Kelnitz said to me, ‘have hitherto been mostly constitutionalists; but they are excellent men, with minds) open to any honest idea; they have plenty of friends all over Russia, and you will see later on what you can do.”) I already knew Tchaykoévsky, and a few other members of! this circle. Tchaykévsky had won my heart at our first i meeting, and our friendship has remained unshaken for!
twenty-seven years. | The beginning of this circle was a very small group of young men and women,—one of whom was Sophie Pe- révskaya, — who had united for purposes of self-education and self-improvement. 'Tchaykdévsky was of their number. In 1869 Nechaieff had tried to start a secret revolution- ary organization among the youth imbued with the before-| mentioned desire of working among the people, and to secure THE CIRCLE OF TCHAYKOVSKY 305 this end he resorted to the ways of old conspirators, with- out recoiling even before deceit when he wanted to force his associates to follow his lead. Such methods could have no success in Russia, and very soon his society broke down. All the members were arrested, and some of the best and purest of the Russian youth went to Siberia before they had done anything. The circle of self-education of which I am speaking was constituted in opposition to the methods of Nechdaieff. The few friends had judged, quite correctly, that a morally developed individuality must be the founda- tion of every organization, whatever political character it may take afterward, and whatever programme of action it may adopt in the course of future events. This was why the Circle of Tchaykévsky, gradually widening its programme, spread so extensively in Russia, achieved such mmportant results, and later on, when the ferocious prosecu- tions of the government created a revolutionary struggle, ‘produced that remarkable set of men and women who fell ‘in the terrible contest they waged against autocracy.
At that time, however, — that is, in 1872, — the circle had nothing revolutionary in it. If it had remained a mere circle of self-improvement, it would soon have petri- fied, like a monastery. But the members found a suitable work. They began to spread good books. They bought the works of Lassalle, Bervi (on the condition of the labor- ing classes in Russia), Marx, Russian historical works, and so on,—whole editions,—and distributed them among students; in the provinces. Ina few years there was not a town of importance in “thirty-eight provinces of the Russian Empire,” to use official language, where this circle did not have a group of comrades engaged in the spreading of that sort of literature. Gradually, following the general drift of the times, and stimulated by the news which came from Western Europe about the rapid growth of the labor Movement, the circle became more and more a centre of 306 MEMOIRS OF A REVOLUTIONIST socialistic propaganda among the educated youth, and ¢ natural intermediary between members of provincial circles and then, one day, the ice between students and worker: was broken, and direct relations were established witk working-people at St. Petersburg and in some of the pro vinces. It was at that juncture that I joined the ones, | il the spring of 1872.
All secret societies are fiercely prosecuted in Russia, an the Western reader will perhaps expect from me a descrip tion of my initiation and of the oath of allegiance whicel I took. I must disappoint him, because there was nothin, of the sort, and could not be; we should have been th first to laugh at such ceremonies, and Kelnitz would no have missed the opportunity of putting in one of his sai castic remarks, which would have killed any ritual. Ther was not even a statute. The circle accepted as membel only persons who were well known and had been tested i various circumstances, and of whom it was felt that the could be trusted absolutely. Before a new member WE received, his character was discussed with the franknes and seriousness which were characteristic of the nihilis The slightest token of insincerity or conceit would hay barred the way to admission. ‘The circle did not care j make a show of numbers, and had no tendency to conce) trate in its hands all the activity that was going on among the youth, or to include in one organization the scores | different circles which existed in the capitals and tl provinces. With most of them friendiy relations we) maintained; they were helped, and they helped us, why necessity arose, but no assault was made on their autonom| The circle preferred to remain a closely united group friends; and never did I meet elsewhere such a collecti« of morally superior men and women as the score of perso! whose acquaintance I made at the first meeting of f Circle of Tchaykévsky. I still feel proud of having bet received into that family.
