She had proposed the name Three Hundred Foxes, after the ones Samson caught, tying them up by the tails and setting their tails alight before releasing them into his enemies’ camps to burn them down. But there wasn’t much support for the name Foxes. Stenka Razin seemed to please the majority, so that’s what they’re called.

In their meetings to plan their first act of violence, Clementine proposed putting a bomb next to the fortress where two legendary rebels were imprisoned, but they decided not to after thinking it over; it would be absurd, if not impossible.

“Who would even care? We need to do something that has an impact on citizens, not on prisoners, it’s not worth the risk.”

“What do we care about risks? Long live Nisan Farber!” Nisan Farber was an anarchist who stabbed a strike-breaking business owner and put a bomb in the police station, killing many, including himself.

Later, Clementine suggested planting a bomb at the statue of Tsar Peter on his horse, but they replied, “Absolutely not! We’ll win only enemies doing that, it symbolizes the city!”

“But the city has nothing to do with that statue!”

“That’s what you think, Clementine, because you live with your head in the clouds, but the people of St. Petersburg think of him as the symbol of our city.”

When she thought about the city, what came to mind were the slums near the port, a ring of misery that surrounds it, where the working class lives.

“Then we should change the symbol to something that represents the people of St. Petersburg.” But she didn’t convince anyone. Someone suggested a café, someone else a hotel, they couldn’t agree. They couldn’t even agree on whether it should be a suicide bomb, to guarantee its success.

“There’s no other way, the mistake is …”

Clementine is the only one who believes it’s not necessary to take innocent lives, that the important thing is to draw attention to their cause through provocation—just not with collaborators or infiltrators.

At last they come to an agreement about where they’ll plant the bomb. If they blow up the rails across the frozen river, they’ll grab the attention of most Petersburgians. It won’t be a suicide bomb. Clementine will plant it. They did a lot of strategizing and planning but didn’t take into account the possibility that the bomb might not work….

Clementine arrives at her accomplices’ heated meeting. As she enters, she hears, “She didn’t pull the detonator, obviously.”

She jumps to her own defense.

“Of course I pulled the detonator, if I hadn’t the bomb wouldn’t have made the pathetic noise that it did. I only heard it because I have such sharp ears. Believe me, it sounded like a spoon landing on the floor.”

“You weren’t the only one who heard it—”