Nikolay Rusanov

He studied medicine at the Medical and Surgical Academy in St. Petersburg, where he became involved in radical student politics.

This group emphasised urban organisation over rural agitation among the peasants and also endorsed political terrorism as a tactic.

Rusanov was one of the earliest Russian revolutionaries to be strongly influenced by Marxism, after reading Marx' Das Kapital, The Communist Manifesto and The Civil War in France.

He contributed articles to some early Marxist journals and deployed Marx' thesis that the economic 'basis' determines the political 'superstructure' to argue against the Jacobin voluntarism and élitism of Lev Tikhomirov, the leading ideologue of 'The People's Will' in exile.

Gots co-founded the journal Herald of the Russian Revolution (Vestnik russkoi revoliutsii), which became the theoretical organ of the Socialist-Revolutionary Party (PSR).

It united revolutionary socialists who, for various reasons, objected to the "orthodox" Marxism of the Russian Social-Democratic Workers Party (RSDRP), and who looked back to the indigenous Russian revolutionary tradition of Alexander Herzen, Peter Lavrov, Nikolay Chernyshevsky, Nikolai Danielson, and others.

Ideologically and tactically the PSR was quite diverse, comprising anti-Marxists as well as professed Marxists, advocates and opponents of political terror, those who favoured organisation among urban workers and those who emphasised rousing the peasantry.

The abortive Russian Revolution of 1905 brought Rusanov back to Russia, where he participated in the creation of workers' councils (soviets) - a tactic Lenin then still opposed.