‘Opinions! So your opinions were that you must stir up a revolution?’
What was I to reply? Yes? Then the construction which would be put upon my answer would be that I, who had refused to give any answers to the gendarmes, ‘avowed everything’ before the brother of the Tsar. His tone was that of a commander of a military school when trying to obtain ‘avowals’ from a cadet. Yet I could not say ‘No’: it would have been a lie. I did not know what to say, and stood without saying anything.
‘You see! You feel ashamed of it now’—
This remark angered me, and I at once said in a rather sharp way, ‘I have given my replies to the examining magistrate, and have nothing more to add.’
‘But understand, Kropótkin, please,’ he said then in the most familiar tone, ‘that I don’t speak to you as an examining magistrate. I speak quite as a private person—quite as a private man,’ he repeated, lowering his voice.
Thoughts went whirling in my head. To play the part of Marquis Posa? To tell the emperor through the grand duke of the desolation of Russia, the ruin of the peasantry, the arbitrariness of the officials, the terrible famines in prospect? To say that we wanted to help the peasants out of their desperate condition, to make them raise their heads—and by all this try to influence Alexander II.? These thoughts followed one another in rapid succession, till at last I said to myself: ‘Never! Nonsense! They know all that. They are enemies of the nation, and such talk would not change them.’
I replied that he always remained an official person, and that I could not look upon him as a private man.
He then began to ask me indifferent questions. ‘Was it not in Siberia, with the Decembrists, that you began to entertain such ideas?’
‘No; I knew only one Decembrist, and with him I had no conversation worth speaking of.’
‘Was it then at St. Petersburg that you got them?’