The magazine (named for an earlier publication edited by Nikolay Karamzin) was founded by Mikhail Matveevich Stasyulevich, a former professor of history, who remained the publisher-editor until 1909; its editorial office "was located in Stasyulevich's flat at 20 Galernaya Street and was one of the centres of St. Petersburg's cultural and political life (the journal's major contributors as well as their friends and associates used to get together on Wednesdays).

[2] "The journal always had a serious, objective, professorial character; even in the most heated polemics, for example, it shunned harsh invective and often even avoided naming its adversary.

It "placed its dark red monthly booklet, 'like a little brick, on the slowly and arduously erected structure of social rights and consciousness.

[5]: 76–78 During the heated ideological struggles of the 1870s and 1880s, the magazine tried to steer a course between moderate reformism and the kind of revolutionary socialism it consistently opposed; Leonid-Lyudvig Slonimsky, a frequent contributor on economic and political topics, wrote a regular "Foreign Survey" which he used "to sketch the outlines of an ideal relationship between liberals and socialists in Russia’s not-too-distant parliamentary future, which involved one group supplementing its program with demands for social reforms and the other abandoning its calls for revolution.

"[8] Following the 1905 Russian Revolution, many of its members joined the Constitutional Democratic Party,[1] which separated the journal more and more from the radical movement, and in the spring of 1918 its publication was suppressed by the Soviet authorities (the last issue was March 1918).