There is no doubt but that after 1 March 1881 revolutionary Populism entered a decadent phase and that the Russian revolutionary movement as a whole, having suddenly flourished in the 1870s, went into a temporary decline. For one thing, terrorism abated, even though certain groups did continue to contemplate its application. Meanwhile, those groups which were in any case opposed to violence (albeit on tactical rather than moral grounds), realising that the advent of socialism was not so imminent as their predecessors had hoped, accepted that the patient and unheroic activity of many generations would be necessary before revolution would take place, and set themselves correspondingly limited objectives. Activity came to be hampered, moreover, by confusion and lack of purpose as the weakness of the major theoretical premisses of Populism became increasingly apparent. After all, it seemed unlikely now that ‘critically thinking’ individuals could generate far-reaching social change by means of patient propaganda, inflammatory agitation or terrorism – political or economic – or indeed that they could obliterate distinctions between themselves and the peasantry, as Populists had once hoped. As for the peasants themselves, they, as revolutionaries had already begun to their chagrin to learn in the 1870s, were not exceptionally amenable to socialism or ready to carry out revolution from below, be it peaceful, as Lavrov had hoped, or violent, as Bakunin had imagined.