1. Most notably Wildman, Allan K., The Making of a Workers’ Revolution: Russian Social Democracy, 1891–1903 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967 Google Scholar; Zelnik, Reginald E., “Russian Bebels: An Introduction to the Memoirs of Semen Kanatchikov and Matvei Fisher,” Russian Review 35, no. 3 (1976): 249–60, and no. 4 (1976): 417–48CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Naimark, Norman, Terrorists and Social Democrats: The Russian Revolutionary Movement under Alexander III (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1983 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; McDaniel, Tim, Autocracy, Capitalism, and Revolution in Russia (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988 Google Scholar.

2. A remarkable, recent exception (which, unfortunately, appeared too late to be utilized for this article) is Zelnik, Reginald E., “On the Eve: Life Histories and Identities of Some Revolutionary Workers, 1870–1905,” in Making Workers Soviet: Power, Class, and Identity, eds. Siegelbaum, Lewis H. and Suny, Ronald Grigor (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994), 27–65.Google Scholar

3. Pervaia vseobshchaia perepis’ naseleniia Rossiiskoi imperii … 1897 goda, vol. 6, Viadimirskaia guberniia, pt. 2 (St. Petersburg: Tipo-lit, 1904), prilozhenie; Gosudarstvennyi arkhiv Ivanovskoi oblasti (hereafter GAIO), f. 4, op. 1, d. 369, 1. 3 ob; d. 613, 1. 30; d. 903, 1. 30. On Ivanovo-Voznesensk in general, see Susan M. Vorderer, “Urbanization and Industrialization in Late Imperial Russia: Ivanovo-Voznesensk, 1880–1914” (Ph.D. diss., Boston College, 1990).

4. On Ivanovo-Voznesensk in 1905, see Ascher, Abraham, The Revolution of 1905, vol. 1: Russia in Disarray (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988), 144–50Google Scholar; Vorderer, “Urbanization and Industrialization,” 676–88; Gard, William G., “The Party and the Proletariat in Ivanovo-Voznesensk, 1905,” Russian History 2 (1975): 101–23CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Dave Pretty, “Neither Peasant nor Proletarian: The Workers of the Ivanovo-Voznesensk Region, 1885–1905” (Ph.D. diss., Brown University, 1995). For Lenin's invocations during the civil war, see Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 5th ed. (Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel'stvo politicheskoi literatury, 1958–65), 37: 426, 461; 38: 67, 70n, 71, 203; 39: 239; 40: 200, 274, 296, 321.

5. The relative paucity of intellectuals among Ivanovo-Voznesensk social democrats is confirmed by David Lane's brief survey of the local movement in his The Roots of Russian Communism: A Social and Historical Study of Russian Social-Democracy 1898–1907 (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1968), 133–46.

6. Most of those discussed in this article became social democrats; even the major exception, Avenir Nozdrin, remained politically active. However, worker activism should not be read as synonymous with revolutionary opposition; see Mark D. Steinberg's description of a flourishing segment of the printing industry in Russia that might be described as apolitically active, urging worker self-improvement and even some betterment of their work conditions but within the framework of existing social relations (Moral Communities: The Culture of Class Relations in the Russian Printing Industry, 1867–1907 [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992], 89–122 and passim). Furthermore, reflecting trends visible elsewhere in the empire, many Ivanovo activists who later became fervent revolutionaries did not perceive their early participation in marxist circles as necessarily political; Roman Semenchikov gave an eloquent description of the transformation of peaceful “economist” into committed revolutionary effected by the crucible of prison and exile in Riabinin, A. N., Material dlia biografii R.M. Semenchikova (1877–1911) ([Moscow]: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel'stvo, 1922), 12–15.Google Scholar

7. The factors discussed here are not, of course, the sole determinants of activists’ careers. Differences in skill, pay, education, age, sex, family economic standing, strength of ties to the countryside and ethnicity all played roles in shaping workers’ worldviews and degrees of activism, as did such important conjunctural events as depressions and booms, wars and revolutions, strikes and riots. The stress here, however, is on factors at a more fundamental level than material and conjunctural ones, and which may have helped mold how the latter were perceived and experienced.

8. On Nechaev, see Gleason, Abbott, Young Russia: The Genesis of Russian Radicalism in the 1860s (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 337–89Google Scholar; Pomper, Philip, Sergei Nechaev (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1979 Google Scholar. On a branch of the populist “movement to the people” that briefly operated in the city in 1875, see E. Korol'chuk, intr., “Pis'ma G.F. Zdanovicha,” Krasnyi arkhiv no. 1/20 (1927): 186; Rabochee dvizhenie v Rossii v XIX veke, vol. 2, pt. 2 ([Moscow]: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel'stvo politicheskoi literatury, 1950), 28–47; Ocherki istorii Ivanovshoi organizatsii KPSS, part 1: 1892–1917 (hereafter Ocherki 10 KPSS), ([Ivanovo]: Ivanovskoe knizhnoe izdatel'stvo, 1963), 23–25.

