Underground Petersburg: Radical Populism, Urban Space, and the Tactics of Subversion in Reform-Era Russia by Christopher Ely (review)

Abstract

SEER, 95, 4, OCTOBER 2017 772 Elsewhere, davit´ ikh vsekh nado — a fair approximation of which might be ‘we need to crush them all’ — is rendered as ‘everything is necessary to crush them’ (p. 50), and the verb prikhodit´sia produces the line ‘I don’t want to hope that it will come to me to live a long time here’ (p. 81). Such mistakes, typographical errors and stylistic infelicities abound throughout, testing the reader’s patience. These shortcomings notwithstanding, however, Badcock deserves credit for having produced an assiduous, enlightening and admirably humane piece of scholarship, one that adds greatly to our understanding of a hitherto obscure and understudied aspect of Russia’s imperial experience. London Ben Phillips Ely, Christopher. Underground Petersburg: Radical Populism, Urban Space, and the Tactics of Subversion in Reform-Era Russia. Northern Illinois University Press, DeKalb, IL, 2016. xi + 325 pp. Illustrations. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $39.00: £27.50 (paperback). Revolutionary populism of the mid nineteenth century has been well served by historical writing. Soviet historiography saw the seeds of Bolshevik Marxism in the tactics of insurgency used by radicals in the nineteenth century. Magisterial studies by Franco Venturi and Avrahm Yarmolinsky provided thorough accounts of the ideology, strategy and tactics of populist and socialist movements in mid-nineteenth-century Russia. The number of chroniclers is unsurprising, as the story of the populists was a dramatic one that illuminates diversefieldsincludingradicalpolitics,publicspectacleandtheuseofterrorism. Significant acts included the ‘going to the people’ movement in 1874 and the successful use of regicide by the People’s Will in 1881. Christopher Ely’s new work seeks to combine this well-worn narrative of insurgent struggle against tsarist autocracy with an exploration of the dynamics of the developing urban environment. His contribution is to challenge analyses of populism that see the struggle as primarily ideological — instead, Ely focuses on environmental and strategic factors as key to understanding the populists; particularly, he focuses much attention on the development of the revolutionary underground as a space for populist mobilization. Drawing on Foucault, Ely conceptualizes St Petersburg as a battleground where power could be won or lost; he considers the urban environment to be a ‘heterotopia’ where the legitimacy of the state could be successfully challenged by insurgency due to the layout of the city. In Ely’s words, ‘by similarly isolating radical populism from any all-embracing justification, or lack thereof, we can more easily see it as rooted both in a specific time and place and in the development of a discrete set of practices that did not require coherent ideological scaffolding’ (p. 17). The transition from a REVIEWS 773 rural to urban setting during the 1870s transformed the tactics of the populists as they sought to use the city space to aid their cause. Ely convincingly argues that public space gave opponents of the autocracy a new space in which they could refine their arguments and techniques of resistance. The novelty and emotional attraction of the populist message led to a number of supporters being recruited to the cause. Ely assesses the development of revolutionary populism from 1855–81 across eight tightly focused chapters. To demonstrate his arguments, Ely draws on a wide variety of source materials, including archival documents and, usefully, voluminous quotations from the populists themselves, and engages widely with the secondary literature on the subject. In an interesting chapter, Ely examines how revolutionary insurgency was in effect performed through a series of public events. The first was the emergence of mass demonstrations. The demonstrations that accompanied the Balkan Crisis of 1875–76, in spite of their support for autocracy, showed the potential for public disorder. More crucial to this story was the appearance of a number of ‘red funerals’ held for deceased populists during 1876. Following these funerals was the infamous trial of Vera Zasulich in 1878, which allowed for a public articulation of the populist message (p. 164). Realizing its mistake in allowing these non-autocratic voices to be aired, the government sought to drive the populist movement underground. Close monitoring in the following decade meant populists were largely restricted to a revolutionary underground, using the passport system, fake identities and communal housing to evade capture. The populists...