Chapter 9: Going to the People

The liberalization of university admissions under Alexander II was limited to men. The extent of higher education for young women in Russia consisted of finishing schools for the daughters of the nobility, the most prominent of which was called the Smolny Institute.255 Women were on occasion permitted to attend university lectures, but only as outside auditors not allowed to take any of the qualifying examinations. There was little incentive for women to engage in a rigorous course of studies.²⁵⁶ At the beginning of the Sixties, however, a “Sunday School movement” arose, in which regular school teachers volunteered their time on the sabbath to try to provide access to learning for young women otherwise excluded from the educational establishment. The Sunday School embodied something of the spirit of the women’s self-help collective idealized in What Is to Be Done? The movement rapidly gained momentum. There were soon 2,500 volunteers teaching in the Sunday Schools throughout Russia.²⁵⁷ But this was short lived. The very wildfire nature of the Sunday Schools, as well as the ministry of education’s inability to supervise their curriculum, caused the government to entertain grave doubts about the wisdom of allowing them to exist. Those in power feared that the unregulated schools were spreading “liberal ideas,” or worse. In 1862, most of the Sunday Schools were abruptly disbanded by government decree. The more radical teachers were arrested and the schools were closed down “pending their reorganization on a new basis.”258

When Sofia Perovskaya returned to St. Petersburg at age 16 in 1869, the situation in women’s university education was basically unchanged. That spring, another unofficial school for women, consisting of a series of evening classes, had been launched by university professors teaching on a volunteer basis. Because the classes were given in a school building near the Alarchina Bridge, they were called the “Alarchinsky” classes.²⁵⁹ Anna Vilberg, on the boat with Sonia, was headed to St. Petersburg to study in the Alarchinsky classes. Sonia rapidly made up her mind to enroll in Alarchinsky as well.

Sofia Perovskaya as a student in Alarchinsky was quiet and taciturn. Only a few of the other students learned much about her.²⁶⁰ A fellow woman student recalled the impression which Sonia made at this time:

[A] girl very young, almost a little girl, who stood out over the other women by the modesty of her attire: a very simple gray dress, that almost resembled a high school uniform, with a small white collar that did not fit her that well. One sensed a complete indifference to her exterior aspect. The first thing that stood out about her was her exceptionally high and large forehead which swallowed up the rest of her small round face.

Watching her closely, I noted, under the forehead, blue-gray eyes that looked around from beneath lowered lashes at everything around her with an air of distrust. In that look, there was something inflexible. When she was not speaking, her childlike mouth was pressed shut, as if she was afraid of allowing any superfluous words to escape. Her face was profoundly serious and thoughtful. From her whole persona emanated something ascetic and monastic.261

Perovskaya embodied an incongruous combination of feminine gentleness and masculine hardness. Although her appearance was juvenile and unprepossessing, something about Perovskaya made her attractive to men. One would later preface his biography of her with the comment, “[i]t was not the beauty which dazzles at first sight, but that which fascinates the more, the more it is regarded.”²⁶² Over the course of the next ten years, several men in the radical community developed real crushes on her.²⁶³ But Perovskaya cultivated a studied indifference to the opposite sex.

In terms of the Alarchinsky course program, Perovskaya’s main academic pursuit was mathematics. But her real interest was quickly drawn to the flaming women who attended the class sessions. With their lack of feminine adornment, short cropped hair, wide brimmed hats, and plain white blouses, their whole manner of dress exuded the distinctive nihilist attitude.²⁶⁴ The effect was topped off with the nihilist trademark, enormous blue spectacles. Sonia liked the aura and audacity of these women. She soon become close friends with several of them. The stocky, masculine looking Alexandra “Sasha” Kornilova became one of the closest. Like Sonia, Sasha had a passion for remaining independent of all forms of male control.²⁶⁵

Sonia as well as other girl students soon went outside the formal curriculum of Alarchinsky to become involved in organizing independent group meetings. Feminism and the oppression of women were always the issues at the center of the debate, even if political and social themes also were discussed. Perovskaya, although the youngest, already was the de facto leader of a study circle. She was cautious about which girls she agreed to admit into the group. It was decided to delve in depth into review of an edition of John Stuart Mill that Chernyshevsky had annotated. She walked everybody through this text slowly, analyzing each new idea and argument presented. Sonia took these studies very seriously. With biting sarcasm she criticized the girls who did not show up for the study sessions, or who chronically arrived late.266

