was first expounded by the "father of Russian socialism" Alexander Herzen, in an 1861 issue of his newspaper Kolokol, following the closure of Saint Petersburg University in response to growing student unrest.

[14] By the 1870s, radical propaganda was being circulated widely within self-education circles and student communes, igniting a "youth revolution", during which young people were inspired "to resolve all (of Russia's) cursed questions which gave humanity no respite.

[20] To many of its participants, the movement took on a religious character, in which they acted as populist missionaries of a "new faith", adopting elements of Biblical scripture as a way of spurring the masses towards revolution.

This led the Ukrainian historian Avrahm Yarmolinsky to characterize the movement as a "children's crusade", due to the "ignorance and naivete" of the enthusiastic student participants.

The decentralized groups involved acted autonomously, with the only point of connection being a Moscow-based printing press that produced fake passports and propaganda pamphlets, or the various quarters used by the students for shelter and resupply.

The buntars were also largely unsuccessful in stirring up revolt, with peasants either unwilling, unequipped or unorganized enough to do so, while those that traveled to the Urals did not find any of the rumored fugitives that they intended to organize into a revolutionary armed force.

In a synthesis of both Lavrov and Bakunin's ideas, the organization planned to establish decentralized groups that would both propagandize the masses and carry out acts of terrorism against the ruling classes of Russia.

[38] Nevertheless, the peasantry remained at the center of revolutionary focus in the country, with a renewed attempt by populists to "go to the people" in the spring of 1875, which also proved a failure, leading to widespread disillusionment with the Lavrovist methods of peaceful propaganda.

The majority of the movement moved towards the buntar position, with Sergey Stepnyak-Kravchinsky criticising Lavrov for his reformism and declaring that "one mutinous act, even if unsuccessful, would achieve more than a decade of indoctrination".

The buntars began agitating in Korsun, where they planned to incite the local peasants to expropriate the land they worked and to launch an armed uprising against the Russian authorities, gaining a foothold there by the spring of 1876.

[42] Claiming to act on behalf of Alexander II, the buntars led by Yakov Stefanovich intervened on the side of the peasant dusheviks in order to redistribute land to them.

[45] By this time, Russian anarchists in exile in Geneva had begun publication of The Worker monthly newspaper, but it only gained a limited readership during its short-lived existence.

publishing scathing critiques of anarchism, focused on the anarchists' insistence on the imminence of revolution in Russia, their practice of direct action and their appeals to "elemental passions".

[47] Lavrov called for intellectuals to build a workers' and peasants' army, but insisted on it being self-managed, himself opposed to the dictatorship of a revolutionary minority, which he believed would institute a regime of state capitalism in the name of socialism.

[50] Tkachev and the Blanquists established their own journal Tocsin, in which they attacked Lavrovism for its gradualist stance and called for the seizure of power by a "morally and intellectually advanced" elite, which would consolidate control over the state, rather than abolishing it like the anarchists.

Despite the limited circulation of the journal, Tkachev's ideas eventually found a dedicated following among Russian Marxists, including one Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov.

[56] The spokesperson for the 193 defendants, who referred to themselves as the "Socialist Revolutionary Party", declared their intention to establish a "free union of autonomous communes" through a popular uprising against the state and attacked the Senate as having organised a show trial.

[62] The campaign also caused the author Leo Tolstoy to experience a moral crisis, during which he renounced the Russian Orthodox Church as an oppressive institution, instead placing his faith in the peasantry.

"[63] The campaign later went on to inspire the Ballets Russes, with its founder Sergei Diaghilev declaring its intellectual origins to be "in objects of utility (domestic implements in the country districts), in the painting on the sleighs, in the designs and the colours of peasant dresses, or the carving around a window frame, we found our motifs, and on this foundation we built.

"[64] Inspired by the campaign, the Russian ethnographers Yury Melgunov and Evgenia Linyova had recorded peasant songs, using the scientific method to transcribe the polyphonic harmonies displayed by the singers.