Deborah Pearl. Creating a Culture of Revolution: Workers and the Revolutionary Movement in Late Imperial Russia.

Abstract

Deborah Pearl’s purpose in Creating a Culture of Revolution: Workers and the Revolutionary Movement in Late Imperial Russia is to reexamine the history of the Russian revolutionary movement over the period from the early 1870s to 1905, approaching the subject from a different perspective from that used by most scholars who have previously addressed it. She focuses not on the whole range of activity of the leading revolutionary groups (Land and Liberty, the People’s Will, the Black Repartition) but on the role of workers in the movement, and on the subculture that developed in the numerous workers’ circles that sprang up in St. Petersburg, Moscow, and many provincial towns and cities. Exposed in these circles, or kruzhki, to an education that enlightened and revolutionized them, workers formed a utopian vision of a socialist society characterized by solidarity, equality, and social justice. It was a vision they expected the eventual revolution to realize. By studying the revolutionary movement from this point of view, Pearl hopes to show how the workers, usually aided by propagandists from the intelligentsia, developed “the revolutionary outlook and the level of political consciousness and organizational experience that made them the crucial political and social force in the revolutions of 1905 and 1917” (1).