The organization promulgated a program which called for "complete freedom of conscience, speech, press, assembly, association, and electoral agitation". The group made the establishment of political freedom its top public objective, with the radical publicist N.K. Mikhailovsky (1842–1904) contributing two finely crafted "political letters" on the topic to two early issues of the party's official organ. The party declared its intention to lay down arms as soon as political concessions were made. There were no dreams of the organization forming the basis of a ruling party, with a fundamental hope maintained in the emergence of the self-governing village commune as the basis of a new socialist society.