Yakov Stefanovich

He and his colleagues deceived participants by telling them the Russian tsar supported appropriating land from big landowners for the peasants.

While at the University, Stefanovich joined the Kiev branch of the Chaykovsky circlean anarchist group, inspired by the writings of Mikhail Bakunin.

In July 1874, he agreed to join Yekaterina Breshko-Breshkovskaya and Maria Kolenkina on a mission to 'go to the people' and spread propaganda in peasant villages.

In 1875, a group of peasants led by an army veteran named Foma Pryadko petitioned the tsar, wrongly believing that he secretly sympathised with them.

Stefanovich gained the prisonsers' trust because he spoke Ukrainian fluently, and through a profound understanding of peasant folklore, as the hostile memoirist Lev Tikhomirov - an ex-revolutionary turned monarchist - acknowledged.

[3] Stefanovich and Deutsch obtained a secret printing press and created a Secret Imperial Charter, supposedly issued by the tsar, which granted liberty to all of Chigirin's rural population and ordered that the land, including that belonging to the nobility, should be distributed equally.

I now know that the peasants who were exiled to remote places in Siberia in connection with his case also considered him a very fine man and were anxious to meet him again.

Stefanovich crossed the Russian border by train, travelling with Olga Lyubatovich, so that they could pose as man and wife.

The couple arrived as revolutionaries were on the point of splitting over the issue of whether to continue with propaganda work, or focus on killing the Tsar.

The court accepted his statement that he was not a member of the Narodnaya Volya and gave him the comparatively light sentence of eight years hard labour in Kara.

"[9] They arranged to share a room during their exile in Siberia in the 1880s, where Deutsch tried, but failed to persuade Stefanovich, whom he described as "unusually thoughtful and far-seeing" to become a Marxist.

[1] Breshko-Breshkovskaya, who considered Stefanovich to be "one of the most sincere among the young revolutionists ... tall and broad with an open honest face...."[11] thought that after the Chigirin affair "owing to the influence of his success and the recognition of his great abilities, Yakov gained too high an opinion of himself ...