Suny R.G. (ed.) The Cambridge History of Russia, Volume 3: The Twentieth Century

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impressive. Though these parties had relatively few members, and large num-

bers of workers could not understand what they saw as the pointless and

harmful squabbling between Mensheviks and Bolsheviks, the inﬂuence of

socialist ideas among workers, students and others was considerable. But as

the popularity of socialism grew, so did the variety of motivating logics and

approaches.

Across the political spectrum, from liberals to socialists, the ‘woman ques-

tion’ was an essential, if frequently unsettling, issue in debates about demo-

cratic change in Russia. If, as most agreed, democratic change meant creating

a society in which the dignity and rights of the individual were respected

and individuals were able to participate actively in the public sphere, the sit-

uation of women was clearly in dire need of change. Women were widely

viewed as morally and intellectually different and weak and women’s civic

roles and personal autonomy were circumscribed. Since the mid-1800s, how-

ever, such patriarchalism had been persistently challenged by activist men and

increasingly by publicly active women. Often paired with programmes for

the emancipation of all people, activists targeted the particular humiliations

women endured: sexual harassment, domestic violence, prostitution, lack of

education, lack of training for employment, lower wages, undeveloped social

supports for maternity and childcare, lack of legal protections and civil rights.

The movement for women’s emancipation gained particular force and

urgency during and after the 1905 Revolution, as women, though not given

the vote, were often heard at meetings appealing for respect as human beings

and for equal rights as citizens, and as a series of women’s organisations and

publications emerged to promote the cause. As a movement, the struggle to

improve the situation of women was as divided as the larger political world;

and it divided that world. On the one hand, many activists fought directly to

overcome women’s inferior status, and spoke of the particular sufferings of

women in public and private life. On the other hand, many women, especially

socialists, argued that feminism, which focused on women’s particular needs,

risked fragmenting the common cause, which must be to free all people from

the restrictions of the old order. Only as part of this ‘larger’ cause, it was said,

could women be emancipated.

17 Richard Stites, The Women’s Liberation Movement in Russia (Princeton: Princeton Univer-

sity Press,1978); Linda Edmondson, Feminism in Russia,1900–17 (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford

University Press, 1984); Barbara Clements, Barbara Engel and Christine Worobec

(eds.), Russia’s Women: Accommodation, Resistance, Transformation (Berkeley: University

of California Press, 1991).

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In the public sphere

For women and men, the expansion of the public sphere in the late 1800s

and early 1900s was one of the most consequential developments in Russian

life. The growth of this critically important civic space – the domain of social

life in which organised associations mediate between the individual and the

state, citizens communicate with one another on matters of general interest,

public opinion takes form and the state is restrained in its inﬂuence and com-

pulsion – dramatically altered the Russian social and cultural terrain, indeed

the very texture of individuals’ lives, but also had enormous implications

for politics. Arguably, it provided the essential foundation for the possibil-

ity of democratic civil society. The 1905 Revolution unleashed civic opinion

and organisation, enabled further by the partial civil rights promised by the

reform legislation that followed, but the history of civic organisations and pub-

lic opinion was older. Especially since the late 1800s, voluntary associations

had proliferated, including learned societies, literacy and temperance soci-

eties, business and professional associations, philanthropic and service organi-

sations, workers’ mutual assistance funds and varied cultural associations and

circles. Already before the de facto press freedoms of 1905 and the freeing

of the press from preliminary censorship in 1906, the printed word, includ-

ing mass-circulation daily newspapers and a burgeoning book market, had

become a powerful medium for disseminating and exchanging information

and ideas. In addition, universities, public schools, law courts, organisations

of local rural and urban self-government and even the Church stood on the

uncertain boundaries of being at once state and civil institutions, though offer-

ing an important space for individuals to engage with the emerging public

life.

This public sphere could not have emerged with such intensity had it not

been for the ongoing economic and social modernisation of the country.

Material and social life were changing: the industrial sphere expanded, evi-

denced by rising numbers of factories and other businesses and innovations

in technology; the size and populations of urban areas grew; a commercial

18 On civil society, see esp. Edith Clowes, Samuel Kassow and James West (eds.), Between

Tsar and People: Educated Society and the Quest for Public Identity in Late Imperial Russia

(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991); and Joseph Bradley, ‘Subjects into Citizens:

Societies, Civil Society, and Autocracy in Tsarist Russia’, American Historical Review 107,

4 (Oct. 2002): 1094–123. On the press, literacy and reading, see Jeffrey Brooks, When

Russia Learned to Read: Literacy and Popular Literature, 1861–1917 (Princeton: Princeton

University Press, 1985); and Louise McReynolds, The News under Russia’s Old Regime

(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991).

