He then entered the Duroff circle of Fourierists, the most moderate of all the Petrashevsky circles, which a good authority declares to have entertained no purely revolutionary ideas whatever.

They rebelled against the maintenance of the strict censorship then in force, serfdom, and administrative abuses, but paid little attention to the question of a change in the form of government, and attributed no importance to political upheavals.

Dostoevsky himself was, in general, very far from cherishing any revolutionary designs; he enthusiastically declaimed Pushkin's verses about slavery falling "at the wave of the Tzar's hand," and insisted that no socialistic theories had the slightest importance for Russians, since in the commune, and the working unions (_artel_), and mutual guarantee system there had long existed in their land more solid and normal foundations than all the dreams of Saint Simon and his school, and that life in a community and phalanstery seemed to him more terrible and repulsive than that of any galley-slave.
Notwithstanding this, in May, 1849, Dostoevsky was arrested, along with the other followers of Petrashevsky, confined in the fortress, and condemned by court-martial on the charge of having "taken part in discussions concerning the severity of the censorship, and in one assembly, in March, 1849, had read a letter from Byelinsky to Gogol, received from Pleshtcheeff in Moscow, and had then read it aloud in the assemblies at Duroff's, and had given copies of it to Mombelli to copy.
In the assemblies at Duroff's he had listened to the reading of articles, knew of the intention to set up a printing-press, and at Spyeshneff's had listened to the reading of 'A Soldier's Conversation.'" All the Petrashevskyians were condemned to be shot, and the sentence was read to them on January 3, 1850, on the scaffold, where they stood stripped, in the freezing cold, for twenty minutes, in momentary expectation of their execution.

But the death sentence was mitigated in different degrees by the Emperor, Dostoevsky's sentence being commuted to exile with hard labor for four years, and then service as a common soldier in the ranks.

He was dispatched to Siberia two days later, which was on Christmas Eve, according to the Russian reckoning.
The wives of the Decembrists (the men exiled for revolutionary plots in 1825, at the accession to the throne of the Emperor Nicholas I.), visited the Petrashevskyians in prison at Tobolsk and gave Dostoevsky a copy of the Gospels.