At that time, however, the special service of the Okhrana, or personal guard of the Sovereign, still existed. General Tchérévine took energetic, though not violent, measures to put an end to the disorder, so that it might not have time to develop itself dangerously or to disturb--outwardly at least--the established order of things.
But after the Coronation matters changed, and the revolutionary committees became more active. The catastrophe of the Khodinka Field was used to attack the person of the Sovereign, and they did not spare him. Anarchist proclamations were distributed right and left, and in reply the police made wholesale arrests without due discrimination between the people whom it suspected of favouring the active revolutionary propaganda and those who were really guilty.
Among the persons who were thus imprisoned was a young girl of extraordinary talent and beauty, who, though full of sympathy for the cause of what she considered liberty, had, nevertheless, never been in communication with the leaders of the anarchist party. Some forbidden books had been found during a police search that had taken place in the rooms which she occupied in some furnished lodgings, and this afforded quite sufficient pretext to arrest her and transfer her to the fortress.
What took place during some six months that she spent there, separated from everybody, and not even allowed to communicate at first with her own father and mother, no one knows. Certainly some cruel scenes must have been enacted, because one day, at the very time when, owing to energetic efforts on the part of her friends, Mademoiselle Vietroff was about to be released, she was found dead in her cell, burned to death under the most horrible circumstances. She had had the courage to empty over her bedclothes the oil out of a paraffin lamp that she was allowed to have, and to set fire to them, after having laid herself down on the bed, where she remained until the flames had done their work.
The scandal was enormous, and people wondered what could have induced this lovely, charming, highly gifted girl, to commit such an awful suicide. Dark things were hinted at, and terrible rumours accused the authorities of the prison of having driven her to seek release from suffering and shame through the only means left at her disposal.