The Fortress slept. The walls spoke. O. V. Aptekman, "Iz vospominanii zemlevol'tsa (Petropavlovskaia krepost')"In the center of St. Petersburg, on a small island in the Neva River, stands the Peter and Paul Fortress. This is the founding site of the imperial Russian capital: a citadel and cathedral complex that served as both symbolic heart of the Romanov autocracy as well as its most notorious political prison. In its cells the empire's most illustrious rebels-Bakunin, Chernyshevsky, Kropotkin, Figner, Trotsky-not only suffered in solitude but also wrote novels and treatises, planned future political activities, and reimagined what it meant to be a revolutionary actor in tsarist Russia. Over the course of the nineteenth century, generations of radicals developed a set of practices and narratives that fundamentally contested the space of the fortress, gradually transforming the regime's most notorious carceral site from a realm of mute discipline into a stage of revolutionary politics.This article tells the story of one element in this larger history of subversion: Russia's prison knocking language (perestukivanie). From 1870 to the fall of the tsarist autocracy, the political prisons of the Romanov regime were filled with the sound of tapping. This was the famous knocking language that allowed political prisoners in solitary confinementIn putting together this piece, I have many people to thank.