9. Ocherki 10 KPSS, 31–33; N.V. Malitskii, “'Tainoe obshchestvo’ v gor. Ivanovo-Voznesenske v 90-kh godakh XIX stoletiia,” Trudy Ivanovo-Voznesenskogo gubemskogo nauchnogo obshchestva kraevedeniia, no. 3: Itogi kraevednoi raboty gubernii v dokladakh pervoi gubernskoi kraevedcheskoi konferentsii (Ivanovo-Voznesensk: Ivanovo-Voznesenskoe gubernskoe obshchestvo kraevedeniia, 1925), 175–77; Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi arkhiv literatury i iskusstva (hereafter RGALI), f. 352, op. 1, d. 2, 1. 294–316; 353–72. The first opis' of this last-named fond consists of the manuscript memoirs of Avenir Nozdrin, the chair of the Ivanovo-Voznesensk soviet of workers’ deputies in 1905 and a member of Slukhovskii's circle. They were written in 1936 and 1937, just before their author was “repressed.” They are invaluable not only for what they say but for the editorial process still visible in them: the excisions, additions and revisions provide an illuminating account of what was permissible in Stalin-era memoirs and what was not.

10. Shesternin, S. P., Perezhitoe: iz istorii rabochego i revoliutsionnogo dvizheniia 1880–1900 (Ivanovo: Ivanovskoe oblastnoe gosudarstvennoe izdatel'stvo, 1940), 94–96 Google Scholar; Bagaev, M. A., Moia zhizn': vospominaniia ivanovtsa bol'shevika-podpol'shchika ([Ivanovo]: Ivanovskoe oblastnoe gosudarstvennoe izdatel'stvo, 1949), 34–35.Google Scholar

11. Shesternin, Perezhitoe, 96–98 (quote 98); Bagaev, Moia zhizn', 30–35; RGALI, f. 352, op. 1, d. 2, 1. 379, 410.

12. Bagaev, Moia zhizn', 33; Shesternin, Perezhitoe, 98; Ocherki 10 KPSS, 36–37.

13. Shesternin, Perezhitoe, 98; Bagaev, Moia zhizn', 40.

14. Shesternin, Perezhitoe, 104–5; Bagaev, Moia zhizn', 53.

15. McDaniel, Autocracy, Capitalism, 183.

16. Ibid., 185.

17. Walzer, Michael, The Revolution of the Saints: A Study in the Origins of Radical Politics (1965; reprint, New York: Atheneum, 1974), 218.Google Scholar

18. As Victoria E. Bonnell has pointed out, “In a labor force dominated by semiskilled and unskilled workers, many of them fresh from the countryside, the possession of a skill acquired through prolonged training gave workers a feeling of mastery, selfrespect, and control over the work process” (Roots of Rebellion: Workers’ Politics and Organizations in St. Petersburg and Moscow, 1900–1914 [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983], 52).

19. McDaniel, Autocracy, Capitalism, 194.

20. See Zelnik, Reginald E., trans, and ed., A Radical Worker in Tsarist Russia: The Autobiography of Semen Ivanovich Kanatchikov (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1986 Google Scholar. A recent study offering much insight on St. Petersburg metalworkers is Hogan, Heather, Forging Revolution: Metalworkers, Managers, and the State in St. Petersburg, 1890–1914 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993.Google Scholar

21. Bagaev, Moia zhizn', 29, 34–37; Ivanovskoe gosudarstvennoe istoriko-kraevedcheskoe ob “edinenie muzeev oblasti imeni D.G. Burylina (hereafter IGIKOM), Nauchnyi arkhiv, d. 2396, 1. 1.

22. Gosudarstvennyi arkhiv Rossiiskoi Federatsii, f. 102, DP OO, 1898, d. 5, ch. 44, lit. B, 1. 21 ob-22.

23. Pervyi v Rossii: Ivanovo-Voznesenskii obshchegorodskoi sovet rabochikh deputatov 1905 goda v dokumentakh i vospominaniiakh (Moscow: Sovetskaia Rossiia, 1975), 239–49.

24. GAIO, f. 4, op. 1, d. 903, 1. 32 ob-33 ob.

25. McDaniel, Autocracy, Capitalism, 195. This Puritan-like ethic of sober self-discipline and pride in work was not restricted to skilled workers. Fedor Afanas'ev, a veteran of the earliest marxist circles in St. Petersburg and an important figure in Ivanovo Social Democracy from 1897 until he was beaten to death by Black Hundreds in October 1905, was a weaver all his life. However, one of his employers, Ivanovo factory owner D.G. Burylin, recalled that “I considered him one of most diligent workers. He always treated his work at the loom seriously and attentively. He was a rarity among workers, always sober and neat. The governor and police and gendarmes often inquired after him but I could never say anything but good about him” ( Vlasov, I. I., Tkach Fedor Afanas'ev [1859–1905]: Materialy dlia biografii [Ivanovo-Voznesensk: Osnova, 1925], 35 Google Scholar).

