> The middle class helped spark the revolution hoping that the proletariat would come around eventually. That resulted in several decades of false starts by wh

> The middle class helped spark the revolution hoping that the proletariat would come around eventually. That resulted in several decades of false starts by what Krein would call the Russian "secondary elite", in the form of the Narodniks, in the 1870s and 1880s. They had almost zero experience with the real "narod", only an idealized mental picture, and when they moved out of the big cities into the countryside (where the majority of the poor, Russia being vastly unindustrialised, lived), most of them got homesick and went back again.