The fusing of these two diverse elements was powerfully helped on by the white heat of indignation that glowed throughout Russia when details of the official peculation and mismanagement of the war with Turkey became known.  Everything combined to discredit the Government; and enthusiasts of all kinds felt that the days for scientific propaganda and stealthy agitation were past.  Voltaire must give way to Marat.  It was time for the bomb and the dagger to do their work.

The new Nihilists organised an executive committee for the removal of the most obnoxious officials.  Its success was startling.  To name only a few of their chief deeds:  on August 15, 1878, a Chief of the Police was slain near one of the Imperial Palaces at the capital; and, in February 1879, the Governor of Kharkov was shot, the Nihilists succeeding in announcing his condemnation by placards mysteriously posted up in every large town.  In vain did the Government intervene and substitute a military Commission in place of trial by jury.  Exile and hanging only made the Nihilists more daring, and on more than one occasion the Czar nearly fell a victim to their desperadoes.

The most astounding of these attempts was the explosion of a mine under the banqueting-hall of the Winter Palace at St. Petersburg on the evening of February 17, 1880, when the Imperial family escaped owing to a delay in the arrival of the Grand Duke of Hesse.  Ten soldiers were killed and forty-eight wounded in and near the guard-room.

The Czar answered outrage by terrorism.  A week after this outrage he issued a ukase suspending the few remaining rights of local self-government hitherto spared by the reaction, and vesting practically all executive powers in a special Commission, presided over by General Loris Melikoff.  This man was an Armenian by descent, and had distinguished himself as commander in the recent war in Asia, the capture of Kars being largely due to his dispositions.  To these warlike gifts, uncommon in the Armenians of to-day, he added administrative abilities of a high order.  Enjoying in a peculiar degree the confidence of Alexander II., he was charged with the supervision of all political trials and a virtual control of all the Governors-General of the Empire.  Thereupon the central committee of the Nihilists proclaimed war a outrance until the Czar conceded to a popularly elected National Assembly the right to reform the life of Russia.

Here was the strength of the Nihilist party.  By violent means it sought to extort what a large proportion of the townsfolk wished for and found no means of demanding in a lawful manner.  Loris Melikoff, gifted with the shrewdness of his race, saw that the Government would effect little by terrorism alone.  Wholesale arrests, banishment, and hangings only added to the number of the disaffected, especially as the condemned went to their doom with a calm heroism that inspired the desire of imitation or revenge.