The students found the rules of the Academy constraining; the teachers were conservative and there was a strict separation between high and low art.

The society maintained independence from state support and brought the art, which illustrated the contemporary life of the people from Moscow and Saint Petersburg, to the provinces.

From 1871 to 1923, the society arranged 48 mobile exhibitions in St. Petersburg and Moscow, after which they were shown in Kiev, Kharkov, Kazan, Oryol, Riga, Odessa and other cities.

[2] Peredvizhniki were influenced by the public views of the literary critics Vissarion Belinsky and Nikolai Chernyshevsky, both of whom espoused liberal ideas.

Because of his political activism, officials prohibited publication of any of his writing, including his dissertation; but it eventually found its way to the art world of nineteenth-century Russia.

In 1863, almost immediately after the emancipation of serfs, Chernyshevsky's goals were realized with the help of Peredvizhniki, who took the pervasive Slavophile-populist idea that Russia had a distinguishable, modest, inner beauty of its own and worked out how to display it on canvas.

They portrayed the emancipation movement of Russian people with empathy (for example, The Arrest of a Propagandist, Refusal of Confession, and They Did Not Expect Him by Ilya Yefimovich Repin).

They portrayed social-urban life, and later used historic art to depict the common people (The Morning of the Streltsy Execution by Vasily Surikov).

[4] As the authority and public influence of the society steadily grew, government officials had to stop their efforts to repress the members.