Later on, the larger world first heard of him in the very hour of his downfall, during one of those State trials which astonish and puzzle the average man who reads the newspapers by a glimpse of unsuspected intrigues. And in the stir of vaguely seen monstrosities, in that momentary, mysterious disturbance of muddy waters, Councilor Mikulin went under, dignified, with only a calm, emphatic protest of his innocence--nothing more. No disclosures damaging to a harassed autocracy, complete fidelity to the secret of the miserable _arcana imperii_, deposited in his patriotic breast a display of bureaucratic stoicism in a Russian official’s ineradicable, almost sublime contempt for truth; stoicism of silence understood only by very few of the initiated, and not without a certain cynical grandeur of self-sacrifice on the part of a Sybarite. For the terribly heavy sentence turned Councilor Mikulin civilly into a corpse, and actually into something very much like a common convict. It seems that the savage autocracy, any more than the divine democracy, does not limit its diet exclusively to the bodies of its enemies. It devours its friends and servants as well. =The Soviet State: Its Roots and Growth= It was this same Czarist Russia of which Turgenev wrote in _Fathers and Sons_. Examining Nihilism, he also looked at contemporary events such as the emancipation of serfs and the attempts of some landowners to improve the lot of their workers despite agrarian disturbances. Violently anti-revolutionary, Dostoyevsky replied in _The Possessed_ to what appeared to him to be Turgenev’s advocacy of revolution. In his massive and powerful novel he showed the agitation produced by groups such as the “quintets” organized by Pyotr Verhovensky, themselves the forerunners of the Communist cells. In Koestler’s _Darkness at Noon_ Dostoyevsky’s nightmare becomes an even more terrible actuality. In his introductory note Koestler writes: The characters in this book are fictitious. The historical circumstances which determined their actions are real. The life of the man N. S. Rubashov is a synthesis of the lives of a number of men who were victims of the so-called Moscow Trials. Several of them were personally known to the author. This book is dedicated to their memory.