ABSTRACT
Intellectual and dissident activity, including the student population, has already been amply researched in Russian history. The role of the intellectual was to educate the worker, not to attempt to take over the leadership of the workers' circles. The student intelligentsia were simply those intellectuals who were still in high school or in institutions of higher education. Tochisskii's goal was to raise the intellectual and moral level of the workers. Tochisskii realized that the student intelligentsia was much more likely to be arrested than workers' members, who melt more easily into the general population. Student circles consolidated into an intellectual center which they called the "Central Student Circle". Workers' circles were the principal institutional expression for the emergence of the "workers' intelligentsia". The workers' network, numbering four to six circles, escaped detection, for the most part, and continued its operations. These groups eventually formed the Central Workers' Circle within a year.