26. Bagaev, Moia zhizn', 12.

27. Shesternin, Perezhitoe, 119–20. Shesternin was a partial exception to the paucity of social democratic intellectuals in Ivanovo-Voznesensk. He was a city judge from 1893 through 1897 and provided a great deal of logistical support to the local social democratic circles. However, because of his high visibility, he played a minute role in the actual work of these circles.

28. Ibid., 112.

29. Bagaev, Moia zhizn', 27, 35.

30. Ibid., frontispiece; Ocherki 10 KPSS, 39.

31. Bagaev, Moia zhizn', 64–65; Shesternin, Perezhitoe, 168–69.

32. Another example among these men's contemporaries, although not sharing quarters with them, was Aleksandr Orekhov. The son of an Ivanovo weaving foreman and himself a metalworker, he was arrested in 1896 and subsequently exiled to Rostovon-Don. Unable to get a job, he fell into a deep depression and carried out a suicide pact with a young woman dying of consumption in 1899 when he was 25 (Shesternin, Perezhitoe, 169–70).

33. The reader may note that I often seem to use “sectarian,” “schismatic” and “Old Believer” interchangeably. This is neither to ignore nor deny the sizable and important differences within the Old Belief proper and between it and the multitude of religious sects, some of them of Old Believer origin, others not, that were profuse in late imperial Russia. Rather, this terminological vagueness is a function of sources that themselves often neither distinguish between these currents and sects nor provide enough information for the historian to do so.

34. For a succinct description of these problems, see Manfred Hildermeier, “Alter Glaube und neue Welt: Zur Sozialgeschichte des Raskol im 18. und 19. Jahrhundert,” Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas 38, no. 3 (1990): 372–77.

35. As mentioned above, Pistsovo was the hometown of the Workers’ Union's founder, Fedor Kondrat'ev.

36. B.V. Aleksandrov, M.P. Sokol'nikov and P.M. Ekzempliarskii, comps., Nash krai: istoriko-kul'turnyi sbornik (Ivanovo-Voznesensk: Osnova, 1926), 90. See also Hildermeier, Manfred, “Alter Glaube und Mobilitat: Bemerkungen zur Verbreitung und sozialen Struktur des Raskol im fruhindustriellen RuBland (1760–1860),” Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas 39, no. 3 (1991): 329–30Google Scholar; Ekzempliarskii, P. M., Istoriia goroda Ivanovo, part 1: Dooktiabr'skii period ([Ivanovo]: Ivanovskoe knizhnoe izdatel'stvo, 1958), 59, 79–80 Google Scholar; Razgon, A.M., ed., “Opisania promyshlenno-torgovykh sel Ivanova i Vasil'evskogo, sostavlennye krest'ianami-zemskimi votchinnykh pravlenii,” Materialy po istorii SSSR, vol. 5, Dokumenty po istorii XVIII veka (Moscow: Izdatel'stvo Akademii nauk SSSR, 1957), 319 Google Scholar. Suggestively, nakazy to Catherine II from the city residents of Shuia and nearby laroslavl’ went out of their way to raise the question of rights for Old Believers (Igor Smolitsch, Geschichte der russischen Kirche, vol. 2, ed. Gregory L. Freeze, Forschungen zur Osteuropaischen Geschichte, vol. 45 [Berlin: Otto Harassowitz, 1991], 182 n. 612).

37. On the formation of the edinoverie, see P.S. Smirnov's tendentious but generally accurate Istoriia russkago raskola staroobriadstva, 2nd. ed. (1895; reprint Westmead, Hants.: Gregg International Publishers, 1971), 207–16; Madariaga, Isabel de, Russia in the Age of Catherine the Great (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981), 517–18.Google Scholar

38. Rieber, Alfred J., Merchants and Entrepreneurs in Imperial Russia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982), 141.Google Scholar

39. On the inflationary effect this legislation had on edinoverie membership, see Smirnov, Istoriia russkago rascola, 266 ff. The same source also discusses various changes in government policies, albeit from a pro-state and pro-church position (217–28). Many of these problems are also discussed in Waldron, Peter, “Religious Toleration in Late Imperial Russia,” in Civil Rights in Imperial Russia, eds. Ol'ga Crisp and Linda Edmondson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), 103–19.Google Scholar

