e sobering influences of time and experience or drifted into lucrative
professions. Besides this, the reactionary currents were making
themselves felt, especially since the attempt on the life of the
Emperor. So long as these had been confined to the official world they
had not much affected the literature, except externally through
the Press-censure, but when they permeated the reading public their
influence was much stronger. Whatever the cause, there is no doubt that,
in the last years of the sixties, there was a subsidence of excitement
and enthusiasm and the peculiar intellectual phenomenon which had been
nicknamed Nihilism was supposed to be a thing of the past. In reality
the movement of which Nihilism was a prominent manifestation had merely
lost something of its academic character and was entering on a new stage
of development.

CHAPTER XXXV

SOCIALIST PROPAGANDA, REVOLUTIONARY AGITATION, AND TERRORISM

Closer Relations with Western Socialism--Attempts to Influence
the Masses--Bakunin and Lavroff--"Going in among the People"--The
Missionaries of Revolutionary Socialism--Distinction between Propaganda
and Agitation--Revolutionary Pamphlets for the Common People--Aims
and Motives of the Propagandists--Failure of Propaganda--Energetic
Repression--Fruitless Attempts at Agitation--Proposal to Combine
with Liberals--Genesis of Terrorism--My Personal Relations with the
Revolutionists--Shadowers and Shadowed--A Series of Terrorist Crimes--A
Revolutionist Congress--Unsuccessful Attempts to Assassinate
the Tsar--Ineffectual Attempt at Conciliation by Loris
Melikof--Assassination of Alexander II.--The Executive Committee
Shows Itself Unpractical--Widespread Indignation and Severe
Repression--Temporary Collapse of the Revolutionary Movement--A New
Revolutionary Movement in Sight.

Count Tolstoy's educational reform had one effect which was not
anticipated: it brought the revolutionists into closer contact with
Western Socialism. Many students, finding their position in Russia
uncomfortable, determined to go abroad and continue their studies in
foreign universities, where they would be free from the inconveniences
of police supervision and Press-censure. Those of the female sex had
an additional motive to emigrate, because they could not complete their
studies in Russia, but they had more difficulty in carrying out
their intention, because parents naturally disliked the idea of their
daughters going abroad to l