Sonia’s father, with Varvara, left St. Petersburg for an extended period to visit Germany to seek relief in a sanitarium for his physical and mental ailments. By the time her parents returned, Sonia had become accustomed to hanging out in her new circle of nihilist women. One time Sonia’s mother made some of Sonia’s friends stay for dinner. Lev immediately detested these women due to their irreverent attitude, boisterous conversations and nihilist form of dress. He forbade Sonia from ever bringing them into his home again. He even threatened to forbid Sonia from continuing with the Alarchinsky courses if she continued to see them.²⁶⁷ This edict greatly upset Sonia. She rejected any thought of obeying Lev’s orders. Sonia decided to move out and rent her own room. In order to do so, she had to possess an internal passport stating that she was allowed to reside in the town. Because Sonia was underage, the passport could only be provided by her father. This, he refused to do.

But Sasha Kornilova’s father, a wealthy merchant and the father of four radical daughters, was far more tolerant. Before long, Sonia became a regular at the Kornilova household. There she engaged in long discussions with Sasha and her sisters, as well as a steady stream of other women who constantly dropped in to visit. One of the Kornilova sisters, Vera, worked out a fictitious marriage with a willing young man in order set up her own separate flat. One night Sonia failed to return home and instead stayed with Vera Kornilova. She intended to remain there, in hiding, until Lev relented and granted her the papers necessary to live on her own. She stubbornly stuck to her resolve, even though her father instigated a major police investigation aimed at finding her and returning her home.268

Lev was appalled at his daughter’s impertinence. He accused her brother Vasily of putting her up to it. Vasily at one point met with his father’s doctor to discuss the situation with Sonia. This doctor scoffed at Sonia’s demand for independence. Vasily pointed out to the doctor that Sonia, if denied the independence she sought, could very well commit suicide. This was taken as a serious threat. Vasily was summoned to the police station and threatened with arrest if he did not disclose where Sonia was hiding. Fortunately for him, he really did not know where his sister was. Varvara intervened, trembling with emotion. She tearfully insisted to Lev that she would go along to the police station with Vasily, and that she would insist on being arrested herself if Vasily were to be arrested. In response to his wife’s impassioned reproach, Lev softened his attitude.

Sofia Perovskaya (on floor wearing man’s trousers), with companions (L to R) A. Vilberg, S. Lechern and A. Kornilova, 1870.

Sofia Perovskaya (on floor wearing man’s trousers), with companions (L to R) A. Vilberg, S. Lechern and A. Kornilova, 1870.

The following day, Lev himself joined Vasily in the trip to the police department. He seemed bent on avoiding trouble. After speaking alone in the office with the chief of police, he left in the carriage. When Vasily’s turn came to be interviewed the chief did not arrest him, but merely gave a lecture about the foolishness of Sonia’s behavior. He warned that hanging out with the wrong crowd could ruin her life. He added that he hoped the uproar caused by Sonia’s evasion could be resolved peacefully and without police involvement. In the course of the interview, Vasily repeated to the police chief what he had told the doctor, that he knew his sister, and that if police become involved, she may take a “tragic step” (implying suicide). Faced with this threat, continued pressure from Varvara, and his doctor’s medical advice against any further stress of confrontation, Lev finally relented and signed to allow Sonia an internal passport. When doing so, he lashed out to Vasily that he never wanted to see Sonia in his house again.269 The wish, made in anger, would be granted.

After getting her passport, Sofia Perovskaya moved into a communal dacha along with Sasha Kornilova, Anna Vilberg and Sofia Leshern, a woman a decade older than Perovskaya who had been involved with the Sunday School movement. The housemates spent much of their time focusing on a self-directed reading program. To avoid unwanted sexual attention, the four of them wore men’s clothes when they went walking. Sonia’s ascetic personality included a prominent rejection of any sexual experiments. Vasily recalled a conversation he had with Sonia during this period in which the topic turned to sexual relations. Sonia expressed a strong opinion that early marriages were against the normal development of the human body, and that a person was not ready for sex until around age 30. Earlier sexual urges, in her opinion, were caused by “living in the city” and “ballet.” Perovskaya and her friend Vilberg shared the view that early marriages serve to halt a person’s development in the activities of public life.²⁷⁰