40. GAIO, f. 4, op. 1, d. 903, 1. 30 ob, 32; the entry for Old Believers is “churches and molel'ni,” which can be translated as “meeting houses.” On the difficulties of counting Old Believers, see Hildermeier, “Alter Glaube und Mobilität,” 322–24. Although historians have generally been indifferent to the Old Belief and various sects, the Orthodox Church itself seems to have perceived them as growing threats of the first order; see Gregory L. Freeze, ‘ “Going to the Intelligentsia': The Church and Its Urban Mission in Post-Reform Russia,” in Between Tsar and People: Educated Society and the Quest for Public Identity in Late Imperial Russia, eds. Edith W. Clowes, Samuel D. Kassow and James L. West (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), 222, 232, as well as idem., The Parish Clergy in Nineteenth-Century Russia: Crisis, Reform, Counter-Reform (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), xxvi and passim. At the turn of the century, government statisticians counted 3, 215 Old Believers in Shuia county. Of these, 35.4% did not indicate what kind of Old Belief they followed, 50.1% were “priested” (popovtsy, recognizing priests trained in Orthodox seminaries) and 14.1% were bespopovtsy, seeing no priests as legitimate and getting by without them; only seven individuals were members of rational sects. This was quite a change from Vladimir province as a whole, where 46.2% admitted to being bespopovtsy, 14.3% to being popovtsy, 3.2% to membership in rational sects, and 104 (0.3%) in mystical sects. Their percentage of the county's population as a whole was 1.31%, as opposed to 2.52% for the province, 2.26% for European Russia, and 2.49% for the empire (Raspredelenie staroobriadtsev i sektantov po tolkam i sektam [St. Petersburg, 1901], 2–3, 11). The figures from the 1897 census for Shuia county (which are almost but not exactly the same) show the following breakdown: Ivanovo-Voznesensk, 0.8%; Shuia city, 1.6%; Shuia county outside the cities, 1.4% (Pervaia vseobshchaia perepis', vol. 6, pt. 2, 84–85). Given the region's history and the strength of the schism in its labor catchment area, I find these figures unconvincingly low, reflecting a severe undercounting of priestless schismatics and, possibly, an increased rate of conversion to edinoverie, figures for which are not separated from those for Orthodoxy. This last is somewhat supported by statistical data from 1876: while Ivanovo-Voznesensk had just over 10% of Vladimir province's urban population, it had three quarters of its urban edinoverie and three fifths of its urban Old Believer population. In addition, of 82 members of the edinoverie clergy (and their families) living in Vladimir province, 59 lived in Shuia county, half of them in Ivanovo-Voznesensk (Ezhegodnik Vladimirskago gubernskago statisticheskago komiteta 3 [1880]: attached tables I and II).

41. RGALI, d. 352, op. 1, d. 1, 1. 66. This was edited to read, “were not believers, and rarest of all in Ivanovo were religious working women [religioznykh rabotnits]. “

42. Ibid., 1. 45–47. Apparently, the Orthodox owner, Shodchin, responded to the crisis of mechanization not by adapting technically but by trying to teach his printers the “Orthodox god.” The only effect was to make them pay more for beer, since he kept them after work and they were only let out after the bars had closed; as a result, they had to resort at a premium to bootleggers.

43. Ibid., 1. 88, 135, 138, 207. While persecutions of edinovertsy seem to have been of exceeding rarity, the episode is reminiscent of those times when, as Hildermeier noted, Old Believers “acted outside the current law, in that they took on deserters and sent them off with false papers to a new life, usually as meshchane.” One is reminded of other traits, such as home christening, when he continues: “One must surmise that these sorts of salvation from the teeth of the Antichrist were most likely practiced by priestless communities” (“Alter Glaube und Mobilität,” 336).

44. Ibid., 1. 16, 134. The Guzova cross is discussed on 1. 180; it is not clear whether its proprietor was Nozdrin's maternal (Old Believer) or paternal (Orthodox) grandmother.

45. Ibid., 1. 64: “vtorili d'iakonu parodiei-pobasenkoi, vyshuchivaniem staroobriadcheskogo tona.” This page was crossed out in the manuscript.

46. Ibid., 1. 215, 223, 236. According to Nozdrin, many people wanted to follow his example but he chose only the two; when they left, “we were accompanied with such pomp, it was as if we were setting off to perform some sort of armed feats [ratnye podvigi]” (1. 244).

47. Smirnov, Istoriia russkago raskola, 113.

48. Hildermeier, “Alter Glaube und Mobilität,” 329.

49. Smirnov, Istoriia russkago, 114–18.; Shuia county, in which Ivanovo-Voznesensk was located, lay at the northern edge of Vladimir province, and bordered Iaroslavl’ and Kostroma provinces.

50. RGALI, f. 352, op. 1, d. 1, 1. 229–48.

51. Ibid., 1. 276, 280.

52. Nozdrin was not the only ivanovets of Old Believer background to become an activist; in the mid-1890s, Bagaev was living in an Old Believer household, where he was able to attract to socialism his landlady's granddaughter, Mariia Kapatsinskaia, who subsequently became the clerk in the bookstore the circle helped run (Bagaev, Moia zhizn', 38).

53. Shesternin, Perezhitoe, 110–11. Interestingly, Nozdrin first met Shchekoldin in a neighborhood bathhouse run by the son of a sexton, though of what denomination is not specified (RGALI, f. 352, op. 1, d. 1, 1. 328).

54. According to one Garavin descendent, Shchekoldin was betrayed to the police by the priest of the neighboring church. According to this source, the school was built by an uncle of Shchekoldin. One of the Garavins was described as an “unbeliever (neveruiushchii)” which an eager Soviet-era local historian glossed as “(atheist!)” although, given the context, other interpretations are possible (IGIKOM, Nauchnyi Arkhiv, d. 2396, 1. 1, 4).

