The emancipation of the serfs in 1861 did not suddenly end the state of grim rural poverty in Russia, and the autocracy headed by the Tsar of Russia and the nobles around him, as well as the privileged state bureaucracy, remained in firm control of the nation's economy from which it extracted pecuniary benefits. By the beginning of the 1870s, dissent regarding the established political and economic order had begun to take concrete form among many members of the intelligentsia, which sought to foster a modern and democratic society in Russia in place of the economic backwardness and political repression which marked the old regime.