The outbreak of the Russo-Japanese war at the beginning of 1904 was greeted by the revolutionary parties as an opportunity to launch a further attack on the autocracy. A new campaign of political terror was undertaken by the SRs, which achieved its most spectacular success in the assassination of Plehve, the hated Minister of the Interior, on 15 July 1904. At this time, a group was formed within the party who felt that its terrorist activities were too exclusively political and should be more closely integrated into the mass movement by the sanctioning of economic terror. The most outspoken advocates of this view were the faction of ‘agrarian terrorists’ which formed in Geneva in 1904, led by a group of Breshkovskaya's disciples – including Evgenii Lozinskii (Ustinov) and Mikhail Sokolov, the former student of the Mariinskoe agricultural college near Saratov and a future Maximalist leader. Their supporters were drawn mainly from the youngest and most recent contingent of émigrés.

The term ‘agrarian terror’ was used to describe the measures of destructive violence which were traditionally adopted by the peasantry in the course of their local conflicts with the gentry landowners. These measures included murder, arson, the destruction of crops, the killing of livestock, etc. Before 1904, the attitude of both the SR Peasant Union and the Agrarian-Socialist League towards the peasants' use of ‘agrarian terror’ had been an ambivalent one. The initial appeal of the SR Peasant Union ‘To all those working for revolutionary socialism in Russia’ had essentially avoided the issue of ‘agrarian terror’.