55. Shesternin, Perezhitoe, 98, 112; Ocherki 10 KPSS, 56; Bagaev, Moia zhizri, 108, 110; Malitskii, ‘ “Tainoe obshchestvo, '” 179–80.

56. A. Riabinin, “Iz istorii rabochago dvizheniia v Ivano-Voznesenskom [sic] promyshlennom raione (1897–1900 g.g.): Istoricheskie sud'by sela Kokhmy i razvitie v nem krupnoi promyshlennosti,” Minuvshie gody 1, no. 5–6 (May-June 1908): 467. On buki-az-ba, the rote method of teaching the alphabet, see Eklof, Ben, Russian Peasant Schools: Officialdom, Village Culture, and Popular Pedagogy, 1861–1914 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), 41–43 Google Scholar. Matrena may well have been a chernichka, a “pious peasant [woman] who wished to live a life of prayer and dedicated celibacy [who because of the state's reduction of monastery openings] had to take up such a life on [her] own, within the interstices of village life … Russian peasant culture, being a religious culture, generally made room for” such women (Meehan-Waters, Brenda, “To Save Oneself: Russian Peasant Women and the Development of Women's Religious Communities in Prerevolutionary Russia,” in Russian Peasant Women, eds. Farnsworth, Beatrice and Viola, Lynne [New York: Oxford University Press, 1992], 122 Google Scholar).

57. Riabinin, “Iz istorii,” 469; emphasis in the original.

58. Ibid., 470.

59. It is worth noting that the maternal aunt of Semen Kanatchikov, the worker autobiographer, was an Old Believer; there is at least a good chance that his mother was also. His father, although religious, did not like priests and worked for many years in St. Petersburg hotels (see note 63 below on this point). Additionally, Savinov, the “conscious” worker who successfully broke Kanatchikov's faith, had only admiring things to say about the radical Dukhobor sect (Zelnik, A Radical Worker, 2, 5, 33, 145).

60. Hildermeier, “Alter Glaube und Mobilität,” 327, 334. Without having had an opportunity to examine Hildermeier's sources, it should be pointed out, especially in view of the failure of Dobrotvorskii (see next note) to mention the religious aspect, that adherence to the schism may have been an improper assumption about the ofeni; possibly their commercial journeys were confused with strannichestvo or any available perceived negative traits became ascribed to traveling “hucksters,” which is one translation often offered for ofeni.

61. N. Dobrotvorskii, “Krest'ianskie iuridicheskie obychai v vostochnoi chasti Vladimirskoi gubernii (Uezdy: Viaznikovskii, Gorokhovetskii, Shuiskii i Kovrovskii),” Iuridicheskii vestnik: part 1, “Brak,” 2nd decade, v. 28, bk. 2–3 (June-July 1888): 322–49; part 2, “Sem'ia, semeinye razdely i pravo nasledovaniia,” 3rd decade, v. 2, bk. 6–7 (June-July 1889): 261–93; pt. 3, “Veshchniia prava,” 3rd decade, v. 9, bk. 2 (October 1891): 197–208; pt. 4, “Prava po obiazatel'stvam,” 3rd decade, v. 9, bk. 3 (November 1891): 326–63. While the ofeni are discussed throughout, for the general description important here, see part 1, 341–43. Unfortunately, this source is completely silent on questions of Old Belief or sectarianism. It should also be noted that the region that Dobrotvorskii avers was the former center of the ofeni is scores of miles north of where Hildermeier places it.

62. Hildermeier, “Alter Glaube und Mobilität,” 335–38; quote from pg. 338.

63. Bagaev, Moia zhizn', 54. It should be noted that Hildermeier also considers innkeepers a highly schismatic group ( “Alter Glaube und Mobilität,” 333).

64. Bol'shevikov, P. and Gorbunov, G., Ol'ga Afanas'evna Varentsova (Moscow: Izdatel'stvo politicheskoi literatury, 1964), 3–5.Google Scholar

65. Crummey, Robert O., “Old Belief as Popular Religion: New Approaches,” Slavic Review 52, no. 4 (Winter 1993): 700–1.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

66. See page 288.

67. Ibid., 709, 708, 706. As regards the most easily measured mark of distinction, in Ivanovo-Voznesensk in 1897 56% of Orthodox males and 27% of Orthodox females were literate; the rate for Old Believers were 72% and 45%, respectively (Pervaia vseobshchaia perepis', v. 6, pt. 2, 84–85).

68. Vivid evidence of this can be found in a letter NoZdrin wrote to a friend in the 1920s: “The revolution of 1905 was a revolution of popular wrath and desperation, but that revolution was full of poetry; there are reasons that it is said we carried it out in song. The second revolution was a revolution of retribution, of fire, of correcting the mistakes of the first revolution. And if the second revolution has been unsuccessful, then we have to wait for the third, which should be a revolution of popular judgment, of the great word [velikoe slovd], where the great majority will sit in the dock.” (A copy of this letter, from the Gosudarstvennyi arkhiv Vladimirskoi oblasti, was shown to me by an employee of IGIKOM; unfortunately, the original reference was not available.)

