The novel begins with the bomb which kills its intended target, a hated Russian minister of police, along with a number of innocent bystanders. A young student named Razumov hides the perpetrator, then betrays him and becomes a spy among his exiled comrades. He faces a moral dilemma from which there is no escape. Conrad professed that he intended to render "the psychology of Russia," a country being driven by a Czarist despotism into anarchy by revolutionaries, "unable to see that all they can effect is merely a change of names." this masterwork, published six years before the Russian Revolution, is a chillingly accurate prophesy of what was to come.