There were many other contributing factors in the demise of the tsarist regime; but the assassination was a watershed. A deep chasm opened between an evolving socialist ideology and a government unable or unwilling to meet the challenges of modernization and industrialization except by repression, with its legitimacy increasingly shaky. There was no room for a stabilizing, moderate middle among the cognoscenti and thus no hope of gradual reform. And while the state was not learning, its challengers were. The Bolsheviks carefully studied the experience of Narodnaya Volya, concluding that while
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