In this way the revolutionary movement entered on its second stage, the stage of socialistic teaching and propaganda. Events in the West had kindled the imagination of the youthful champions of liberty in Russia, the rise and progress of the International, the terrible struggle at Paris under the Commune, the growth of the German Social Democracy. A positive and far-reaching ideal now drew the aspirations of the enthusiasts for liberty, the deliverance of the proletariat, represented in Russia by an ignorant and wretched peasantry. The anarchic socialism of Bakunin was unquestionably the controlling element in the new Russian movement. Beside it we must place the influence of Lavroff, another eminent Russian exile, who represented the more temperate phase of anarchism, shading off into the recognition of a constitutional and gradual development of the theory. In its second stage also the revolutionary movement of Russia was a mixed phenomenon. The anarchism of Bakunin continued, however, to be the characteristic feature, and thus the negative factor was still prominent enough. From Bakunin also proceeded the practical watchword at this stage of the revolutionary movement, ‘to go among the people’ and spread the new doctrines. And this course was unwittingly furthered by the action of the Government. Early in the _seventies_, hundreds of young Russians of both sexes were studying in Western Europe, particularly at Zürich in Switzerland. As their stay there exposed them to constant contact with revolutionary Russian exiles, and to infection with all the unsettling ideas of the West, an imperial ukase of 1873 recalled them home. They returned home, but they carried their new ideas with them. ‘Going among the people’ was adopted as a systematic principle, a passion and a fashion among the youthful adherents of anarchism. In accordance with their creed they had no appointed organisation, no very definite plan of action. They ‘went among the people’ as the apostles of a new theory, each one as his heart moved him.