On the next evening after her arrest, Sophia Perovskaya was led out of the three-storey gendarme building and taken to the Peter and Paul Fortress. Four days earlier, after still another long procession across the wind-blown Neva, her victim, Alexander II, had been buried in the fortress's cathedral. A gendarme led Sophia into a vaulted, half-dark room,where a gendarme colonel sat behind a large table covered with a green cloth. There waiting to identify her was the heavyset bomb-thrower Rysakov, now clad in prison garb.

At the time of her daughter's arrest, Sophia's mother was in the Crimea at the little house where Sophia had recovered after her first prison term. Four days after Sophia's arrest, a gendarme captain arrived and took away her brother Vasily, and told her mother and brothers that Sophia had been arrested. That same evening Sophia's mother and oldest brother, Nicholas, left for St Petersburg.

Not long after arriving in the capital, Mrs Perovskaya went to the office of the Minister of Internal Affairs, Loris-Melikov. His preoccupation these days was with security, that of the new Tsar in particular. He and others were still fearful that the People's Will might try to strike again. The reform proposal which Alexander II had approved the day of his death was for the present in abeyance.