XIV WHEN I joined the Circle of Tchaykdévsky, I found its members hotly discussing the direction to be given to their activity. Some were in favor of continuing to carry on rad- ical and socialistic propaganda among the educated youth; but others thought that the sole aim of this work should be to prepare men who would be capable of arousing the great inert laboring masses, and that their chief activity ought to be among the peasants and workmen in the towns. In all the circles and groups which were formed at that time by the hundred, at St. Petersburg and in the provinces, the same discussions went on; and everywhere the second pro- gramme prevailed over the first.
If our youth had merely taken to socialism in the abstract, they might have felt satisfied with a simple declaration of socialist principles, including as a distant aim ‘the com- munistic possession of the instruments of production,’ — and in the meantime they might have carried on some sort of political agitation. Many middle-class socialist poli- ticians in Western Europe and America really take this course. But our youth had been drawn to socialism in quite another way. ‘They were not theorists about social- ism, but had become socialists by living no better than the workers live, by making no distinction between ‘‘ mine and thine”’ in their circles, and by refusing to enjoy for their own satisfaction the riches they had inherited from their fathers. They had done with regard to capitalism what _ Tolstédy urges should be done with regard to war, when he calls upon the people, instead of criticising war and _ continuing to wear the military uniform, to refuse, each one 308 MEMOIRS OF A REVOLUTIONIST for himself, to be a soldier and to bear arms. In this same way our Russian youth, each one for himself or her- self, refused to take personal advantage of the revenues of their fathers. It was, of course, necessary that they should identify themselves with the people. ‘Thousands and thou- sands of young men and women had already left their houses, and now they tried to live in the villages and the industrial towns in all possible capacities. This was not an organized movement: it was one of those mass movements which occur at certain periods of sudden awakening of human conscience. Now that small organized groups were formed, ready to try a systematic effort for spreading ideas of freedom and revolt in Russia, they were forced to carry on that propaganda among the masses of the peasants and of the workers in the towns. Various writers have tried to explain this movement “to the people ” by influences from abroad: “foreign agitators are everywhere,” was a favorite explanation. It is certainly true that our youth listened to the mighty voice of Bakunin, and that the agitation of the ‘International Workingmen’s Association had a fascinating effect upon us. But the movement had a far deeper origin it began before “foreign agitators” had spoken to the Rus: sian youth, and even before the International Association had been founded. It was beginning in the groups of Karak6zoff in 1866; Turguéneff saw it coming, and already in 1859 faintly indicated it. I did my best to promote that movement in the Circle of Tchaykévsky; but I was only working with the tide which was infinitely more powerfu. than any individual efforts.
We often spoke, of course, of the necessity of a politica. agitation against our absolute government. We saw already that the mass of the peasants were being driven to unavoid able and irremediable ruin by foolish taxation, and by stil’ more foolish selling off of their cattle to cover the arrears 0 taxes. We “visionaries” saw coming that complete rui NEED OF POLITICAL AGITATION | 309 of a whole population which ‘by this time, alas, has been accomplished to an appalling extent in Central Russia, and is confessed by the government itself. We knew how, in every direction, Russia was being plundered in a most scandalous manner. We knew, and we learned more every day, of the lawlessness of the functionaries, and the almost incredible bestiality of many among them. We heard con- tinually of friends whose houses were raided at night by the police, who disappeared in prisons, and who — we ascer- tained later on—had been transported without judgment to hamlets in some remote province of Russia. We felt, therefore, the necessity of a political struggle against this terrible power, which was crushing the best intellectual forces of the nation. But we saw no possible ground, legal or semi-legal, for such a struggle.
