Memoirs of a Revolutionist
The worst was the silence, as of the grave, which reigned about me. In vain I knocked on the walls and struck the floor with my foot, listening for the faintest sound in reply. None was to be heard. One month passed, then two, three, fifteen months, but there was no reply to my knocks. We were only six, scattered among 36 casemates, all my arrested comrades being kept in the Litovskiy Zamok prison. When the noncommissioned officer entered my cell to take me out for a walk, and I asked him, 'What kind of weather have we, Does it rain,' he cast a furtive side glance at me and without saying a word promptly retired behind the door..."We certainly foresaw that if full freedom is left to the individual for the expression of his ideas and for action, we should have to face a certain amount of extravagant exaggerations of our principles. I had seen it in the Nihilist movement in Russia. But we trusted - and experience has proved that we were right - that social life itself... would be the most effective means for threshing out opinions.