Stepniak

Stepniak ('Son of the Steppe'), the nom de guerre of an exiled leader of the Russian revolutionary party, was born in 1852 of an old Little Russian family called Kravchinsky. Sergius Mikhailovitch studied at Kieff, held a commission in the artillery, and in 1870-73 was a professor at Kieff; but having become obnoxious to the government, and believed to have been the assassin of General Mesentseff, head of the Russian police in 1878, he left Russia and settled (1876) in Geneva, and subsequently (1885) in London. He published in Russian many articles and works on the ethnography, history, folk-lore, and literature of Little Russia, and lectured and wrote for the magazines in England and America, but was best known as author of La Russia Sottcranca (Milan, 1881; Eng. trans. Underground Russia, 1883), sketches of the Nihilist movement and its leaders; of Russia under the Tsars (Eng. trans. 1885), a terrible indictment; and of The Carcer of a Nihilist, a novel (1889); Russian Wit and Humour (1894); Nihilism as it is (1894); King Stork and King Log (1895). With Kropotkin (q.v.) and Lavroff, he was one of the heads of the Nihilist party. See NIHILISM. He was run over by a train near London, 23d Dec. 1895.