With Sasha Kornilova, Sonia began to attend meetings of the Chaikovsky circle, so named after one of its early organizers, Nikolai Chaikovsky. Their participation in this group, because it was organized by men, caused a bit of a stir at first among Sonia’s women friends who were accustomed to her “keep males out” attitude that had prevailed to that point.271 The Chaikovsky participants were basically the same St. Petersburg radicals who, just a year earlier in 1869, had declined to become involved with Nechaev and his phantom “Committee.” They tried to build an organization on a higher level of moral development than the crude Nechaev model, one dedicated to mutual respect, trust, and equality of all members. Mark Natanson was an influential participant. The circle united around the point of view that the “people” – workers in the urban areas, peasants in the country -- needed to be “prepared” before the revolution would come. The Chaikovsky members themselves needed to be “prepared” as well. For this purpose they organized classes and study programs for themselves. Natanson frequently served as the “professor.” The young men and women lived communally in dachas rented by Natanson and other wealthy adherents. In the mornings they worked out with gymnastics and also rowing, another physical activity at which Perovksaya excelled.²⁷²

At the time of Sonia’s arrival, the Chaikovsky circle functioned much like a utopian collective from the pages of What Is to Be Done? Nikolai Chaikovsky himself was an idealist of the highest order, a true believer in the vision of Chernyshevsky. One of the participants later wrote:

There were no rules, for there was no need of any. All the decisions were always taken by unanimity. . . . Sincerity and frankness were the general rule. All were acquainted with each other, even more so, perhaps, than the members of the same family, and no one wished to conceal from the others even the least important act of his life. Thus every little weakness, every lack of devotion to the cause, every trace of egotism, was pointed out, underlined, sometimes reciprocally reproved, not as would be the case by a pedantic mentor, but with affection and regret, as between brother and brother.273

Perovskaya rapidly immersed herself in Chaikovsky. She passed a year in its almost cloistered surroundings. During this time she became one of the group’s more respected and influential members. Despite her small stature and youthful appearance, her air of stoic severity, her indefatigable energy, and her mental capacity brought her a moral authority over others. Her disciplined lifestyle was admired. She slept on bare boards. She insisted on personally carrying large buckets of water and performing other physically strenuous household chores.²⁷⁴ The anarchist theoretician Peter Kropotkin, who spent much time with Perovskaya during the Chaikovsky days, described his memory of her:²⁷⁵

Seeing this worker dressed in a wool dress, wearing ugly shoes, with her head very simply covered with a cotton scarf, nobody ever could have recognized in her the same girl who, just a few years earlier, had glittered in the most aristocratic halls of the capital. She was our favorite out of everyone. . . . Hard as steel, she displayed no fear at the thought of death, the vision of the scaffold. One day she said to me, ‘We are undertaking something big. Two generations perhaps will die at the task, but it will be accomplished.’

Those in the Chaikovsky circle strongly embraced “Going to the People.” This was a movement that swept over and through the “Sixties” activists during the early 1870’s. The “spirit of Narodnichestvo” arose. This means, roughly, “a love and reverence for the working classes of one’s country, coupled with an altruistic desire to serve them.” It was inspired in large measure by the published advocacy of Herzen and Bakhunin. Bakhunin’s writings, in particular, urged activist students to leave the university in order to raise consciousness of the need for revolt.276 Hundreds if not several thousands of young people left the cities, left their families, left the universities and colleges and, hastily acquiring some semblance of a practical trade and peasant dress, headed for the villages. They felt an urge to mingle with the mujiks, to breathe their smell, to share in their suffering. The idea was to prepare and bring about the revolution by working directly among the vast Russian peasantry to enlighten them and to improve their lot. There was an almost religious feeling among these “populists,” as they called themselves, a sense that by serving the humble and blessed “people,” a child of wealth and privilege could somehow expiate the moral debt of original sin.²⁷⁷

In the spring of 1872 Sonia left the communal Chaikovsky dacha in St. Petersburg for Stavropol, a medium sized town nestled inside a meander of the Volga in the province of Samara.²⁷⁸ There she stayed for a time with a local doctor named Evgraf Alexeivitch Osipov. Osipov sympathized with the progressive point of view on Russian society. From what we can gather, Osipov and his family acted as generous benefactors to Perovskaya. Sonia, however, rapidly grew to feel disdain for the doctor and also for his wife, whom Sonia disparaged as being “infected with liberalism.” In contrast to her monastic singular commitment to the cause of radical change, Osipov was in her view bogged down with “family, aristocratic, petty life; all the attention he gives to community medical activities.”²⁷⁹

