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Then in the spring of last year Vera Zasulitch shot at General Trépoff, who had ordered a political prisoner to be flogged. She was tried by a jury, and the feeling throughout the country was so much in favour of the people who had been so terribly persecuted that she was acquitted.

So surprised and frightened were the jurymen by this unexpected consequence of their verdict, that they obstinately acquitted, in the face of the most convincing evidence, all the other prisoners brought before them. The most famous case of acquital when there was no conceivable doubt as to the guilt of the accused was that of Vera Zasulitch, who shot General Trepof, Prefect of St.

During the first part of the Turkish campaign of 1877-78, when the Russian armies were repulsed in Bulgaria and Asia Minor, the hostility to autocracy was very strong, and the famous acquittal of Vera Zasulitch, who had attempted to assassinate General Trepof, caused widespread satisfaction among people who were not themselves revolutionaries and who did not approve of such violent methods of political struggle.

Petersburg; but the circumstances were so peculiar that they will hardly support any general conclusion. I happened to be present, and watched the proceedings closely. Vera Zasulitch, a young woman who had for some time taken part in the revolutionary movement, heard that a young revolutionist called Bogoliubof, imprisoned in St.

At the close of the proceedings, which were dexterously conducted by Counsel in such a way that, as the Emperor is reported to have said, it was not Vera Zasulitch but General Trepof who was being tried, an eminent Russian journalist rushed up to me in a state of intense excitement and said: "Is not this a great day for the cause of political freedom in Russia?"