Almost exactly a century ago, Russia saw the burgeoning of a tradition of revolutionary violence that was not to bear fruit until 1917 but that even in those earlier times deeply affected the Russian people. In this magisterial and exciting book, Adam Ulam offers a brilliant history of Russian political and intellectual life in those critical decades from 1855 to 1884 and describes the successive conspiracies that shook the edifice of tsarist autocracy. Mr. Ulam's dramatic and densely detailed story is suggestive of many themes that seem strikingly modern: the rebellion of a younger generation, women's liberation, the struggle for sexual freedom, intellectuals' dissent, the political role of ethnic minorities. But above all his book is about extraordinary groups of extraordinary people - the radicals, dissenters, writers, students, and activists who in the name of the people called for revolution in Russia. What kind of revolution, and engineered by whom? The debate began when Alexander Herzen and Nicholas Chernyshevsky were the major leaders of dissent in Russia under Nicholas I, and Mr. Ulam opens his history with these three towering figures. But during the reign of Alexander II, the Tsar Liberator, younger challengers seized the radical initiative, and they are the principals in Mr. Ulam's drama - Karakozov, who tried to kill the emperor in 1866; the members of Land and Freedom; the co-conspirators with Nechayev, who was the model for Dostoyevsky's The Possessed; and the People's Will, which on its eighth attempt succeeded in assassinating the Tsar in 1881. Were these radical conspiracies seriously planned and purposeful attempts at revolution, or just madcap enterprises? Real underground political parties or merely emotional groups of hotheaded youngsters? Were the Russian peasants in fact ready to "lift the ax" and rise in nationwide revolt? Mr. Ulam includes many brilliantly conceived portraits of revolutionary intellectuals and activists - Bakunin, Vera Figner, Nicholas Obruchev, and literally dozens of others - and a skillful interpretation of the events, mysterious and tangled to this very date, of which they were a part. Other intriguing and dramatic issues - where does one draw the line between revolutionary terrorism and crime? between fanatacism on behalf of a cause and madness? - add further depth and meaning to this clearsighted and dramatic history. - Dust jacket.