With help from Osipov, Perovskaya volunteered to start a program of smallpox vaccinations, an activity she could combine with proselytizing for revolution as she made her way from village to village, boarding each night with a different peasant family. She lived with spartan “Rakhmetov-ness,” according to a colleague’s anonymous memoir, meaning, she lived without comforts, slept on straw pillows, ate milk porridge, etcetera. The peasants, in general, were friendly. They enjoyed 18-year old Sonia’s energy, her robust health and rosy cheeks,280 but they proved very resistant when it came to selling them on social upheaval. The “people” were, in fact, far more firmly anchored in reality than were the idealists who came to them in droves from the Sixties Generation. Few “Going to the People” ventures ended well. The populists possessed little in the way of skills relevant to rural life. They failed to appreciate that the romanticized view of the peasantry reflected in Russian literature was not widely embraced by the peasants themselves. The prevailing mentality of peasants throughout Russia was to be stubborn, protective of old ways, and suspicious of strange people and doctrines. Peasants especially did not trust privileged, educated youth who were preaching revolution. They immediately suspected them of being spies, spirits, or worse. Most of the populist missions devolved into a series of disappointments.²⁸¹

We have a window into the inner gloom Perovskaya felt upon sensing the vast disconnect between her visions and the reality. She wrote a letter to a friend and Chaikovsky companion, Alexandra Yakovlevna Obodovskaya, shortly after her arrival in Samara in late April 1872.

6 May (1872).

Alexandra Yakovlev(na), Why you don’t write to us. How do you live and how long do you intend to stay there. I'm here, in the Samara province for the second week already. I just moved to the village, before I lived in Stavropol with Dr. Osipov. This gentleman gave me a nasty impression. He married an empty lady who is infected with liberalism, and now he gradually begins to get bogged down completely with family, aristocratic, petty life; all the attention he gives to community medical activities. He has a brother, who also serves in zemstvo, he seems better. I have met two rural teachers, they seem good, but don't seem developed. When I look around, I feel the smell of dead deep sleep, I don't see the thought of active work and life; and in the villages and cities, everywhere is the same. And the peasants are similarly working every day, like machines, no longer thinking, just dead machines that started once and now always move in a routine. This situation deeply affects the young teachers, they are just silent, sad, and it seems that they could start the activity, but there is only emptiness and death everywhere. I now understand why the persons traveling alone to the province start to feel down with time. First of all, the people’s consciousness is not thoroughly enough developed. Then, when they find themselves in this state of torpor, they inevitably begin to converge with other personalities that have anything good, and therefore that way, they gradually start to get used to the vulgarity, and then later they become vulgar themselves. After all it’s necessary for a human to have a rest, and if you don’t have noble people around, you can stick with vulgar and immoral ones, with the exception of only the strong, energetic personalities.

I had such a strong yearning these days, it was impossible to study, and yet everything around me brings such a wistful melancholy, including even these teachers, because they are so sad, add to this also the fact that I feel that the only way out from this situation is to stir it up and to help these individuals to break out of their situation, and yet for this I have no knowledge, no skill. It is true that skill and knowledge can be gained, but now the situation is still despicable. I want to stir up this dead world, but all I can do now is to look at it.282

A month later, Sonia wrote Obodovskaya again. She claimed that her prior “apathetic despair” had passed, yet the written evidence in the form of Perovskaya’s own words persuades us otherwise. Sonia was already looking at moving on from Stavropol; much of the message was spent urging her friend to find her some kind of accounting job working at the Tver cheese factory where Obodovskaya was employed. “Please take care of it,” she implored. “I don’t want to live with my mother.” By this time, Perovskaya had largely ceased her “work” in the villages. She was concentrating on indoctrinating student teachers. On June 13 she wrote:

Then I will say that I live now in the heart of Stavropol, helping one lady to work with teachers and four peasant boys. Mainly, I read now; now more than ever, I feel the need to study, because of the awful situation around. All around I see only torpor, and the other people fight, fight, but their efforts are wasted and accomplish almost nothing, and due to that fact, it seems to me that there is little knowledge as to existing conditions as well as theoretical, they cannot correctly and finally decide what to do next.

