Along with this attempt to force the whole population into a single mold
went a determined resistance to liberalism in all its forms. All this was
accompanied by a degree of efficiency in the police service quite unusual
in Russia, with the result that the terroristic tactics of the Will of the
People party were unavailing, except in the cases of a few minor officials.
Plots to assassinate the Czar were laid, but they were generally betrayed
to the police. The most serious of these plots, in March, 1887, led to the
arrest of all the conspirators.

In the mean time there had appeared the first definite Marxian Social
Democratic group in Russia. Plechanov, Vera Zasulich, Leo Deutsch, and
other Russian revolutionists in Switzerland formed the organization known
as the Group for the Emancipation of Labor. This organization was based
upon the principles and tactics of Marxian Socialism and sought to create a
purely proletarian movement. As we have seen, when revolutionary terrorism
was at its height Plechanov and his disciples had proclaimed its futility
and pinned their faith to the nascent class of industrial wage-workers. In
the early 'eighties this class was so small in Russia that it seemed to
many of the best and clearest minds of the revolutionary movement quite
hopeless to rely upon it. Plechanov was derided as a mere theorist and
closet philosopher, but he never wavered in his conviction that Socialism
must come in Russia as the natural outcome of capitalist development. By
means of a number of scholarly polemics against the principles and tactics
of the Will of the People party, Plechanov gathered to his side of the
controversy a group of very brilliant and able disciples, and so laid the
basis for the Social Democratic Labor party. With the relatively rapid
expansion of capitalism, beginning with the year 1888, and the inevitable
increase of the city proletariat, the Marxian movement made great progress.
A strong labor-union movement and a strong political Socialist movement
were thus developed side by side.