"If it has been said that the Russian peasant is poor, especially in terms of his awareness of his poverty, it can be said that the common Russian citizen or subject, being poor in terms of his civil rights, is particularly poor in his awareness of the lack of those rights.

Just as the muzhik has grown accustomed to his dead-end misery, he has gotten used to living without contemplating the causes of it and the possibility of its eradication; in the same way, the average Russian citizen has generally become accustomed to the omnipotence of the government, has gotten used to living without pondering whether this omnipotence can be maintained and whether there are, alongside it, phenomena that undermine the aging political regime.

Usually, an extremely good "antidote" against this lack of political consciousness and this lethargy consists of "secret documents," which show that not only irreparable troublemakers or deadly enemies of the government, but also the very members of the government, including ministers and even the tsar himself, are aware of the instability of autocratic forms of governance and are seeking various means to improve their situation, which does not seem satisfactory to them at all."