During my first year in St. Petersburg I had no friends outside the university except my parents’ acquaintances, whose social position set them quite apart from my student life. Somehow, I felt that they were shocked to discover that the modest young man they had known had
suddenly been transformed into a young madman who bubbled over with excitement as he talked about the theater, the opera, music, and modern literature, and who hinted at certain new friends from the Institute of Higher Learning for Women.
In the fall of 1900, however, after returning from my first student vacations in Tashkent, I made the acquaintance of the Baranovsky family. Mrs. Baranovsky, the divorced wife of L. S. Baranovsky, a colonel of the General Staff, was the daughter of the eminent sinologist, V.P. Vasilyev, who was a member of the Russian Academy of Science, as well as of a number of foreign ones. She had two daughters, Olga and Yelena, and a son, Vladimir, who was in the Guards artillery. The charming 17-year-old Olga attended the Bestuzhev-Ryumin Courses of Higher Learning for Girls, which were enjoying great popularity at the time. A circle of students had formed around Olga, and we were soon joined by Olga’s cousin Sergey Vasilyev, a very gifted and enterprising young man of my own age. These young people were much more my own kind than my society friends, and we had a great deal in common. We had a wide range of interests. We discussed modern Russia and foreign literature and endlessly recited the poetry of Pushkin, Merezhkovsky, Lermontov, Tyutchev, Baudelaire, and Bryusov to each other. We were ardent theatergoers, and the brilliant performances of the Moscow Art Theater under Stanislavsky and Nemirovich-Danchenko during the spring season left us spellbound for weeks. We had heated debates about current political developments in Russia and abroad, for like most young people of our time, we were fiercely opposed to the official political line. Almost unanimously we were in sympathy with the narodnik movement, or rather the socialist revolutionaries, but as far as I recall there were no Marxists among us. Many of us, needless to say, participated in student demonstrations.
After the Baranovskys moved from their home on Vasilyevsky Island to a street near the Tauride Garden, our circle broke up. We had grown up by then, and the carefree life of our student years was over. I was not unduly distressed, however, for Olga Baranovsky became my bride.
( pages 21 - 22 )
After the Revolution of 1905, the students, too, had plunged head over heels into political work. A vast number of Menshevik, Bolshevik, and social-revolutionary groups sprang up, some affiliated with party centers and some independent. The autonomy unexpectedly granted to the universities in August, 1905 turned the lecture halls into public forums where freedom of speech and assembly blossomed,
immune from police intervention, since the police now had no right to enter the university. The professors were unable to stem the revolutionary oratory that flowed from the rostrums.
My wife's cousin Sergey Vasilyev, who was in his final year at the Institute of Means of Transportation, joined the institute's student committee of the Socialist Revolutionary Party. Together with A.A. Ovsyannikov, and N.D. Mironov, he founded a socialist revolutionary group, which engaged in propaganda and the distribution of mimeographed leaflets. My wife and I allowed them to store their material in our apartment, a good deed which was later to cost us dear.
I did not take all these improvised political groups too seriously. I thought their activities were just a temporary craze, which I dubbed "revolutionary romanticism." What, for instance, was the point of Sergey's proclamations, which were signed in the name of a formidable sounding "Organization of Armed Rebellion"? I knew only too well that none of the members possessed firearms and that no insurrection in St. Petersburg was even so much as contemplated by the group.
( pages 59 - 60 )
... returning from the washbasin, I found that, without my knowledge, a thin, tightly rolled sheet of paper had been slipped into my pocket. It was a table with six rows of letters in alphabetical order, the rows being numbered one to six. A note at the bottom explained how to use the letters to communicate with other prisoners by knocking against the wall or on the central heating pipes. I twas a special prison code not unlike the Morse system. When I had sufficiently acquainted myself with the code, I started to knock on the wall. My neighbor responded immediately, and one of the first things he told me was the Sergey Vasilyev was imprisoned on the floor above me.
by this time I had settled in the cell. The rules were not especially strict. For example, the families of political prisoners were permitted to send food and candy, as well as an unlimited number of books. Books could also be borrowed from the excellent prison library. Strangely enough, I almost enjoyed this solitary confinement, which gave me leisure to think, to look back at my life, and to read to my heart's content. There was the additional pleasure of exchanging news with Sergey Vasilyev by means of our code. Two weeks went by in this way.
According to law, no prisoner could be held for more than two weeks without informing him of the reason for his arrest. So far I had not been informed of the charge against me. This I was particularly anxious to learn because of the curious behavior of the police inspector at the time of my arrest. Instead of questioning me about Sergey Vasilyev or his group, the captain had shown each member of
my family—except me—a photograph of a young girl, apparently in an attempt to detect some sign of recognition. Of course no one had been able to identify her, since she had never been to our house. The captain had shown as little interest in my copies of Burevestnik as he had in Sergey Vasilyev. What was all this about a girl? Turning the matter over in my mind, I decided that he had had some reason for coming which was quite unconnected with the pamphlets for which I had been arrested. But I could think of no explanation.
( pages 66 - 67 )
The "Bloody Sunday" of January 9, 1905, had destroyed the bonds between the workers and the Crown. On July 8, 1906, a fatal blow was dealt to the Russian peasantry's faith in the Tsar as a just and impartial defender of the people's interests.
The Duma was dissolved on July 8, 1906. On July 24, a well-known statesman and philosopher, Prince Yevgeny Trubetskoy, sent a prophetic letter to the Tsar.
[' . . that bureaucratic system which you have condemned is in any event doomed. But if you ar slow in abolishing it, if you do not make haste to remove the advisers, trained in its traditions, you yourself will be buried under its ruins.' (etc)]
Even though te Tsar and the people had not come to terms during the first Duma, the political climate had eased somewhat while it lasted. Although an amnesty was not proclaimed, many political prisoners who had been arrested by mistake or who were not considered dangerous were quietly released. Among them were Sergey Vasilyev and his friends, and myself. Sergey was allowed to stay in the capital, but I was
banned for some years—I've forgotten the number—from St. Petersburg, Moscow, and several other large towns. Evidently the mysterious motives behind my arrest were responsible for this decision too. All the other members of the Organization of Armed Rebellion returned to a normal existence and to political work,but I, who had done nothing but store some of their pamphlets in my apartment, was to have my whole life distorted.
( pages 70 - 72 )