The Maximalists rejected this as Social-Democratic 'attentism' and argued that the coming Russian revolution would not be able to stop half-way; it was the two-stage theory, not Maximalism, that was unrealistic if it thought the toiling masses, once liberated, would content themselves with a bourgeois republic and gradual reforms.
Before the Azef scandal of 1908, the PSR had endorsed 'political terror', i.e., attacks on state officials and members of the ruling royal family.
The Maximalists claimed that what was needed was a population imbued with a general 'toilers' consciousness' and a small, energetic minority, forming a disciplined secret organisation that would seize power and establish a 'Toilers' Republic'.
Lozinsky was one of the Maximalists' leading theorists and editor of Volniy Disskussioniy Listok (Free Discussion Reader), the group's journal.
Sokolov, a charismatic peasant organiser and experienced bank robber and extortionist, was the principal leader of the group and was accepted as a 'born dictator' by his followers.
In theory it was devoted to revolutionary agitation among workers and peasants for an immediate socialist revolution; in practice, much of its energy was directed to fundraising by criminal means and to violence against state officials, capitalists and landowners.
In the aftermath of the failed Revolution of 1905–07, the Maximalists were decimated by arrests, but with difficulty they remained in existence as a distinct revolutionary current until 1917, when they participated in the soviets.
Always more given to 'action' than to 'theory', the Maximalists soon splintered; some allied with the Left SRs, others joined the Bolsheviks (who had shed their attachment to the Social-Democratic 'two-stage' theory and were in the process of establishing a radical revolutionary dictatorship of sorts).