These sects, which sprang up in church and synagogue during the latter part of the "seventies," were the outcome of political and social as well as religious unrest. Alexander II fulfilled the expectation which the first years of his reign aroused in Jewish hearts no more than Catherine II and Alexander I. Those who had hoped for equal rights were doomed to disappointment. Most of the reforms of the Liberator Czar proved a failure owing to the antipathy and machinations of his untrustworthy officials. Russia was split between two diametrically opposed parties, the extreme radicals and the extreme reactionaries, waging an internecine war with each other. The former originated with the young Russians that had served in the European campaigns during the Napoleonic invasion, and who, in imitation of the secret organizations which had so greatly contributed to the liberation of Germany, united to throw off the yoke of autocracy in Russia. These secret orders, the Southern, the Northern, the United Slavonian, and the Polish, Alexander I had endeavored in vain to suppress, and the drastic measures taken by Nicholas I against the Dekabrists (1825) proved of no avail. Nor did the reforms of Alexander II help to heal the breach. On the contrary, seeing that the constitution they expected from the Liberator Czar was not forthcoming, and the democracy they hoped for was far from being realized, they became desperate, and determined to demand their rights by force. The peasants, too, sobering up from the intoxication, the figurative as well as the literal, caused by the vodka drunk in honor of their newly-acquired volyushka (sweet liberty), discovered that the emancipation ukase of the czar had been craftily intercepted by the bureaucrats, and their dream of owning the land they had hitherto cultivated as serfs would never come true. Russia was rife with discontent, and disaffection assumed a national range. The cry was raised for a "new freedom." A certain Anton Petrov impersonated the czar, and gathered around him ten thousand Russians. Pamphlets entitled _Land and Liberty_ (_Zemlya i Volya_) were spread broadcast among the masses, the mind of the populace was inflamed, and attempts on the life of the czar ensued.