Our elder brothers did not want our socialistic aspirations, -and we could not part with them. Nay, even if some of us had done so, it would have been of no avail. The young generation, as a whole, were treated as ‘ suspects,” and the elder generation feared to have anything to do with them. Every young man of democratic tastes, every young woman following a course of higher education, was a suspect in the eyes of the state police, and was denounced by Katkoff as -an enemy of the state. Cropped hair and blue spectacles worn by a girl, a Scotch plaid worn in winter by a student, ‘Instead of an overcoat, which were evidences of nihilist sim- plicity and democracy, were denounced as tokens of ‘ po- _hitical unreliability.” If any student’s lodging came to be frequently visited by other students, it was periodically ‘Invaded by the state police and searched. So common were the night raids in certain students’ lodgings that Kelnitz ' once said, in his mildly humorous way, to the police officer ' who was searching the rooms: “‘ Why should you go through all our books, each time you come to make a search? You might as well have a list of them, and then come once us ma 310 MEMOIRS OF A REVOLUTIONIST month to see if they are all on the shelves; and you might, - from time to time, add the titles of the new ones.” The slightest suspicion of political unreliability was sufficient ground upon which to take a young man from a high school, to imprison him for several months, and finally to send him to some remote province of the Urals, — “for an undeter- mined term,” as they used to say in their bureaucratic slang. Even at the time when the Circle of Tchaykévsky did nothing but distribute books, all of which had been printed with the censor’s approval, Tchaykévsky was twice arrested and kept some four or six months in prison; on the second occasion at a critical time of his career as a chemist. His researches had recently been published in the “ Bulletin of the Academy of Sciences,” and he had come up for his final” university examinations. He was released at last, because the police could not discover sufficient evidence against him to warrant his transportation to the Urals! “ But if we | arrest you once more,’”’ he was told, “we shall send you to, | Siberia.” In fact, it was a favorite dream of Alexander 6: | | to have somewhere in the steppes a special town, guarded night and day by patrols of Cossacks, where all suspected young people could be sent, so as to make of them a city of ten or twenty thousand inhabitants. Only the menace which such a city might some day offer prevented him from.
carrying out this truly Asiatic scheme.
One of our members, an officer, had belonged to a group: of young men whose ambition was to serve in the pro-| vincial Zémstvos (district and county councils). They) regarded work in this direction as a high mission, and prepared themselves for it by serious studies of the eco- nomical conditions of Central Russia. Many young people cherished for a time the same hopes; but all these hopes vanished at the first contact with the actual government machinery.
OFFICIAL REFORMS USELESS 311 Having granted a very limited form of self-government to certain provinces of Russia, the government immediately directed all its efforts to reducing that reform to nothing by depriving it of all its meaning and vitality. The provincial “self-government” had to content itself with the mere function of state officials who would collect additional local taxes and spend them for the local needs of the state. Every attempt of the county councils to take the initiative in any improvement — schools, teachers’ colleges, sanitary measures, agricultural improvements, ete. — was met by the central government with suspicion, with hostility, — and denounced by the “ Moscow Gazette” as “separatism,” as the creation of ‘‘a state within the state,” as rebellion against autocracy.
