Government had marked the new propaganda with great jealousy. In Russia, no propaganda among the peasants can remain unobserved. When a stranger arrives at a Russian village, he is immediately the common talk, whatever he says passes from mouth to mouth, and he may even be invited to state his views publicly in the _mir_. A mission conducted under these conditions soon attracted the notice of the authorities, who, in 1874, discovered it in thirty-seven different provinces of Russia, and arrested as many as 774 of the propagandists. Some of these were at once banished administratively to Siberia, and of the rest, 193 were, four years afterwards, brought up for trial and condemned. With these apprehensions the nihilist movement collapsed for the moment. Thun states that Lavroff's newspaper during that period adopted a tone of despair, and the revolutionists who escaped arrest recognised very clearly that their scheme of "going into the people" was a complete mistake, and that some safer and more effective system of tactics must be concocted. They fell upon two different expedients. The first was the plan of nihilist colonization. To avoid detection by the authorities, a band of revolutionists settled down in a given district in a body, got personally acquainted with the peasantry about them, and then, after acquiring a sufficient knowledge of their characters, proceeded with due prudence to impart their ideas to those who seemed most trustworthy, hoping in this way to be able, unobserved, eventually to leaven the whole lump. The other plan they now resorted to was an approach to the tactics of Bakunin, and in the very year, 1876, in which that old revolutionist died, they began a series of socialist demonstrations at Odessa, Kasan, and elsewhere, which made a little local sensation at the time. This was the very opposite kind of tactics to the cautious system of colonization that was pursued simultaneously with it, but there is always in revolutionary organization only a step between reticence and rashness. Open demonstrations like those practised at that period were simply suicidal folly in Russia, where the forces of the Government were so immeasurably superior to the forces of the demonstrationists.