Recently, I received a letter from Mikhail Fedotich.283 He is in distress, — all the bread he planted, dried up, so he has only the debt left now and doesn’t have money to pay it back, to move further, and to finish a course in University, otherwise he will be forced to become a Cossack. Maybe he will visit me while passing by my place. I really want to see him, to know what impression was made on him by the year of peasant life.

You ask me to write you more, but to write about my inner state disgusts me, also it is now very volatile; one thing I can say is that my apathetic despair state that I had due to the surrounding conditions in which I was when I wrote you the last letter has passed, and I hope, will never return. A general characteristic of my condition both external and internal, both at present and in the future, is the uncertainty. It seems that only two girls out of those with whom I study and the lady who arranged these sessions are good people. The first two are beginners in becoming part of the new direction, and their moral qualities, in my opinion, are hopeful. But their outer situation is horrible -- first, because of the family, and secondly, because of poverty, so whether they can break out of this wilderness, is still unknown.284

Sonia’s letter reveals much about an aspect of her mentality she shared in common with terrorists of more recent vintage. She drew a sharp distinction between “good people” – meaning persons she perceived as candidates for total dedication to the “cause” -- and everybody else.

Perovskaya sent a third letter to Obodovskaya about a month later. Again, the basic theme was a plea for help in finding work elsewhere. The authorities had by now identified Sonia as a subversive threat. They had banned both the “vaccinations” and the “studying sessions with the teachers.” She talked as if the inertia of her situation was making her feel listless and almost physically ill.

Alexandra Y., you, probably, have not received my answer to your letter, where I begged you to learn from Vereshchagin²⁸⁵ whether there is any accountant clerk position or something like that. I wrote you this letter a long time ago, and still didn’t get the answer. I am in a very nasty situation; here, in Stavropol, I do nothing, because of the terrible awfulness, I need to find a job somewhere to survive; due to lack of money and any prospects in this place I can't move anywhere. Anyway, please Alex. Yacob., even if you didn’t find out about an accounting position, yet answer me as soon as possible, and it is better finally to know that the answer is no, than rely on a maybe. I absolutely don’t know what I am going to do in the future. I know one thing, that I need any activity, even in the most ordinary sense of the word. I can’t be happy with only theory and books; it is my strong desire to do some work, even though it is purely physical, only that it is reasonable. And in inaction, a whole day alone in four walls with books mixed with talks to one or another, leads me, finally, into such a state of apathy and mental dullness that I cannot stand any book, and everything, starting with myself and ending with all people and everything around me, is getting me sick. Sometimes I so desperately want to do something, except reading books and making conversations, that I end up in an abnormal state -- running from one corner to another or prowling through the woods, then fall into another strongest apathy. I need five or six hours a day to work, even to some extent physically, and then my theory will go smoothly. At first, when I came here, it was a totally unfamiliar environment, the vaccination, acquaintance with the teachers gave me quite a bit of living material, and my theory went well, I read Buckle and some other books and I started to identify a number of issues for which I was trying to come to a practical final conclusion. But now the vaccination is stopped, and the studying sessions with teachers ended, due to the fact that the authorities banned it, and because I now have nothing to do and am waiting for a job and my lack of money doesn’t allow me to move. I don’t have anything to write about now and don’t want to.286

Sonia’s statement that she read Buckle near the start of her sojourn in Stavropol is of interest. The Englishman Henry Thomas Buckle (1821-1862), much like Perovskaya, was an “auto-didact” – meaning, he was self-educated. Being the son of a wealthy merchant who inherited a fortune while relatively young, Buckle had time for leisure, and, by dint of his high intelligence, he developed into a brilliant chess player. He was a prolific writer as well. The Miscellaneous and Posthumous Works of Henry Thomas Buckle were published in 1872, at just about the same time when Perovskaya arrived in Stavropol. This volume included an essay with the tantalizing – for Perovskaya – title, “The Influence of Women on the Progress of Knowledge.”287 Sonia apparently felt enraptured by passages such as this:

On every side, in all social phenomena, in the education of children, in the tone and spirit of literature, in the forms and usages of life; nay, even in the proceedings of legislatures, in the history of statute-books; and in the decisions of magistrates, we find manifold proofs that women are gradually making their way, and slowly but surely winning for themselves a position superior to any they have hitherto attained. This is one of many peculiarities which distinguish modern civilization, and which show how essentially the most advanced countries are different from those that formerly flourished.²⁸⁸