If any one were to tell the true history, for example, of the teachers’ college of Tver, or of any similar undertaking of a Zémstvo in those years, with all the petty persecutions, the prohibitions, the suspensions, and what not with which the institution was harassed, no West European, and espe- cially no American reader, would believe it. He would throw the book aside, saying, ‘‘It cannot be true; it is too stupid to be true.” And yet it was so. Whole groups of the elected representatives of several Zémstvos were de- prived of their functions, ordered to leave their. province -and their estates, or were simply exiled, for having dared to petition the Emperor in the most loyal manner concern- ing such rights as belonged to the Zémstvos by law. ‘The elected members of the provincial councils must be simple ) ministerial functionaries, and obey the minister of the in- terior: ”” such was the theory of the St. Petersburg govern- “ment. As to the less prominent people, — teachers, doc- _tors, and the like, in the service of the local councils, — _ they were removed and exiled by the state police in twenty- four hours, without further ceremony than an order of the omnipotent Third Section of the imperial chancelry. No 312 MEMOIRS OF A REVOLUTIONIST longer ago than last year, a lady whose husband is a rich landowner and occupies a prominent position in one of the Zémstvos, and who is herself interested in education, in- vited eight schoolmasters to her birthday party. “Poor men,” she said to herself, “‘they never have the opportunity of seeing any one but the peasants.” The day after the party, the village policeman called at the mansion and in- sisted upon having the names of the eight teachers, in order to report them to the police authorities. The lady refused to give the names. ‘“ Very well,” he replied, “I will find them out, nevertheless, and make my report. Teachers must not come together, and I am bound to report if they do.” The high position of the lady sheltered the teachers, — in this case; but if they had met in the lodgings of one of their own number, they would have received a visit from | the state police, and half of them would have been dis-. missed by the ministry of education; and if, moreover, an, angry word had escaped from one of them during the police raid, he or she would have been sent to some province of | the Urals. This is what happens to-day, thirty-three years | after the opening of the county and district councils; but it was far worse in the seventies. What sort of basis for a political struggle could such institutions offer?: When I inherited from my father his Tambdv estate, I thought very seriously for a time of settling on that estate, | and devoting my energy to work in the local Zémstvo. | Some peasants and the poorer priests of the neighborhood. asked me to do so. As for myself, I should have been content with anything I could do, no matter how small. it might be, if only it would help to raise the intellectual level and the well-being of the peasants. But one day, when several of my advisers were together, I asked them:) ‘‘ Supposing I were to try to start a school, an experimen: | tal farm, a codperative enterprise, and, at the same time, also took upon myself the defense of that peasant from our PLANS FOR A CONSTITUTION o13 village who has lately been wronged, — would the authori- ties let me do it?” ‘‘ Never!” was the unanimous reply.
An old gray-haired priest, a man who was held in great esteem in our neighborhood, came to me, a few days later, with two influential dissenting leaders, and said: ‘ Talk with these two men. If you can manage it, go with them and, Bible in hand, preach to the peasants...Well, you know what to preach...No police in the world will find you, if they conceal you...There ’S nothing to be done besides; that’s what I, an old man, advise you.”
I told them frankly why I could not assume the part of Wiclif. But the old man was right. A movement similar to that of the Lollards is rapidly growing now amongst the ‘Russian peasants. Such tortures as have been inflicted on the peace-loving Dukhobdrs, and such raids upon the peas- ant dissenters in South Russia as were made in 1897, when children were kidnapped so that they might be educated in orthodox monasteries, will only give to that movement a force that it could not have attained five-and-twenty years ago.
As the question of agitation for a constitution was con- _tinually being raised in our discussions, I once proposed to our circle to take it up seriously, and to choose an appropriate plan of action. I was always of the opinion that 'when the circle decided anything unanimously, each member ought to put aside his personal feeling and give all his strength to the task. ‘“‘If you decide to agitate for a con- stitution,” I said, ‘‘ this is my plan: I will separate myself from you, for appearance’ sake, and maintain relations with -only one member of the circle, — for instance, Tchaykov- sky, — through whom I shall be kept informed how you succeed in your work, and can communicate to you in a general way what I am doing. My work will be among 314 MEMOIRS OF A REVOLUTIONIST the courtiers and the higher functionaries. JI have among them many acquaintances, and know a number of persons who are disgusted with the present conditions. I will bring them together and unite them, if possible, into a sort of organization; and then, some day, there is sure to be an opportunity to direct all these forces toward compelling | Alexander II. to give Russia a constitution. There certainly will come a time when all these people, feeling that they are compromised, will in their own interest take a de- | cisive step. If it is necessary, some of us, who have been officers, might be very helpful in extending the propaganda amongst the officers in the army; but this action must be | quite separate from yours, though parallel with it. I have seriously thought of it. I know what connections I have and who can be trusted, and I believe some of the discon- | tented already look upon me as a possible centre for some | action of this sort. This course is not the one I should take of my own choice; but if you think that it is best, I will give myself to it with might and main.”
