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er my personal control and direction, without however in any way creating the suspicion that I was personally interested. Presently you will understand more perfectly how this all came about, and in quite a natural way it would seem, for always things accomplished seem easy enough to the casual observer; and you who read are only observers after all. You are receiving a bit of unwritten history which closely concerned the Russian empire and without which the assassination of Alexander would undoubtedly have happened many years before it did, for I give to myself the credit of having extended the days of that really great but much misunderstood Moscovite gentleman. At the time of my appearance in St. Petersburg the forces of nihilism had assumed proportions greater than they had ever attained before or will ever attain to again, thanks to my activities. The palace itself was a hotbed of conspiracy; the rank and file of the army was so disaffected that the officers never knew whom they could depend upon or whom they might trust; a secret pressure of the thumb, indeterminate in its character but nevertheless significant, was likely to be received from any hand clasp, no matter where given or with whom exchanged, and a princess or a countess was as likely to bestow it upon you as any ordinary person whom you might chance to meet. The pressure itself was merely a tentative question which might be translated by the words: "Are you a nihilist?" and you might understand it and reply to it by a returning pressure of acquiescence, or ignore it utterly, as you pleased. The pressure itself was so slight, was carelessly given and might so readily be attributed to a careless motion of the hand that it could not betray the person who made it; nor could the answering pressure do so. I had not been long at the palace before I discovered that many of the high officials who had ready and constant access there had become inoculated with the nihilistic bacilli and although I had no doubt that many of them were at heart loyal to the emperor, I already knew better than they did the immensity of the obligation they had undertaken in swearing allegiance to an association of persons dominated by fanatics and by actual criminals whose trade was murder and whose chiefest pleasures and relaxation was the study of how best to bring about entire social upheaval. The confession of Moret enabled me to read every sign however slight that was made
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