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sphere expanded, marked by increasing numbers of consumer goods and new

forms of commerce such as department stores and arcades, which tangibly

transformed everyday material life; growing also was a middle class of urban

professionals, business owners, salaried employees and others; literacy spread,

as did the regularity of reading, creating a growing market for the expanding

press; and social and geographic mobility made Russia in many ways a country

on the move as peasants, workers and the educated journeyed betweencity and

country, between various places and types of work and between occupations

and even class levels.

The daily press was a chronicle of the unsettling and inspiring uncertainties

of modern life in Russia. Its images of everyday public life were often posi-

tive and conﬁdent: stories of scientiﬁc knowledge and technical know-how;

entrepreneurial success and opportunities for upward mobility; the increas-

ing role of institutions of culture (museums, schools, libraries, exhibitions,

theatres); the growth of civic organisation (scientiﬁc, technical, philanthropic);

and the civilising effects of the constructed beauty and ordered space of city

streets and buildings. But the daily press was also ﬁlled with a sense of the

disquieting forms and rhythms of the modern: a widespread tendency to

esteem material values over spiritual values; the egoistic and predatory prac-

tices of the growing class of ‘capitalists’; frightening attacks on respectable

citizens and civic order by ‘hooligans’; the pervasive dangers and depredations

of con-artists, thieves and burglars; sexual licentiousness and debauchery;

prostitution, rape and murder; an epidemic of suicides; widespread public

drunkenness; neglected and abandoned children (who often turned to street

crime and vice); and spreading morbidity – especially diseases such as syphilis

that were seen as resulting from loose morals, or tuberculosis or cholera that

were seen as nurtured by urban congestion.

Sex, consumption and popular entertainment were widely and publicly

discussed as touchstones for interpreting the meaning of modern public life

and the nature of the modern self. Civic discussion of sex often propounded

liberal ideals about the individual: personal autonomy, rights to privacy and

19 This summary of images of the modern city in the daily press is drawn primarily from

the St Petersburg mass-circulation dailies Gazeta-Kopeika and Peterburgskii listok from

1908 to 1914. See also Joseph Bradley, Muzhik and Muscovite: Urbanization in Late Imperial

Russia (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985); Daniel Brower, The Russian City

between Tradition and Modernity, 1850–1900 (Berkeley: University of California Press,

1990); Joan Neuberger, Hooliganism: Crime, Culture, and Power in St. Petersburg, 1900–1914

(Berkeley:University of California Press, 1993); Catriona Kelly and David Shepherd (eds.),

Constructing Culture in the Age of Revolution: 1881–1940 (Oxford: Oxford University Press,

1998), p.2; Mark Steinberg, Proletarian Imagination: Self, Modernity, and the Sacred in Russia,

1910–1925 (Ithaca, N. Y.: Cornell University Press, 2002), pp. 5–9, 147–81.

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happiness and the rule of law. But these accounts also dwelled on the need for

sexual order, rationality and control, reﬂecting anxieties about unleashed indi-

vidualities.

The emergence of a consumer culture similarly impressed many

observers as both desirable and disconcerting. Department stores and glass-

covered arcades (passazhi) displayed goods and objects of visual pleasure and

desire which stimulated notions of being fashionable and respectable – that is,

modern materialist and consumerist identities – but also confused identities

and raised the spectre of threatening self-creation.

Urban mass entertain-

ments particularly disturbed the ‘culturalist’ intelligentsia as the consumption

of crass and debasing pleasures rather than the acquisition of uplifting knowl-

edge or the improvement of taste. City spaces ﬁlled with opportunities for

unenlightened public pleasure: music halls, nightclubs, caf

eschantants,‘pleasure

gardens’, cheap theatres and cinemas. These entertainments were especially

aimed at the growing urban middling and working classes. Reading tastes often

seemed hardly less uplifting. Newspapers ‘pandered to crude instincts’ with

stories of ‘scandal’ and sensation, while ‘boulevard’ ﬁction, often serialised in

the press and made available in cheap pamphlets, eroded traditional popular

and national values in favour of preoccupations with adventure, individual

daring (and suffering), exotic locales and behaviours, material success (or loss)

and a pervading moral cynicism.

The unsettling and contradictory character of modern life was also visible

in art and literature. One can speak of a pervading ‘decadence’ in Russian

expressive culture, a characteristic sense of disintegration and displacement,

even a foreboding, though also an imaginative anticipation, of an approach-

ing ‘end’ that might also be a beginning. Some embraced a melancholy

mood. Some turned to an escapist aestheticism: the old world was dying,

but at least it should be a beautiful death. Some nurtured a cosmopolitan

‘nostalgia for world culture’ or turned back to Russia’s ‘pure’ national tradi-

tions. Some dwelled on the self as both a new source of meaning and a dark

source of danger. And some, especially the ‘Futurists’, engaged in iconoclastic

rebellion in the name of the new and the modern, evoking in their works

the noise of factories and of the marketplace and the textures of iron and

glass, and challenging ‘philistine’ tastes and perceptions with bizarre public

20 Laura Engelstein, The Keys to Happiness: Sex and the Search for Modernity in Fin-de-Si

ecle

Russia (Ithaca, N. Y.: Cornell University Press, 1992).

