Like that of the Lyubomudry group founded earlier in the century, the purpose of the circle was to discuss Western philosophy and literature that was officially banned by the Imperial government of Tsar Nicholas I.

As part of a pre-planned intentional deception, the Tsar had prepared a letter to general-adjutant Sumarokov, commuting the death sentences to incarceration.

Petrashevsky, who had always tended to flaunt his iconoclasm, had for some time been a person of interest to the secret police, but they now decided to place him under close surveillance.

An agent, Antonelli, was deployed in Petrashevsky's department in January 1849, ingratiated himself, began attending the meetings of the circle and reported to his superiors.

The aristocrat Nikolay Speshnev, who began attending the Fridays in early 1848, was resolutely in favour of promoting the socialist cause by any means possible, including terrorism, and sought to form his own secret society within the circle.

Speshnev's associate, the army lieutenant Nikolay Mombelli, initiated a series of conversations promoting the idea of organised infiltration of the bureaucracy to counter government measures.

Found among Speshnev's papers after his arrest was a prototype "oath of allegiance" in which the signer would pledge obedience to a central committee and a willingness to be available at any time for whatever violent means were deemed necessary for the success of the cause.

The first—a sketch entitled "A Soldier's conversation"—was an exhortation of the popular uprising in France aimed at a peasant audience, and was written by another Speshnev associate, the army officer Nikolay Grigoryev.

Filippov and Mombelli made copies and began distributing them, but Petrashevsky again tried to calm the rising sense of urgency by insisting that judicial reform was the best way forward for the peasantry.

Among these was the poet Pleshcheyev who, according to the verdict, "for distributing Belinsky's letter, was deprived of all rights of the state and sent to hard labor in factories for 4 years."

The Commission of Inquiry headed by General Nabokov questioned the prisoners individually on the basis of information supplied by Antonelli, and documents confiscated at the time of the arrest.

Reviewing the decision the highest military court, the General-Auditariat, ruled that a judicial error had been made and that all the remaining prisoners should be executed.

The Tsar agreed to the lesser sentences, but gave explicit instructions that only after the entire ritual of preparation for execution had been completed should the prisoners be told that their lives had been spared by an act of imperial grace.

Grigoryev, who in prison had been showing signs of derangement, completely lost his senses, and spent the remainder of his days as a helpless mental invalid.

Dostoevsky, who had been next in line, recalled the experience twenty years later in The Idiot: "The uncertainty and feeling of aversion for the new thing which was going to overtake him immediately, was terrible".