St Petersburg in 1868–69 presented Sergei Nechaev with an ideal opportunity to organize a following committed to his style of ‘making revolution’. The situation was not unlike 1861–62 when student unrest and government repression invigorated the revolutionary movement in the form of the first Zemlia i Volia. Only this time there would be no period of remission. Tsarist policy and Nechaevist agitation combined in 1868 to produce a student movement whose revolutionary potential was to destabilize tsarist Russia for the next fifteen years.

Again, as in 1861, the process of student radicalization was touched off by the authorities' desire to curb nihilist inspired student activism. In taking a reactionary course after the 1866 Karakazov affair, the government established a new, extremely conservative regime in higher education which imposed a strict system of surveillance (nadzor) over students in secondary and post-secondary institutions. The architect of this system of policing education, Dmitrii Tolstoy, proceeded in 1867 to put in place a set of regulations designed to suppress independent student activity. Besides reinforcing previous restrictions on unauthorized student assemblies and self-help societies, these regulations imposed additional controls by instructing university authorities and police to cooperate in identifying ‘student delinquents’ and reporting ‘about all activities raising doubt about the moral and political reliability of students’.

The students responded by calling agitational meetings (skhodki) in defence of their ‘rights’ to conduct their own affairs as they saw fit.