The nurturing bed of russian intelligentsia ideas and values in the 1890's was the kruzhok. The one infallible earmark of intelligenty since the time of the Masonic Lodges of the eighteenth century was their instinctive propensity, in whatever situation they found themselves, to coagulate into small kruzhki. In these kruzhki literature was assembled, exchanged, and discussed, referaty containing theses were presented and heatedly debated, and sooner or later kruzhki became the spring-board for more organized activity of an illegal or conspiratorial nature. If an individual did not manifest this penchant for kruzhkovshchina, it was a sign that somehow he did not belong to the intelligentsia.