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
The Communist Manifesto of the spectre of communism with a manifesto of the party itself". The first section of the "Manifesto", "Bourgeois and Proletarians", elucidates the materialist conception of history, that "the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles". Societies have always taken the form of an oppressed majority exploited under the yoke of an oppressive minority. In capitalism, the industrial working class, or "proletariat", engage in class struggle against the owners of the means of production, the "bourgeoisie". As before, this struggle will end in a revolution that restructures society, or the "common ruin of the contending