It was in the days of such oppression on one side and vain strainings
of all energies, on the other that I was arrested in Samara in 1907,
again in the month of September.
It seemed to me that this time I would be unable to escape alive
from the hands of the hangmen. This was what I thought. But I felt
otherwise. Two years and nine months I was kept in the fortress of
Peter and Paul, thinking not of that, but of the time when Russia,
after the inevitable victorious and triumphant second revolution, would
take up the work of construction and transform our powerless country,
our almost illiterate people, into an exemplary state, which could
serve as a model to other peoples in culture as well as in social
reform.
Faith in the possibility of seeing my country free, my people
developing in material and spiritual plenty, gave me strength, exalted
my powers. I found myself still able to work with the people and for
the people and was grieved to waste time in exile, in the listlessness
of the Siberian taiga. I again made preparations for an escape, aiming
to join my party comrades, who called me, in revolutionary activity.
And again my escape failed. Only two or three hours separated me from
my goal from a sure shelter and it was painful to fall again into the
hands of the enemy after a thousand miles' journey in the winter.
The thought occurred to me again that they would not pardon me my
attempts to escape, my efforts to identify myself again with the
revolutionary movement. At the same time there pulsed so much life in
my heart that I could not imagine the end of my activities. Neither the
long terms passed in jail nor my exile in Yakutsk had dimmed my spirit.
"I will live through all this," said an inner voice to me; "I will live
through everything and live to see the bright days of freedom." From
Yakutsk I was brought to Irkutsk, and my life here was filled with the
same persecutions as my exile in Kirensk. I fell very ill and observed
how the physicians carefully concealed from me the danger of my malady.
It seemed so strange to me that people could think of my fatal end when
my soul was full of complete faith that time was bringing me nearer
daily to a different kind of end, the triumph of the revolution.
The longer the war continued the more horrible its consequences grew,
the clearer the rascality of the government manifested itself, the more
patent appeared the inevitableness of the rise of democracy all over
the world, the nearer advanced also our revolution.
I waited for the sound of the bell announcing freedom, and wondered
why this sound was tardy in making itself heard. When in November of
last year explosions of indignation followed one another, when irate
calls were exchanged among the several groups of the population, I was
already planted with one foot in the Siberian sleigh, feeling sorry
only that the snow road was beginning to melt.
The 17th of March a telegram reached me in Minusinsk announcing
freedom. The same day I was on my way to Atchinsk, the nearest
railroad station. From Atchinsk on began my uninterrupted communion
with soldiers, peasants, workmen, railroad employees, students and
multitudes of beloved women, who to-day all bear the burdens of the
normal and now also abnormal life of a great state.