[1]  Gleb Uspensky, memoirs (1889) concerning censorship in the years following 1848 under Tsar Nicholas I.

One could not move, one cold not even dream; it was dangerous to give any sign of thought — of the fact that you were not afraid; on the contrary, you were required to show that you were scared, trembling, even when there was no real ground for it — that is what those years have created in the Russian masses. Perpetual fear was in the air, and crushed the public consciousness and robbed it of all desire or capacity for thought…  There was not a single point of light on the horizon — ‘You are lost,’ cried heaven and earth, air and water, man and beast — and everything shuddered and fled from disaster into the first available rabbit-hole.