Nikolay Rusanov 1879, Rusanov sided with 'The People's Will' ("Nardodnaya Volya"). This group emphasised urban organisation over rural agitation among the peasants and also endorsed political terrorism as a tactic. The group assassinated Tsar Aleksandr II in 1881. Although Rusanov was not directly involved in the plot, the repression which followed caused him to flee into exile in 1882. He remained in Western Europe, mostly in France and Germany, until 1905. Rusanov was one of the earliest Russian revolutionaries to be strongly influenced by Marxism, after reading Marx' "Das Kapital", "The Communist Manifesto" and "The Civil War in France". He contributed articles
Art manifesto Surrealist André Breton supported the Communist party. Often however, these political organizations rejected the artists’ attention; in other cases, artists were censored and persecuted by European authoritarian governments, like Fascist Italy and Communist Russia, which institutionally rejected the avant-garde. Gustave Courbet wrote a Realist manifesto for the introduction to the catalogue of his independent, personal exhibition, 1855, echoing the tone of the period's political manifestos. In it he asserts his goal as an artist "to translate the customs, the ideas, the appearance of my epoch according to my own estimation." In 1886 the Symbolist Manifesto was published in the French