the event, the Confederate raider did not attack. Soon after the war, Russia sold Alaska to the United States, in part because they felt that an influx of Americans searching for gold was inevitable, and in part to keep the British from seizing control of this vast region. Lincoln's Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles wrote in his diary, "The Russian fleet has come out of the Baltic and is now in New York, or a large number of the vessels have arrived…. In sending them to this country at this time there is something significant." Welles was fully justified in his famous concluding words, "God bless the Russians!". This exceedingly cordial Russo-American friendship set the tone of much nineteenth-century historiography Revolutionary movements Alexander II's reforms, particularly the lifting of state censorship, fostered the expression of political and social thought. The regime relied on journals and newspapers to gain support for its domestic and foreign policies. But liberal, nationalist, and radical writers also helped to mold public opinion in opposition to tsarism, to private property, and to the imperial state. Because many intellectuals, professionals, peasants, and workers shared these opposition sentiments, the regime regarded the publications and the radical organizations as dangerous. From the 1860s through the 1880s, Russian radicals, collectively known as "Populists" (Narodniki), focused chiefly on the peasantry, whom they identified as "the people" (narod). The leaders of the Populist movement included radical writers, idealists, and advocates of terrorism. In the 1860s, Nikolai Chernyshevsky, the most important radical writer of the period, posited that Russia could bypass capitalism and move directly to socialism. His most influential work, Что делать? (What Is to Be Done?, 1863), describes the role of an individual of a superior nature who guides a new, revolutionary generation. Other radicals such as the incendiary anarchist Mikhail Bakunin (1814-1876) and his terrorist collaborator, Sergey Nechayev (1847-1882), urged direct action. The calmer Petr Tkachev (1844-1886) argued against the advocates of Marxism, maintaining that a centralized revolutionary band had to seize power before capitalism could fully develop. Disputing his views, the moralist and individualist Petr Lavrov (1823-1900) made a call "to the people", which hundreds of idealists heeded in 1873 and 1874 by leaving their schools for the countryside to try to generate a mass movement among the narod. However, The Populist campaign failed when the peasants showed hostility to the urban idealists and the government began to