He became a leader of the populist Land and Liberty movement in 1877, but when this turned increasingly to terrorist methods, he formed an anti-terrorist splinter group to continue mass agitation. Exiled in Geneva, he became one of the founders of the League for the Liberation of Labour, the first Russian Marxist revolutionary organization (1883), which merged (1898) with the Russian Social Democratic Workers’ Party. In the 1903 split with Lenin he supported the Mensheviks but always tried to re-unite the party. He returned to Russia in 1917, but failed to prevent the Bolsheviks from seizing power.