A hundred years before George Orwell in the dystopian "1984" promulgated the term "thought crime" (1949), a group of young people in Russia were sentenced to death for participating in a case that the investigators themselves called a "conspiracy of ideas." The fault of the so-called Petrashevites consisted in reading prohibited books, meetings and disputes. Baron Modest Korf, a completely loyal person, was surprised:... "if you can find facts, then how to catch in your thoughts when they have not yet been realized by any manifestation, no transition into action?" Already on the scaffold, convicts announced the replacement of the death penalty with hard labor, exile or prison companies. But for such unobvious guilt, the punishment still seemed excessive and raised questions.