Even under the iron rule of Nicholas, there were, many years after the St. Petersburg insurrection of 1825, still some faint traces of Secret Societies, in which the spirit of Pestel and Murawieff was continued. One of these occult Leagues was that of Petrascheski, detected in 1849, whose members were sentenced to forced labour and to banishment to Siberia. A nearer approach to the plebeian element than was observable in the Conspiracies of 1817-25, characterized this later association. Altogether the more educated classes gradually began to seek closer contact with the people at large. This task was in so far facilitated by the tyrannical Czar-Pope Nicholas, in that he not only trod under foot that portion of the nobiliary class which aimed at a Constitutional share of the political power, but also persecuted the various dissenting sects in the most barbarous fashion. Under an outward gloss of official orthodoxy, Russia is eaten up with a chaos of sects. The Raskolniks, or Old Believers, profess to be the real Church; yet the simplest civic rights were always denied to them. Besides those Old Believers, numerous other sects exist. They in their turn are surrounded by a strange fringe of "Runners," "Jumpers," "Flagellants," "Self-Mutilators," and other eccentric or anti-social pests which crop up most thickly in the dank shadow of an obscurantist despotism, whose very roots, however, they gradually destroy and encroach upon. Persecuted men often seek solace in wild hopes and prophetic beliefs, which, if strongly nurtured by agitation, are apt to imperil the persecutor. Under Nicholas, the persecutor of all Dissenters, popular seers occasionally arose, who in their occult meetings predicted from the book of Esdra that, after the reign of Nicholas should be over, the Monarchy would fall down under his son and that "the people then would be happy and free."