It was difficult for the Imperial regime to maintain a consistent policy for long. In a few years there came a slight relaxation of the more stringent rulings of the censorship and some Ukrainian books were published. The seventies were the great period of the Narodniki, when the educated youth became convinced of their mission to go to the people, disguise themselves as peasants and try to educate their unfortunate brothers. Under such conditions it was only natural that the same movement was attempted by some of the younger Ukrainians, that there came similar publications intended for clandestine use by the Ukrainians who sought thus to keep their adherents from being submerged in the corresponding Russian movement. At the same time there can be no doubt that many of the more zealous partisans of social reform, especially in St. Petersburg, tended to join the Russian illegal movements and for a time at least lost any special interest in the fate of Ukraine in their zeal for humanity. At the same time there was founded in 1872 the Southern Branch of the Geographical Society and around this there gathered a large number of Ukrainians, writing scientific articles in Russian but emphasizing those aspects of South Russian life that were most alien to the general Russian traditions. They helped to place the knowledge of Ukrainian culture on a firmer basis, even though some of the more socially minded sneered at their efforts as of no immediate importance. These young men, largely at the University of Kiev, formed themselves into a society, the Hromada, which worked vigorously along purely scientific, ethnological and philological lines. They included Prof. V. Antonovich and later Mykhaylo Drahomaniv, by far the most brilliant of the scholars of this generation.