In the history of the Russian revolutionary movement the years 1868–70 are primarily known for what came to be called Nechaevshchina. The term, of course, refers to the activity of Sergei Nechaev who tried to create a closely knit and hierarchically organized conspiratorial society whose task it was to initiate and guide a popular revolutionary upheaval. Convinced that ‘there are many people to take Karakazov's place’, Nechaev made it his mission to continue the revolutionary struggle in the spirit of Ishutin's Organization. He was, Franco Venturi writes, ‘the very embodiment of violence… [who] developed the feelings and ideas of Hell with a ruthlessness unique among the revolutionaries of the sixties’. Practising what he preached in his ‘Catechism of the Revolutionary’, jointly composed with Bakunin, Nechaev resorted to blackmail, deception, manipulation, mystification, and cold-blooded murder – all in the name of the ‘people's revenge’.

The ends that were to justify these means were, to Nechaev, self-evident. Revolution was imminent, but its ultimate socialist victory depended on his ability to marshal as quickly as possible all forces of destruction. According to Nechaev's timetable, the great apocalypse would occur soon after 19 February 1870, when the peasants would rise en masse in revolt against the final implementation of the ‘fraudulent’ land settlement of the 1861 emancipation edicts.

The setting in which Nechaev unfolded his brand of revolutionary action was the student community of St Petersburg. Smouldering with discontent, it seemed to be fertile soil for planting his ideas. And plant them he did. But the reaping was not to his liking.