Nikolay Lossky, the father of Vladimir Lossky, also made periodic contributions to the debate. For Semen Frank, as for Gershenzon and Struve, the intelligentsia's failure of leadership in the 1905 revolution warranted a reappraisal of their fundamental assumptions. His essay emphasised the nihilistic sources of the intelligentsia's utilitarianism: material progress and national education were always viewed as a means to another end. Moreover, he saw Russian Marxists as obsessed by a populist drive to perfect society through redistribution and faulted them for their penchant for dividing all humanity into friends and enemies. Gershenzon asserted, in the book's most controversial sentence, that "so far from dreaming of union with the people we ought to fear the people and bless this government which, with its prisons and bayonets, still protects us from the people's fury".