It favoured secret society-led terrorism, justified "as a means of exerting pressure on the government for reform, as the spark that would ignite a vast peasant uprising, and as the inevitable response to the regime's use of violence against the revolutionaries".

This act backfired on a political level, because the peasantry were generally horrified by the murder, and the government had many Narodnaya Volya leaders hanged, leaving the group unorganized and ineffective.

[6] However, these events did not mark the end of the movement, and the later Socialist-Revolutionaries, Popular Socialists, and Trudoviks all pursued similar ideas and tactics to the Narodniks.

The Popular Resistance Association is an example of a modern-day grouping claiming the heritage of the Narodniks and the democratic socialist parties inspired by them.

The Narodnik movement was a populist initiative to engage the rural classes of Russia in a political debate that would overthrow the Tsar's government in the nineteenth century.

These individuals were generally anti-capitalist, and they believed that they could facilitate both an economic and a political revolution amongst rural Russians by "going to" and educating the peasant classes.

[10]: 157–180  Another example of the cultural disconnect between the intelligentsia and the peasants in the "to the people" movement was the Narodniks propagandizing through pamphlets when virtually all poor Russians were illiterate.

Radicals in the latter part of the 1870s would learn that their concept of the narod was flawed, and intellectuals would have to instead make themselves into peasants to have success in the movement and begin a revolution against the government of Alexander II.

[12] Nikolay Chernyshevsky's "anthropological principle" held that all humans, regardless of class, have many intrinsic similarities, and intellectuals saw in the peasants a purified version of themselves that could be radicalized; time demonstrated that this was simply not the case.

[13] Bakunists believed that the peasants were ready to revolt with little propagandizing, whereas the Lavrists thought that considerable effort would be needed for the uprisings to begin.

A lack of ideological unity resulted in varied approaches to the movement, and because of this the Narodniks no longer presented a united front to rural Russia.

Pre-Marxist revolutionaries believed in an unusually strong equality of sex, and educated noblewomen played major roles in radical movements in the latter decades of the nineteenth century.

[17] Historian Dmitri Pisarev writes that "sensing their inability to act alone, the intelligent radical made the peasantry the instrument to realize their hopes."

Radicals in the movement focused on Russia's oppressive taxation and land laws, and their propaganda was viewed as a threat by Tsar Alexander II.

[20] These groups sought to begin a revolution through violence, and when members of Narodnaya Volya killed Tsar Alexander in 1881, the larger Narodnik movement lost virtually all support in the communes and rural parts of Russia.

The latter helped found various groups, included one formed around the literary magazine Viața Românească, which he published along with Garabet Ibrăileanu and Paul Bujor.