Trial of the 193

[1] It coincided with a phase in the Russo-Turkish War when the Russian army was stalled outside Pleven, killing hopes of a swift victory and so undermining support for the government, and there was widespread disgust at the order given by Governor of St Petersburg, General Trepov, to flog an imprisoned student, Arkhip Bogolyubov.

How can you expect him not to speak to his neighbour, whom he has known for so many years, of a fact so extraordinary as the reading of a book, especially when it concerns a matter which appears to him so just, good, and natural as that which the Socialist tells him about?

Thus, whenever a propagandist visits any of his friends, the news immediately spreads throughout the village, and half an hour afterwards the hovel is full of bearded peasants, who hasten to listen to the newcomer without warning either him or his host.

[9][10] One of the arrested Arkhip Bogolyubov was flogged for failing to raise his cap when the governor of St Petersburg, General Trepov visited the prison, and went insane.

In reaction to these demonstrations and the general social foment, Tsar Alexander II came to the conclusion that mass arrests and trials were necessary to halt the revolutionaries and discredit their fight.

This of course meant that a great majority of the political prisoners rounded up in the mass arrests ordered by Tsar Alexander II were held in captivity for possibly years without sufficient evidence for a conviction.

Old friends and new welcomed the released as though they were returned from the dead, while they, exhausted and shattered physically, forgetting the sufferings that they had just endured, dreamed with the ardour of youth, and of long-restrained energy, of fresh labours for the cause ...

Several of the defendants who were acquitted went on to be members of Narodnaya Volya, the organisation that assassinated the Tsar Alexander II, including Sofia Perovskaya and Andrei Zhelyabov.