69. By 1901, good grooming had become so identified with worker activism in Ivanovo that there was “a persecution of all workers who, being decently dressed, do not look completely stupid. Each owner has secretly ordered his directors to take on workers only after looking them over from head to toe. And if someone is well dressed, he is thrown out of the factory on his ear. Against one's will it has become necessary to dress in bums’ clothing” (Iskra no. 9 [October 1901], reprinted in Naputiakh kpobede: Revoliutsionnoe proshloe Ivanovskoi oblasti v osveshchenii bol'shevistskoi pechati 1901–1906 godov [(Ivanovo): Ivanovskoe oblastnoe gosudarstvennoe izdatel'stvo, 1940], 38). On abstinence, see note 72 below.

70. Walzer, Revolution, 317. Examples of early populists who attempted to exploit the perceived oppositional nature of the Old Belief are related in Field, Daniel, “Peasants and Propagandists in the Russian Movement to the People of 1874,” Journal of Modern History 59 (September 1987): 425–28, 434–35CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and passim; Gleason, Young Russia, 42, 182–84, 215–17; and Reginald E. Zelnik, ‘ “To the Unaccustomed Eye': Religion and Irreligion in the Experience of St. Petersburg Workers in the 1870s,” Russian History 16, no. 2–4 (1989): 299–300.

71. See also McDaniel, Autocracy, Capitalism, 201.

72. A greater tendency toward abstinence among more skilled workers had been apparent as early as the 1870s (see e.g. Hogan, Forging Revolution, 17). However, as will be made clear below, temperance became possibly the most important visible attribute of an activist worker; it was not just among worker leaders in the printing trades that “there was a virtual obsession with sobriety and self-discipline” (Steinberg, Moral Communities, 241).

73. RGALI, f. 352, op. 1, d. 1, 1. 175.

74. Ibid., d. 2, 1. 366.

75. Bagaev, Moia zhizn', 38. Kanatchikov's circle in St. Petersburg was much more circumspect: when organizing “socials,” they would “set up tea and some snacks; to avert the eyes of the police, we would also buy some vodka” (Zelnik, A Radical Worker, 103).

76. Barrington Moore, Jr., Injustice: The Social Bases of Obedience and Revolt (White Plains: M.E. Sharpe, 1978), 464.Google Scholar

77. Ibid., 54. Of course, abstinence from alcohol and tobacco were also aspects of this “aggression against the self. “

78. Completing Moore's trio of ascetic characteristics that included “aggression against the self” were “the renunciation of or escape from routine social obligations” and “especially prominent in Christianity … preparation for painful experiences that the individual can expect to encounter at some later point in time” (ibid.).

79. The image many activists had of women as sirens leading men off the true path of secular salvation neatly reflects the view of women as profoundly sexual temptresses that was one of the primary ideological justifications of peasant patriarchy; see Christine D. Worobec, “Temptress or Virgin? The Precarious Sexual Position of Women in Postemancipation Ukrainian Peasant Society,” Slavic Review 49, no. 2 (Summer 1990), 227–38.

80. Zelnik, A Radical Worker, 102. Writing after most revolutionary passions had cooled, Kanatchikov was almost defensive in explaining why activists’ lifestyles departed so much from the norm. Writing in prison in 1904, Roman Semenchikov gave a much rawer, indeed defiant defense of the ascetic path when he took issue with those who pitied him for having been arrested: “What would I have been if I had not been brought in? Well, a good-for-nothing lackey of some merchant, a dyeing master, an oppressor of other workers, a savage, self-satisfied, maybe well-off bumpkin [muzhik], a rich peasant [kulak], the husband of a stupid, pretty woman [baba, implicitly from the lower classes] and everything like that … I would have lived this wholesome (would you not say boorish?) life, eaten my fill, gotten drunk, played and so on. I would have given my old father, the despot, a chance to be a drunkard … Come, now! Bird brains! Honorable highly sheened idlers! Can I really compare this stupid, albeit sated, life with my life, full of sufferings and deprivations!” (Riabinin, Materialy, 5). This positive valuation of ascetic suffering was present in the writings of the very first Ivanovo-bred revolutionary: in the cited passage, Kanatchikov may even have been consciously repeating the first words of Nechaev's Revolutionary Catechism, which begins, “The revolutionary is a doomed man” and continues in an extremely ascetic vein (Gleason, Young Russia, 359).

81. Bagaev, Moia zhizn', 29–30.

82. Ibid., 39.

83. Ibid., 102.

84. Ibid., 102–5. This account is strikingly similar in form to an episode from a saint's life.

85. Zelnik, “Russian Bebels,” 278. Zelnik also goes on to describe psychological factors affecting such sentiments.

86. Morris, Marcia A., Saints and Revolutionaries: The Ascetic Hero in Russian Literature (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), 129–30.Google Scholar

87. Lotman, Iurii M., “The Poetics of Everyday Behavior in Eighteenth-Century Russian Culture,” in The Semiotics of Russian Cultural History, eds. Nakhimovsky, Alexander D. and Nakhimovsky, Alice Stone (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985), 74, 81.Google Scholar

88. For a definition of the ascetic hero, see Morris, Saints and Revolutionaries, 3–13 and, for a superb discussion of the medieval Russian archetype of the ascetic saint, 15–106.

