In the mean time there had appeared the first definite Marxian Social Democratic group in Russia.  Plechanov, Vera Zasulich, Leo Deutsch, and other Russian revolutionists in Switzerland formed the organization known as the Group for the Emancipation of Labor.  This organization was based upon the principles and tactics of Marxian Socialism and sought to create a purely proletarian movement.  As we have seen, when revolutionary terrorism was at its height Plechanov and his disciples had proclaimed its futility and pinned their faith to the nascent class of industrial wage-workers.  In the early ’eighties this class was so small in Russia that it seemed to many of the best and clearest minds of the revolutionary movement quite hopeless to rely upon it.  Plechanov was derided as a mere theorist and closet philosopher, but he never wavered in his conviction that Socialism must come in Russia as the natural outcome of capitalist development.  By means of a number of scholarly polemics against the principles and tactics of the Will of the People party, Plechanov gathered to his side of the controversy a group of very brilliant and able disciples, and so laid the basis for the Social Democratic Labor party.  With the relatively rapid expansion of capitalism, beginning with the year 1888, and the inevitable increase of the city proletariat, the Marxian movement made great progress.  A strong labor-union movement and a strong political Socialist movement were thus developed side by side.

At the same time there was a revival of terrorism, the one available reply of the oppressed to brutal autocracy.  While the Marxian movement made headway among the industrial workers, the older terroristic movement made headway among the peasants.  Various groups appeared in different parts of the country.  When Alexander III died, at the end of 1894, both movements had developed considerable strength.  Working in secret and subject to terrible measures of repression, their leaders being constantly imprisoned and exiled, these two wings of the Russian revolutionary movement were gathering strength in preparation for an uprising more extensive and serious than anything that had hitherto been attempted.

Whenever a new Czar ascended the throne in Russia it was the fashion to hope for some measure of reform and for a degree of liberality.  Frequently, as in the case of Alexander III, all such hopes were speedily killed, but repeated experiences of the kind did not prevent the birth of new hopes with the death of successive Czars.  When, therefore, Alexander III was succeeded by his son, Nicholas II, liberal Russia expectantly awaited the promulgation of constitutional reforms.  In this they were doomed to disappointment, just as they had been on the occasion of the accession of the new Czar’s immediate predecessor.  Nicholas II was evidently going to be quite as reactionary as his father was.  This was made manifest in a number of ways.  When a deputation from one of