The circle did not accept that proposal. Knowing one another as well as they did, my comrades probably thought that if I went in this direction I should cease to be true to myself. For my own personal happiness, for my own per- —— sonal life, I cannot feel too grateful now that my proposal | was not accepted. I should have gone in a direction which was not the one dictated by my own nature, and I should not have found in it the personal happiness which I have found in other paths. But when, six or seven years later, | the terrorists were engaged in their terrible struggle against | Alexander IJ., I regretted that there had not been some- body else to do the sort of work I had proposed to do in the higher circles at St. Petersburg. With some under- | standing there beforehand, and with the ramifications which | such an. understanding probably would have taken all over the empire, the holocausts of victims would not have been PROTECTING THE TSAR 319 made in vain. At any rate, the underground work of the executive committee ought by all means to have been sup- ported by a parallel agitation at the Winter Palace.
Over and over again the necessity of a political effort thus came under discussion in our little group, with no result. The apathy and the indifference of the wealthier classes were hopeless, and the irritation among the perse- euted youth had not yet been brought to that high pitch which ended, six years later, in the struggle of the terror- ists under the executive committee. Nay,—and this is ‘one of the most tragical ironies of history, — it was the ‘same youth whom Alexander II., in his blind fear and ‘fury, ordered to be sent by the Hundred to hard labor and ‘condemned to slow death in exile; it was the same youth who protected him in 1871-78. The very teachings of the socialist circles were such as to prevent the repetition of a Karakézoff attempt on the Tsar’s life. “Prepare in “Russia a great socialist mass movement amongst the work- ers and the peasants,” was the watchword in those times. “Don’t trouble about the Tsar and his counselors. If such ‘a movement begins, if the peasants join in the mass move- ‘ment to claim the land and to abolish the serfdom redemp- ‘tion taxes, the imperial power will be the first to seek support in the moneyed classes and the landlords and to convoke a Parliament, —just as the peasant insurrection in France, in 1789, compelled the royal power to convoke ‘the National Assembly; so it will be in Russia.”
But there was more than that. Separate men and “groups, seeing that the reign of Alexander II. was hope- lessly doomed to sink deeper and deeper in reaction, and entertaining at the same time vague hopes as to the sup- posed “liberalism ” of the heir apparent, — all young heirs _to thrones are supposed to be liberal, — persistently reverted to the idea that the example of Karakdzoff ought to be followed. The organized circles, however, strenuously op: posed such an idea, and urged their comrades not to resort to that course of action. I may now divulge the following | fact which has never before been made public. When a young man came to St. Petersburg from one of the pouthens provinces with the firm intention of killing Alexander IL, and some members of the Tchaykdvsky circle learned of his plan, they not only applied all the weight of their argu-. ments to dissuade the young man, but, when’ he would not. be dissuaded, they informed him that they would keep a: watch over him and prevent him by force from making any such attempt. Knowing well how loosely guarded the! Winter Palace was at that time, I can positively say that) they saved the life of Alexander II. So firmly were the’ youth opposed at that time to the war in which later, when: the cup of their sufferings was filled to overflowing, hea took part.
XV XV THE two years that I worked with the Circle of Tchay- _kévsky, before I was arrested, left a deep impression upon all my subsequent life and thought. During these two “years it was life under high pressure, — that exuberance of life when one feels at every moment the full throbbing of all the fibres of the inner self, and when life is really worth living. I was in a family of men and women so closely ‘united by their common object, and so broadly and deli- _eately humane in their mutual relations, that I cannot now ‘recall a single moment of even temporary friction marring the life of our circle. Those who have had any experience of political agitation will appreciate the value of this statement.
Before abandoning entirely my scientific career, | con- sidered myself bound to complete the report of my journey to Finland for the Geographical Society, as well as some other work that I had in hand for the same society; and “my new friends were the first to confirm me in that de- cision. It would not be fair, they said, to do otherwise.
