ABSTRACT
Young Lev Deich's judgment reflected the revolutionaries' disenchantment with their own "professors"—Peter Lavrov, William Bervi, and, despite appearances to the contrary, Bakunin as well—whose lessons had launched them into the countryside and among the city proletariat. By late 1874, revolutionary Populism lay buried under the weight of its collapsed illusion, just as had the first Land and Freedom in 1864. By 1875 Lavrov's reign over the revolutionary mind was a thing of the past. For one thing the incoherent prophet was too impressionable: his views took on the coloration of whomever he was working with at the moment. Mark Natanson's organization began to solidify in the summer of 1876. Its first successful revolutionary enterprise was engineering the escape of Peter Kropotkin. Now only a few among the conspirators were to know where Natanson and his closest collaborators gathered to decide what revolutionary enterprises should be mounted.
