I was no longer in prison, I saw no more the prison walls, but I did not feel myself free. The purposeless life in a remote Siberian village seemed to me worse than a prison. The peasants, together with the priest, drank for two or three days during the week. They spent all their money at the Government liquor shop, and when they had no ready cash they pawned anything they could conveniently carry out of the house. It seemed that only the _vódka_ gave them the possibility of forgetting the miseries of their wretched existence. In those “drunken” days I hid myself in some corner that no one might see me, and sat looking at the heaps of snow which separated me from the rest of the living.

“You must escape, you must escape from here,” an inner voice grew more and more insistent within me.

The scribe, the uryádnik, and the constable were the only people supposed to keep watch over me, and they seemed neglectful of their responsibility. They may have supposed that the dense forest which surrounded the village was the best guard.

“To escape, to escape,” I repeated to myself in the long, sleepless nights, staring into the darkness and making plans, each one more fantastic than the other.

In the meantime the news of the “Bloody Sunday” reached our village. With trembling hands I held the paper and read to the peasants how the working-men of St. Petersburg, led by Father Gapon, had gone to petition their Czar to better their conditions of life; how they had marched with their wives and children, carrying icons and the portrait of the Emperor, and singing patriotic hymns; how they had suddenly, without warning, been shot down, trampled by Cossack horses, and beaten with sabers and _nagáikas_;[18] how the streets of St. Petersburg had been turned into a battlefield where hundreds of dead and dying lay.... Here the peasants stopped me.

“Is it possible,” they asked, “that the czar, in whom we believe, could do that? Is it possible that he it is who takes our children and sends them to the Japanese to be killed? Is it possible that _he_ does all this, and not his ministers?”

They took the paper from me, turned it in their hands, and made me read it all over again, from the beginning. On that day their faith in the czar was shattered, and they openly showed their sympathy with me, a direct victim of his despotic rule.

To me the fact that the St. Petersburg working-men had gone to petition the czar for a better life had another significance. I saw in it the awakening of the toiling masses, and regarded it as the fore-runner of that great revolution which was to shake the throne from its foundation.

“It can not be that the blood of the innocent children slain in the streets of St. Petersburg on the ninth of January should remain unavenged,” I thought. I saw that the Russian people could no longer suffer the yoke of czarism, that Russia must be free, and I firmly decided to escape and join, weapon in hand, in the great struggle towards liberty and justice for my oppressed and down-trodden country.