Netchaiev was treated with great inhumanity. Overtures had been made to him by General Potapov to turn informer, and so insultingly that the prisoner struck the general in the face. For this he was flogged terribly, chained hand and foot and riveted to the cell wall. He managed to appeal direct to the Czar, Alexander II, in a letter written with his own finger nail and in his own blood; a modest letter stating the facts of his imprisonment, and asking if they were really known to the emperor and met with his sanction. This letter was entrusted to some one working under his window, but it was intercepted and the ultimate fate of the prisoner was never positively known. It was said that he had died of a second flogging, and posthumous letters attributed to him were published in the year 1883. The régime of the Alexis Ravelin was brutally severe. Exercise was forbidden, the windows of the cells were boarded up, and the hot-air openings of the stove were closed, so that consumption rapidly developed in the feeble frames of the prisoners. It was fatal to one young man, Shirayev, whose crime was too free comment upon the state of affairs. He had dared to prophesy a time when the Czar would no more govern, and power would be held by popular representatives. Another, Shevich, an officer of the military academy, went mad in the Alexis Ravelin, to which he was committed for having left the ranks and improperly addressing Alexander III on the occasion of an imperial parade. Despite the elaborate precautions taken, and the strict rules prescribed, the secrecy of the Alexis Ravelin could not be kept inviolate. The government hoped that the silence of the grave might close over its captives. But too many travelled the sad road, and news came back from some. Letters penetrated the thick walls; the inmates found sympathy with their gaolers, who would not remain invariably mute. Some more effectual tomb for the living must be devised, and a large sum (150,000 rubles) was forthwith expended upon the enlargement and improvement, from a disciplinary point of view, of the ancient castle of Schlüsselburg, once the favourite prison of Paul I. This new prison became available in 1884, and was to be the receptacle for the most dangerous and influential politicals. It was freely admitted by the authorities that the very harshest régime would prevail there: close confinement, scanty diet and entire absence of all that makes life endurable,—books, correspondence, the visits of relatives and friends. Above all, when the gates closed on a new arrival in the Schlüsselburg, hope died within him. Lifelong imprisonment was before him; there was no release this side of the grave. Few who enter the prison are ever set free again. The inmates are buried alive, suffering perpetual martyrdom.