Anyone interested in Russia will come across two ‘eternal’ questions: ‘Kto vinovat [Who's to Blame]?’ and ‘Chto delat’?’ [What Is to be Done?]’. The questions are the titles of an 1846 novel by Aleksandr Ivanovich Herzen (1812–70) and an 1863 novel by Nikolai Gavrilovich Chernyshevskii (1828–89). The second title was repeated for programmatic texts by Vladimir Il’ich Lenin in Chto delat’? (1902) and, with a variation, Lev Tolstoy: Tak chto zhe nam delat’? [So what should we do?] (1886). Such questions, expressing a sense of moral protest and practical urgency, dominated the scene in the nineteenth century. Also, given the lack of opportunities to participate in political affairs, the question of alternatives arises: one alternative is to make one's ideas public, which implies struggle with the censorship or tamizdat [publishing abroad]; another is to go underground and establish conspiratorial revolutionary organisations.

Overall, nineteenth-century Russian intellectuals were obsessed by the question of political agency: in a situation of official autocracy, suppression of the political, exclusion of the opposition and absence of political participation, there is only one political authority and only one legitimate agent: the tsar. Consequently, the question as to whether a given tsar is a reformer or a reactionary, a liberal or a conservative, becomes crucial, and direct appeal to the tsar becomes an obvious political act. Mikhail Aleksandrovich Bakunin (1814–76) addressed the tsar (Nikolai I) in writing with his 1851 Confession [Ispoved’] (Bakunin 1977). Herzen could count the tsar (Aleksandr II) among the readers of his underground journal Kolokol [The Bell].