Thanks partly to this foreign influence and partly to their own practical experience, the would-be reformers who remained at home came to understand that academic talking and discussing could bring about no serious results.  Students alone, however numerous and however devoted to the cause, could not hope to overthrow or coerce the Government.  It was childish to suppose that the walls of the autocratic Jericho would fall by the blasts of academic trumpets.  Attempts at revolution could not be successful without the active support of the people, and consequently the revolutionary agitation must be extended to the masses.  So far there was complete agreement among the revolutionists, but with regard to the modus operandi emphatic differences of opinion appeared.  Those who were carried away by the stirring accents of Bakunin imagined that if the masses could only be made to feel themselves the victims of administrative and economic oppression, they would rise and free themselves by a united effort.  According to this view all that was required was that popular discontent should be excited and that precautions should be taken to ensure that the explosions of discontent should take place simultaneously all over the country.  The rest might safely be left, it was thought, to the operation of natural forces and the inspiration of the moment.  Against this dangerous illusion warning voices were raised.  Lavroff, for example, while agreeing with Bakunin that mere political reforms were of little or no value, and that any genuine improvement in the condition of the working classes could proceed only from economic and social reorganisation, maintained stoutly that the revolution, to be permanent and beneficial, must be accomplished, not by demagogues directing the ignorant masses, but by the people as a whole, after it had been enlightened and instructed as to its true interests.  The preparatory work would necessarily require a whole generation of educated propagandists, living among the labouring population rural and urban.

For some time there was a conflict between these two currents of opinion, but the views of Lavroff, which were simply a practical development of academic Nihilism, gained far more adherents than the violent anarchical proposals of Bakunin, and finally the grandiose scheme of realising gradually the Socialist ideal by indoctrinating the masses was adopted with enthusiasm.  In St. Petersburg, Moscow and other large towns the student association for mutual instruction, to which I have referred in the foregoing chapter, became centres of popular propaganda, and the academic Nihilists were transformed into active missionaries.  Scores of male and female students, impatient to convert the masses to the gospel of freedom and terrestrial felicity, sought to get into touch with the common people by settling in the villages as school-teachers, medical practitioners, midwives, etc., or by working as common factory hands in the industrial centres.