In this excellent study, Tat΄iana Saburova and Ben Eklof examine the life of the radical Nikolai Charushin as a window onto the social and cultural history of the Populist movement. Born in 1851, Charushin became a member of the Chaikovtsy circle, stood trial for revolutionary agitation and was sentenced in 1878 to 17 years exile in Siberia. Both in Siberia and after his return to Viatka in 1895, Charushin made a career as a photographer, zemstvo insurance broker, and newspaper editor. The existing literature on Populism usually focuses on revolutionary activity in the 1870s and (sometimes) the experience of exile in the 1880s and 1890s but has little to say about the later fortunes of a generation many of whom lived into the 1920s and 1930s. By contrast, the authors engage with a range of studies, from those examining the radical movement of the 1860s and 1870s, the exile to Siberia of the regime's opponents, the zemstvo movement, the new age of pseudo-constitutional politics after 1905, to the ideological struggles of the 1920s and the fate of the Populists and their legacy under the Soviet regime.
Saburova and Eklof follow a conventional biographical narrative that maps out the key stages in Charushin's life and draws heavily on his memoirs, but they are careful to maintain a wider analytical lens throughout, citing writings and letters of Charushin's fellow radicals including Vera Figner and Sergei Sinegub to examine the history of the generation of the 1870s. This generational identity lay at the heart of the social movement and “expressed the interests of a young generation that revolted against the power of its “fathers” and strove for their own place in a new hierarchy.” Yet the rhetoric of generations also served “to consolidate social solidarity” within that emerging group during a prolonged period of social upheaval (413). The “ethical rationalism” (11) of this cohort bound it together but so did its treatment by the authorities. The arrest and imprisonment of Charushin and his comrades in the wake of the failed going-to-the-people movement in 1873–74 was a defining experience that cemented their collective identity.
Charushin emerges as a self-critical individual, responsive to the changing political situation in the empire. Four years of solitary confinement awaiting trial did not break him (he was one of those who put his signature to a document calling on Russia's youth to join the revolution), but it did force him to ponder “his revolutionary experience, the means of struggling with the authorities and to understand his own limited resources” (157). This critical self-awareness helps explain Charushin's readiness both in Siberia and later, after his return to Viatka in 1895, as a zemstvo official and then as an editor to pursue the “small deeds” of civic activism and state service.
Indeed, the post-exile activities of Charushin and some of his comrades within the zemstvo movement offer a welcome corrective to views of educated society as irreconcilably divided between the proponents of reform and proponents of revolution. Moreover, many individuals moved between the zemstvo and state service, suggesting that the boundaries between state and civil society were decidedly porous in the final decades of the empire. Saburova and Eklof conclude: “State and society, the authorities and the opposition turn out to have been more closely linked, than has been thought. The manifest rupture between them was caused by the subsequent revolutionary upheavals” (419).
The closing chapters examine the “memory wars” that were fought repeatedly throughout the twentieth century over the political and cultural legacy of the Populists. Through their post-revolutionary Society of Former Political Penal Laborers and the journal, Penal Labor and Exile, which was devoted to recording the experiences of political exiles, the Populists championed a less dogmatic revolutionary narrative more concerned with individual freedom that was clearly in conflict with the increasing ideological intolerance of the Bolsheviks. They sought to deploy their own “symbolic capital” in order to press, for example, for the abolition of the death penalty in the new Soviet judicial system (374). In the second half of the twentieth century, the Populists' “belief that freedom and social justice were indivisible proved appealing to a new generation of intellectuals” (408). This richly researched and compelling study situates the Populists not only in the revolutionary movement of the 1870s and 1880s but also reintegrates them into the wider history of Russia.
