[1][2] His father was a retired artillery officer of the Imperial Russian Army and his mother was from a Russified Swedish merchant family.

Letters and poems which were considered compromising had been found at his house and he was imprisoned in the military prison at St. Petersberg for nine months.

No charge of being involved in the conspiracy was laid against him, but he was found guilty of having published subversive ideas and having shown sympathy with men of criminal tendencies.

[4] He was sentenced to exile in Vologda ; after three years escaped and fled abroad, via a short stay in St. Petersberg to acquire a fake passport.

Lavrov believed that while a coup d'état would be easy in Russia, the creation of a socialist society needed to involve the Russian masses.

Lavrov rejected this outlook, believing it possible to create socialism by basing revolutionary tactics on Russia's individual history.

Almost 90 percent of Russia's population were peasants, and there was also the intelligentsia: a unique bunch of people without any class affiliations, who, "unlike other elements of Russian society, were unflawed by the past.

Lavrov considered the intelligentsia the only portion of society capable of preparing Russia for participation in a worldwide socialist revolution.

[5] In his “Historical Letters” Lavrov accentuated the indissoluble connection between sociology as a science and basic principles of individual morality.

The majority of researchers stress the heterogeneity of Lavrov's ideas as well as the fact that a considerable impact was made upon him both by the leaders of the positivist tradition and by Karl Marx.

Solidary interaction distinguishes society from a simple gathering of individuals, the latter phenomenon constituting no sociological object.

Moreover, the condition of individuals being conscious creatures excludes from the field of sociology forms of solidarity / solidary interaction performed by unconscious organisms, or, in other words, marks the borderline between social and biological phenomena.