89. Lotman, “Poetics of Everyday Behavior,” 85. See also his “The Decembrist in Daily Life (Everyday Behavior as a Historical-Psychological Category)” in the same volume.

90. In Russian, the word employed (strasti) also denominates the passion of Christ.

91. Smirnov, V., Na zare rabochego dvizheniiagor. Ivanovo-Voznesenska (1875–1905g.g.) (Vladimir: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel'stvo, 1921), 29 Google Scholar; ellipses in the original. Note the Kontwice-mentioned juxtaposition of the picture of the tsar and tsaritsa (not the emperor and empress!) and the carnivalesque world turned upside down of the mice burying the cat; on this last named, the most popular of all Russian lubki (popular woodcut prints), see Dianne Ecklund Farrell, “Medieval Popular Humor in Russian Eighteenth Century Lubki,” Slavic Review 50, no. 3 (Fall 1991): 560–62. The passage quoted is very similar to the description of his early life related by the future bolshevik duma member (and workmate of future historian Smirnov), Fedor Samoilov: his first readings were all religious and then branched out to such popular literature as “Bova Korolevich” and the like; he then read whatever he could get his hands on in the free reading rooms, “of which there were a few then [c. 1900].” He went there often after work in the company of two or three friends (including those who later joined political parties). He read whenever he had free time, during lunch breaks and at home, in a one-room apartment he shared with fifteen others, who constantly complained about the lamp he had burning. While he never mentions that he himself led an ascetic life, it is obvious both from his description of his own activities—primarily just reading “drunkenly [zapoem],” even on holidays—but of his peers: “At that same time my comrade workers, living in conditions identical to mine, in the same apartment as I did, lived the life of beasts of burden: they only knew that they slept, worked and ate, without knowing any intelligent [razumnye] diversions besides crude jokes, intrigues and sometimes drunkenness.” Of course, what he learned from his voracious reading set him off from his peers, who “laughed at me when I explained the causes of thunder, lightning, rain and other natural phenomena from a scientific point of view; they considered me ‘a person who had read far too much and been knocked off course [zachitavshiisia i sbivshiisia s puti], ’ although I, like them, was religious, went to church, acknowledging and observing all the rites of the cult, fasts, etc.” ( Samoilov, F. N., Vospominaniia ob ivanovo-voznesenskom rabochem dvizhenii 1903–1905 g.g. [Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel'stvo, 1922], 12, 14–15Google Scholar).

92. Just a handful of women are mentioned as political activists in this period and then generally in only auxiliary roles. The sole ivanovka who left memoirs was Ol'ga Varentsova; she, however, only wrote histories of a later period that were narrowly focused on ideological and political concerns. This sexual imbalance is especially striking in a region dominated by an industry—cotton textile production—that was becoming ever more feminized in this period (see Rose L. Glickman, Russian Factory Women: Workplace and Society, 1880–1914 [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984], 74–83). The reasons for this lie outside the purview of this article but certainly include lower rates of literacy and skill, family and household obligations, patriarchal expectations of female dependence and submissiveness, and the almost gynephobic self-denial of the ascetic activists discussed above; on the Russian “culture of patriarchy,” see Worobec, Christine D., Peasant Russia: Family and Community in the Post-Emancipation Period (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), 175–216 Google Scholar. It is worth noting that Russian Orthodoxy offered far fewer active role models to women than it did to men ( Hubbs, Joanna, Mother Russia: The Feminine Myth in Russian Culture [Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988], 265–66 n. 86Google Scholar).

93. As late as 1916, in even such a bailiwick of Old Belief as the diocese of Tomsk, only 12% of the population missed Orthodox confession and communion (Freeze, Parish Clergy, xxix n. 27); nationally, notwithstanding a visible decline after the revolution of 1905, these figures remained at very high levels, especially when compared to similar data for western Europe (idem., comments at the Imperial Russian history seminar, Russian Research Center, Harvard University, 17 March 1994). The strength of popular religiosity is also stressed in Zelnik, “'To the Unaccustomed Eye.' “

94. Shesternin, Perezhitoe, 96.

95. Bagaev, Moia zhizn', 30.

96. Ibid., 15–16.

97. Ibid., 18–19.

98. The continued vitality of religious imagery and formulations among worker activists is shown in Mark D. Steinberg's study, “Workers on the Cross: Religious Imagination in the Writing of Russian Workers, 1910–1924,” Russian Review 53 (April 1994): 213–39.

99. Bagaev, Moia zhizn1, 24.

100. Ibid., 36; Shesternin, Perezhitoe, 103.

101. Bagaev, Moia zhizn', 30, 37; Rabochee dvizhenie v Shuisko-Ivanovskom raione za poslednie 15 let (Geneva: Soiuz russkikh sotsial-demokratov, 1900), 22.