Shortly after sending her third letter, Sonia abandoned Stavropol to join Obodovskaya in Tver, northwest of Moscow.²⁸⁹ There she earned a teaching credential and taught for a time in a rural school. But by the end of the school year, she felt isolated and out of touch with the main populist movement. So she returned to St. Petersburg, where in the summer of 1873 she once more became a prime mover in the Chaikovsky circle. By now Natanson and many other Chaikovsky adherents had been arrested for subversive activities. Along with one of the Kornilova sisters, Sonia began to specialize in visiting jailed comrades. Taking full advantage of her innocent girlish appearance, she brought them books, groceries, clothing, and letters from the outside.

The police had now learned much about the group. Subterfuge was beginning to be required to avoid easy arrest, and Sonia played her part. She moved into a flat, posing as the wife of a member named Dmitri Rogachev.290 Fictitious marriage, so prominently featured in What Is to Be Done?, was considered by the anarchists to be a particularly virtuous form of subterfuge. With other Chaikovsky adherents, Perovskaya became involved in “educating” factory workers. This eventually brought her to the attention of the authorities. In January 1874, the police arrested Perovskaya.²⁹¹ She spent the next six months in jail, reading a series of books brought to her by her brother. Already thoroughly accustomed to a spartan lifestyle, Sonia found this incarceration relatively easy. By means of bribery, she received adequate supplies of both books and interesting visitors.²⁹²

Eventually, Sonia allowed her father to intercede. By now, Lev Nikolaevitch was permanently separated from Varvara Stepanovna. Chronically ill, he lived with a mistress in St. Petersburg.²⁹³ When Lev Nikolaevitch intervened, Sonia was released on bail. She was directed to remain in the Crimea with her mother, under strict police surveillance. While in the Crimea, Sonia worked on improving her healing skills, taking a formal medical training course at Simferopol. Ultimately she was certified as a fel’dsher, a Russian medical professional similar to a paramedic.²⁹⁴ While studying, she worked in a hospital in Simferopol. Due to her zeal and diligence, she managed to acquire such regard from the doctors that they often trusted her with patients, despite the fact that she had not yet finished the fel’dsher course. She was the darling of the sick. In addition to her coursework and her hospital rotations, Sonia volunteered to care for a helplessly ill cancer patient, going to her home every day to change her dressings. This dying woman was very impressed with Sonia.²⁹⁵

Perovskaya took a break from her medical internship to join her brother Vasily and others on a horse camping trip in the mountains. At some point, Sonia’s mount tripped and fell. All her companions were very worried. However, Sonia got the horse back on its feet all by herself. One man in the party, named Peter Telalov, was very funny and charming. However, this did not attract Sonia to him in the slightest way. She kept deliberately sending her horse off into a gallop, so that Telalov’s horse would take off after it. Telalov was terrified, although later he was able to laugh over the episode.

When the vacation was over, Sonia left the horse with her brother and returned to Simferopol where there was an urgent need to treat the many soldiers wounded in the Russo-Turkish war, a sort of pro-Christian, anti-Islamic crusade which Alexander had recently decided to undertake. This sad work made an impression on Sonia. However, after only a month, in the summer of 1877 she was finally summoned by the police to go to St. Petersburg to stand trial on nebulous charges related to her role in “Going to the People.”296

The prosecution of Perovskaya and her fellow “Going to the People” populists was part of a get-tough policy by the Russian government focused on radicals from the Generation of the Sixties. From a political standpoint, the policy reflected a continuation of the White Terror of the late 1860’s. It in many ways backfired. For example, the “Going to the People” wildfire was fueled by an imperial edict issued in 1873 which required all female Russian students then studying in Switzerland to return to Russia by the end of the year.²⁹⁷ This decree was intended to prevent young women from becoming contaminated with Western liberal notions, but in reality it had an opposite effect. Young students, and especially girls, were already attracted to progressive ideas. When required by the edict to return to Russia, large numbers of them returned as populists. The government decided to arrest anybody caught “Going to the People.” Some four thousand were arrested by the end of 1874. Of these 770, including 158 women, were charged and held over for trial.²⁹⁸ A large number of the arrestees were held in custody pending trial at the newly built St. Petersburg House of Detention. Another manifestation of imperial policy in the 1870s, this was a new facility built to lock up radicals.299