On the formation of Swiss center of the Russian political exile in the early 1860s

This article analyzes the formation in Switzerland since the early 1860s center of Russian political emigration. During this period, the number of revolutionaries who went abroad from Russia due to the inability to continue its activities in the homeland is increasing dramatically. This is directly related to the enhancement of the opposition movement in the country and countermeasures of the tsarist government. Anyone who intends to emigrate had to decide for themselves the question of the moral and material aspects of the process. Among the revolutionaries there are two attitudes toward emigration. The first, represented by N. Chernyshevsky, members of a secret organization «Young Russia» and some others, considered emigration impossible for yourself or for personal reasons or because of the inability, in their view, to effectively continue the struggle against the tsarist autocracy. Other represented A. Serno-Solovyevich and some participants revolutionary groups believed that in emigration they can build entire interaction with their comrades in Russia and help through prints, which could be abroad to write about the most urgent issues of Russian reality. Switzerland was not the first center of the Russian political emigration. Attempts to concentrate immigrants in certain places occurred earlier. Thus, in the 1850s . similar center was London, where lived such outstanding figures as A. Gertzen and N. Ogarev. Subsequently, an attempt to create one of the centers of Russian emigration took students at Heidelberg University.