ABSTRACT
As Alexander Mikhailov alleged at his trial in 1882, the People's Will was not strictly speaking a party but the activist segment of a still larger body, the Russian Social Revolutionary Party. There were also less intimate ties with some of the surviving literary celebrities of the revolutionary movement of the 1860s such as Shelgunov and Nicholas Kurochkin. Yet at the same time, the People's Will wanted to exploit the ethnic problem for revolutionary purposes. Over and above all other forms and means of violence, the revolutionaries became fascinated with a relatively novel one: dynamite. "What a long road it has been," exclaims Vera Figner, "from our primitive notions on this subject, the road which took us through many adaptations, tests, and improvements to these elegant and slender bombs constructed for of March 1, 1881, by members of the People's Will".
