The Petrashevskii affair has usually been seen in the West as an insignificant and slightly comic episode. The Petrashevtsy have been regarded as a handful of unconditional admirers of French socialism, whose activities were not related in either a theoretical or a practical manner to the development of the Russian revolutionary movement. As a result they have, until recently, been largely ignored by scholars. Interest in them is now beginning to develop, but there is still very little written on the subject. In the Soviet Union, by contrast, a great deal of attention has been paid to the Petrashevtsy, but their ideas have suffered the ideological distortion with which all pre-Marxian socialist thought in Russia has been viewed. The aim of this article is to take a fresh look at the Petrashevtsy and clear away some of the misconceptions that have crept into the analysis of their circles.