Consequently, I worked hard to finish my geographical and geological books.
Meetings of our circle were frequent, and I never missed them. We used to meet then in a suburban part of St. _ Petersburg, in a small house of which Sophie Perdvskaya, under the assumed name and the fabricated passport of an artisan’s wife, was the supposed tenant. She was born of a very aristocratic family, and her father had been for some time the military governor of St. Petersburg; but, with the approval of her mother, who adored her, she had left 318 MEMOIRS OF A REVOLUTIONIST her home to join a high school, and with the three sisters Korniloff — daughters of a rich manufacturer — she had founded that little circle of self-education which later on be came our circle. Now, in the capacity of an artisan’s wife, in her cotton dress and men’s boots, her head covered with ¢ cotton kerchief, as she carried on her shoulders her twe pails of water from the Neva, no one would have recognizec in her the girl who a few years before shone in one of th most fashionable drawing-rooms of the capital. She wa: a general favorite, and every one of us, on entering th house, had a specially friendly smile for her, —even wher she, making a point of honor of keeping the house rela tively clean, quarreled with us about the dirt which we dressed in peasant top-boots and sheepskins, brought in after walking the muddy streets of the suburbs. She trie then to give to her girlish, innocent, and very intelligen little face the most severe expression possible to it. I her moral conceptions she was a “‘rigorist,’’ but not in th least of the sermon-preaching type. When she was dis satisfied with some one’s conduct, she would cast a sever glance at him from beneath her brows; but in that glance one saw her open-minded, generous nature, which under stood all that is human. On one point only she was ir exorable. ‘A women’s man,’ she once said, speaking c some one, and the expression and the manner in which sh said it, without interrupting her work, are engraved foreve in my memory. | Perévskaya was a “popularist” to the very bottom ¢ her heart, and at the same time a revolutionist, a fight of the truest steel. She had no need to embellish th workers and the peasants with imaginary virtues, in ord: to love them and to work for them. She took them 4 they were, and said to me once: “ We have begun a grei thing. wo generations, perhaps, will suecumb in the tas] and yet it must be done.”’? None of the women of our cire SOME NOBLE WOMEN 319 would have given way before the certainty of death on the scaffold. Each would have looked death straight in the face. But none of them, at that stage of our propaganda, thought of such a fate. Perdévskaya’s well-known portrait is exceptionally good; it records so well her earnest courage, her bright intelligence, and her loving nature. The letter she wrote to her mother a few hours before she went to the scaffold is one of the best expressions of a loving soul that a woman’s heart ever dictated.
The following incident will show what the other women of our circle were. One night, Kupreydnoff and I went to Varvara B., to whom we had to make an urgent communication. It was past midnight, but, seeing a light in her window, we went upstairs. She sat in her tiny room, at a table, copying a programme of our circle. We knew how resolute she was, and the idea came to us to make one of those stupid jokes which men sometimes think funny. “B.,” I said, “we came to fetch you: we are going to try -arather mad attempt to liberate our friends from the fortress.” She asked not one question. She quietly laid down her pen, rose from the chair, and said only, ‘“ Let us go.” She spoke in so simple, so unaffected a voice that I felt at once how foolishly I had acted, and told her the truth. She dropped back into her chair, with tears in her eyes, and in a despairing voice asked: “ It was only a joke? Why do you make such jokes?” I fully realized then the cruelty of what I had done.
Another general favorite in our circle was Serghéi Kray- - ehinsky, who became so well known, both in England and in the United States, under the name of Stepnidk. He was often called “the Baby,’’ so unconcerned was he about his own security; but this carelessness about himself was merely the result of a complete absence of fear, which, after all, is often the best policy for one who is hunted by the police.
820 MEMOIRS OF A REVOLUTIONIST He soon became well known for his propaganda in the circles of workers, under his real Christian name of Serghdi, and consequently was very much wanted by the police: