Several young officers sprang from their chairs as if they had seen a ghost.
Only the brown-haired young man who had earlier tried to pull Kishchenko away snatched up the pamphlet and turned to throw it into the fireplace.
Kishchenko did not stop him. Instead, he said disdainfully, "Burn it. It's only a few sheets of paper, but its spirit will sooner or later be branded into every soul."
"Have you gone mad?" The brown-haired young man stopped short, utterly at a loss. "If the Secret Police sees this, you'll be thrown into prison at once, and the entire Kishchenko family will suffer along with you!"
Kishchenko's gaze swept over the others. "Everyone has read Radishchev's book. Ordinary people endure torment and hardship, while the handful who hold power wallow in boundless luxury."
Radishchev was a contemporary Russian thinker of the Enlightenment. He had written Journey from Petersburg to Moscow, exposing the darkness of Tsarist rule through the details of life among Russia's lower classes, and had once bluntly declared, "The Tsar is the number one criminal, his hands drenched in blood."
The book had been banned the moment it was published, and Catherine II had sentenced him to death, later commuting it to exile in Siberia. However, after Paul I ascended the throne, he granted Radishchev a pardon.
"Actually, all of you know that things cannot go on like this! All of Europe is vigorously developing industry under France's leadership, growing stronger by the day, while we are rotting away!
"What we need now is..."
Kishchenko had wanted to say, "a revolution," but when he saw the alarm and evasiveness in his friends' eyes, he hesitated and changed his words. "What we need is to learn from France. And all of this must begin with the rights and freedoms