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Lev Tikhomirov was born in the Don province of Russia in 1850. As a student he was deeply influenced by the ideas of Sergei Nechayev and joined the People's Will group.

In 1880 there was strong disagreement in People's Will about the purposes of terrorism. One faction that included Nikolai Morozov and Olga Liubatovich, argued that the main objective was to force the government to grant democratic rights to the people of Russia. However, another faction, led by Tikhomirov, believed that it was possible for a small group of revolutionaries to use terrorism in order to directly capture power.

Olga Liubatovich and Nikolai Morozov strongly disagreed with the ideas of Lev Tikhomirov. They argued that this was an example of Jacobinism and would result in the kind of dictatorship that had taken place after the French Revolution. Liubatovich and Morozov left the organization and Tikomirov's views prevailed.

After the assassination of Alexander II Tikhomirov fled from Russia. Tikhomirov lived in several European countries and published biographies of Sophia Perovskaya, Andrei Zhelyabov and Nikolai Kibalchich.

In 1888 Tikhomirov apologized for his past revolutionary activities and was allowed to return to Russia. He now became an opponent of reform and became one of Russia's leading right-wing journalists.

Lev Tikhomirov died in 1922.

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(1) Olga Liubatovich wrote about her disagreements with Lev Tikhomirov in her memoirs published in 1907.

During the debates, the question of Jacobinism - seizing power and ruling from above, by decree - was raised. As I saw it, the Jacobin tinge that Tikhomirov gave to his program for the Executive Committee gave to his program for the Executive Committee threatened the party and the entire revolutionary movement with moral death; it was a kind of rebirth of Nechaevism, which had long since lost moral credit in the revolutionary world. It was my belief that the revolutionary idea could be a life-giving force only when it was the antithesis of all coercion - social, state, and even personal coercion, tsarist and Jacobin alike. Of course, it was possible for a narrow group of ambitious men to replace one form of coercion or authority by another. But neither the people nor educated society would follow them consciously, and only a conscious movement can impart new principles to public life.

At this point, Morozov announced that he considered himself free of any obligation to defend a program like Tikhomirov's in public. I too, declared that it was against my nature to act on the basis of compulsion; that once the Executive Committee had taken on a task - the seizure of state power - that violated my basic principles, and once it had recourse in its organizational practice to autocratic methods fraught with mutual distrust, then I, too, reclaimed my freedom of action.