Questions for discussion:

What were the sources of protest and unrest in the late Imperial period? How did policies of industrialisation and modernisation contribute this development? How might we account for the development of a politically active working class?

Set reading (to be prepared for class discussion):

Source: R. E. Zelnik, ed. and trans., A Radical Worker in Tsarist Russia: The Autobiography of Semen Ivanovich Kanatchikov (Stanford, 1986). Extracts from Part 1, pp. 27-49, 65-74. Scan available here.

Barbara Alpern Engel, “Russian Peasant Views of City Life, 1861-1914,” Slavic Review 52, no. 3 (1993), pp. 446–59.

Mark D. Steinberg, ‘Culture and Class in a Russian Industry: The Printers of St. Petersburg, 1860-1905’, Journal of Social History, 23 (1990), pp. 513–33.

Selected further reading:

Victoria E. Bonnell, The Russian Worker: Life and Labor Under the Tsarist Regime (University of California Press, 1983).

Jeffrey Brooks, When Russia Learned to Read: Literacy and Popular Literature, 1861-1917 (Evanston, Ill: Northwestern University Press, 2003).

Daniel R. Brower, The Russian City Between Tradition and Modernity, 1850-1900 (University of California Press, 1990). E-book.

Stephen Frank, and Mark D. Steinberg, Cultures in Flux: Lower-Class Values, Practices, and Resistance in Late Imperial Russia (Princeton University Press, 1994). E-book.

Anna Geifman, ed., Russia under the Last Tsar: Opposition and Subversion, 1894-1917 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999). Hans Rogger, Russia in the Age of Modernisation and Revolution, 1881-1917 (London: Longman, 1983).

Reginald E. Zelnik, Semen Kanatchikov, and Matvei Fisher, ‘Russian Bebels: An Introduction to the Memoirs of the Russian Workers Semen Kanatchikov and Matvei Fisher. I’, The Russian Review, 35 (1976), 249–89.