It was at this time that Michael Bakunin, from his exile in Switzerland, conspired with Nechaiev to bring about a great uprising of the peasants, through the Society for the Liberation of the People.  Bakunin advised the students to leave the universities and to go among the people to teach them and, at the same time, arouse them to revolt.  It was at this time, too, that Nicholas Tchaykovsky and his friends, the famous Circle of Tchaykovsky, began to distribute among students in all parts of the Empire books dealing with the condition of the peasants and proposing remedies therefor.  This work greatly influenced the young Intelligentsia, but the immediate results among the peasants were not very encouraging.  Even the return from Switzerland, by order of the government, of hundreds of students who were disciples of Bakunin and Peter Lavrov did not produce any great success.

Very soon a new organization appeared.  The remnant of the Circle Tchaykovsky, together with some followers of Bakunin, formed a society called the Land and Freedom Society.  This society, which was destined to exert a marked influence upon revolutionary Russia, was the most ambitious revolutionary effort Russia had known.  The society had a constitution and a carefully worked out program.  It had one special group to carry on propaganda among students; another to agitate among the peasants; and a third to employ armed force against the government and against those guilty of treachery toward the society.  The basis of the society was the conviction that Russia needed an economic revolution; that only an economic revolution, starting with the producers, could overthrow Czarism and establish the ideal state of society.

The members of this Land and Freedom Society divided their work into four main divisions:  (1) Agitation—­passive and active.  Passive agitation included strikes, petitions for reforms, refusal to pay taxes, and so on.  Active agitation meant riots and uprisings. (2) Organization—­the formation of a fighting force prepared to bring about a general uprising. (3) Education—­the spreading of revolutionary knowledge and ideas, a continuation of the work of the Tchaykovsky Circle. (4) Secularization—­the carrying on of systematic work against the Orthodox Church through special channels.  One of the early leaders of this society was George Plechanov, who later founded the Russian Social Democracy and gave to the Russian revolutionary movement its Marxian character, inspiring such men as Nikolai Lenine and Leon Trotzky, among many others.  The society did not attain any very great amount of success in its efforts to reach the peasants, and it was that fact more than any other which determined Plechanov’s future course.

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