The total rejection of authority as exercised by the church, the state, or the family. More specifically, the doctrine of a Russian extremist revolutionary party active in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. In their struggle against the conservative elements in Russian society, the nihilists justified violence, believing that by forcibly eliminating ignorance and oppression they would secure human freedom. The government of Alexander II repressed the revolutionaries severely, and they sought vengeance by assassinating the emperor near his palace on 13 March 1881. After 1917 the small and diffuse cells of nihilists were themselves destroyed by better coordinated revolutionaries.