In 1875 Mark Natanson was by all accounts the deus ex machina who rescued the deeply troubled revolutionary movement. His arrival in St Petersburg electrified the local radical community. The mere presence of this man, who still enjoyed an enormous fund of prestige and trust among his erstwhile Chaikovskyist friends, charged the survivors of the ‘crazy summer’ of 1874 with a renewed sense of optimism, with the hope that not all had been lost and that a new beginning was in the offing. The general sentiment has best been expressed by Lev Deich who wrote in his memoirs that, ‘just then, when the movement was disintegrating and when nobody knew how to resurrect it, there – the suddenly appearing Natanson… was looked upon by many as an anchor of salvation or as a guiding light’. And, being active at that time in Kiev, he vividly recalled how radicals from St Petersburg were saying: ‘Well, now everything will be going along the right track – Mark is organizing again. He will unite everybody.’

In spite of the acknowledged prominence of Natanson in rebuilding the disabled movement in the form of a new revolutionary organization known as Zemlia i Volia, the formative history of this party has remained an elusive subject. Except for recognizing the genius of Mark Natanson in forming the original nucleus of Zemlia i Volia, historians tell us little about its genesis and even less about Natanson's role in it.