Narodnaya Volya was founded in 1879 by Russian populists, or Narodniks, who were disillusioned by the failure to rouse Russian peasants and workers to revolt against the autocracy through the spread of propaganda, and angry at the increasingly severe penalties imposed on their comrades, several of whom had been executed, and who united around the single aim of assassinating the Tsar, believing that a substantial section of public opinion would approve of the deed.
[1] Most of the members were former university students from middle class Their original leader was Mikhailov, Nikolai Morozov its leading theorist.
Merkulov, a carpenter arrested in February 1881 for his part in trying to mine the Tsar's train near Odessa, who co-operated with the police, and gave evidence against the others.
The French novelist Victor Hugo, who was particularly distressed by the prospect that two women were to be hanged, as had already happened to Perovskaya, wrote an impassioned letter to the new Tsar, Alexander III, pleading: "In the darkness, I cry for mercy.
[7] All the death sentences were commuted to life imprisonment, except in the case of Sukhanov, a lieutenant in the imperial navy, who was shot in front of the fleet in Konstadt on 19 March 1881.