102. Shesternin, Perezhitoe, 131.

103. Riabinin, “Iz istorii,” 470, 475.

104. Shesternin, Perezhitoe, 12.

105. Bol'shevikov and Gorbunov, Varentsova, 4, 7.

106. Balashov, S, “Rabochee dvizhenie v Ivanovo-Voznesenske (1898–1905 gg.),” Proletarskaia revoliutsiia no. 9 (44) (September 1925): 147.Google Scholar

107. Riabinin, Materialy, 13. This pattern of youthful religiosity was not restricted to Ivanovo: one need only remember the young Kanatchikov falling asleep after several sleepless nights, only two thirds of the way through the forty readings of the psalter he thought would guarantee the delivery to heaven of his dead mother's soul (Zelnik, Radical Worker, 6).

108. Zelnik, Radical Worker, 24–25.

109. Bagaev, Moia zhizn', 36.

110. Riabinin, “Iz istorii,” 475.

111. There are many more—and more revealing—autobiographical and biographical sources on Ivanovo activists of the 1890s than on those who joined the labor movement after the turn of the century; a notable exception is Samoilov, Vospominaniia.

112. Zelnik, “ T o the Unaccustomed Eye, '” 316–18. One must assume that this experience would be much more likely and much more pronounced among those who already had some sort of religious calling, of a vocation for belief, who had imbibed the lives of the saints and were ready to identify a quest for knowledge with asceticism and zeal.

113. Riabinin, “Iz istorii,” 472; the emphasis on “chosen people” is added. Svetlyi, translated here as “clear,” also can mean “radiant” or “blessed” in spiritual senses of the words, or as an adjective for Easter. Zavetnyi, here “cherished,” comes from zavet, the noun in the Russian terms for the Old and New Testaments.

114. Ibid., Alb.

115. See also Zelnik, ‘ “To the Unaccustomed Eye, '” 319 ff.

116. Shesternin, Perezhitoe, 96. Interestingly, Bagaev remembers Kondrat'ev using a somewhat different tact, explaining how early man's inability to explain natural phenomenon had led some hypocritical men to pose as messengers of the gods and use the people's ignorance to oppress them; this explanation fits more in with Bagaev's version of his own loss of faith, which was finally destroyed by a priest who, when asked, did not explicitly confirm the deity's existence but said it was best to believe, just in case (Moia zhizn', 18, 30).

117. Balashov, “Rabochee dvizhenie,” 148.

118. Riabinin, “Iz istorii,” 468, 475.

119. Balashov, “Rabochee dvizhenie,” 148.

120. The reasons for this apparent vulnerability are beyond the scope of this article. On one hand, it may confirm the implication which Zelnik perceived in Moshe Lewin's article, “Popular Religion in Twentieth-Century Russia,” that pagan survivals and folk beliefs were so integral a part of popular Orthodoxy, forming a kind of dvoeverie, or double belief, “that their erosion would perforce destabilize a pupil's entire belief system” (the quote is from Zelnik, “'To the Unaccustomed Eye, '” 320; Lewin's article is in his The Making of the Soviet System: Essays in the Social History of Interwar Russia [New York: Pantheon, 1985], 57–71, especially 70–71). On the other hand, we are not dealing here with typical Russian Orthodox Christians but rather with those whose faith was much more driven, much more intense (if maybe not so deep), and ultimately more demanding on both believer and belief, than that of most of their peers.

121. See Shanin, Teodor, The Roots of Otherness: Russia's Turn of the Century, vol. 2, Russia, 1905–07: Revolution as a Moment of Truth (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986), 20, 166–67CrossRefGoogle Scholar. The unsurpassed exposition of the importance of marxism's “scientific” basis as an attraction for the revolutionaries is Haimson's, Leopold The Russian Marxists and the Origins of Bolshevism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1955 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

122. See chapter six of my “Neither Peasant nor Proletarian.” In Ivanovo, such literary and propaganda works as Looking Backward, the often reprinted courtroom speech of activist weaver Petr Alekseev, and Tsar'-Golod played important roles in attracting members of the Workers’ Union to socialism. Bellamy's novel seems to have been especially successful in this regard because it presented a fully imagined socialist society where everyone would be well educated, would be workers for most of their youths and would then have the leisure to be an intellectual for the rest of their lives; it promised a resolution of society's contradictions through which literate, bourgeoisified workers would not be the exception but the rule.

123. There were, of course, other roles that were not so well respected, such as the holy fool.

124. Morris, Saints and Revolutionaries, 212–13 n. 26, discussing Linda Ivanits's interpretation of Dostoevsky's fictional monk, Ferapont ( “Hagiography in Brat'ia Karamazovy: Zosima, Ferapont, and the Russian Monastic Saint,” Russian Language Journal 34 [1980]: 114). Morris also points out how at least one tradition within Orthodoxy “seemfs] to link asceticism and excessive pride” (Saints and Revolutionaries, 40, 200 n. 25).

125. McDaniel, Autocracy, Capitalism, 200–1. The quote from Kanatchikov is from a Russian edition of his memoirs; the interpolations in brackets are McDaniel's.

126. Ibid., 200, 203.