It favored the use of secret society-led terrorism as an attempt to violently destabilize the Russian Empire and provide a focus for popular discontent against it for an insurrection, justified "as a means of exerting pressure on the government for reform, as the spark that would ignite a vast peasant uprising, and as the inevitable response to the regime's use of violence against the revolutionaries". The group developed ideas—such as assassination of the "leaders of oppression"—that were to become the hallmark of subsequent violence by small non-state groups, and they were convinced that the developing technologies of the age—such as the invention of dynamite, of which they were the first anarchist group to have made widespread use—enabled them to strike directly and with discrimination.