21 Kelly and Shepherd (eds.), Constructing Culture,pp.107–13.

22 Ibid., 113–41; Richard Stites, Russian Popular Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University

Press, 1992), ch. 1; Louise McReynolds, Russia at Play: Leisure Activities at the End of the

Tsarist Era (Ithaca, N. Y.: Cornell University Press, 2002).

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mark d. steinberg

behaviour and ‘trans-rational’ words and images meant to herald the new and

transcendent.

Sacred stories

The ﬁnal decades of the imperial order in Russia were also marked by spiritual

searching and crisis – a complex upheaval often reduced historiographically to

the simple image of a ‘religious renaissance’. These were years during which

many educated Russians sought to return to the Church and revitalise their

faith. But even more evident were non-conformist paths of spiritual search-

ing known as God-Seeking. Writers, artists and intellectuals in large numbers

were drawn to private prayer, mysticism, spiritualism, theosophy, Eastern reli-

gions and other idealisations of imagination, feeling and mystical connections

between all things. A fascination with elemental feeling, with the unconscious

and the mythic, proliferated along with visions of coming catastrophe and

redemption. The visible forms of God-Seeking were extensive. A series of

‘Religious-Philosophical Meetings’ was held in St Petersburg in 1901–3, bring-

ing together prominent intellectuals and clergy to explore together ways to

reconcile the Church with the growing if undogmatic desire among the edu-

cated for spiritual meaning in life. Especially after 1905, various religious soci-

eties arose, though much of this religious upheaval was informal: circles and

salons, s

eances, private prayer. Some clergy also sought to revitalise Ortho-

dox faith, most famously the charismatic Father John of Kronstadt, who, until

his death in 1908 (though his followers remained active long after), empha-

sised Christian living and sought to restore fervency and the presence of the

miraculous in liturgical celebration.

One sees a similarly renewed vigour and variety in religious life and spiri-

tuality among the lower classes, especially after the upheavals of 1905. Among

23 S. A. Vengerov (ed.), Russkaia literatura XX veka (Moscow, 1914), vol. i,pp.1–26; Camilla

Gray, The Russian Experiment in Art, 1863–1922 (London: Thames and Hudson, 1962).

Vladimir Markov, Russian Futurism: A History (Berkeley: University of California Press,

1968); Katerina Clark, Petersburg, Crucible of Cultural Revolution (Cambridge, Mass.:

Harvard University Press, 1995).

24 A. S. Pankratov, Ishchushchie boga (Moscow, 1911); George L. Kline, Religious and Anti-

Religious Thought in Russia (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968); Maria Carlson,

‘No Religion Higher Than Truth’: A History of the Theosophical Movement in Russia, 1875–

1922 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993); Catherine Evtukhov, The Cross and

the Sickle: Sergei Bulgakov and the Fate of Russian Religious Philosophy, 1890–1920 (Ithaca,

N. Y.: Cornell University Press, 1997); Nadieszda Kizenko, A Prodigal Saint: Father John

of Kronstadt and the Russian People (University Park, Pa.: Pennsylvania State University

Press, 2000); Vera Shevzov, Russian Orthodoxy on the Eve of Revolution (Oxford: Oxford

University Press, 2004).

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Russia’s ﬁn de si

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the peasantry we see widespread interest in spiritual-ethical literature and

non-conformist moral-spiritual movements; an upsurge in pilgrimage and

other devotions to sacred spaces and objects (especially icons); persistent

beliefs in the presence and power of the supernatural (apparitions, posses-

sion, walking-dead, demons, spirits, miracles and magic); the renewed vitality

of local ‘ecclesial communities’ actively shaping their own ritual and spiritual

lives, sometimes in the absence of clergy, and deﬁning their own sacred places

and forms of piety; and the proliferation of what the Orthodox establishment

branded as ‘sectarianism’, including both non-Orthodox Christian denomina-

tions, notably Baptists, and various forms of deviant popular Orthodoxy and

mysticism.

Among urban workers, the often-described decline in Orthodox

belief and practice was complicated by a rise of alternative forms of religious

faith and enthusiasm. This popular urban religious revival included work-

ers’ gatherings in taverns to talk about religion; followers of individual mystics

and healers; adulation of Lev Tolstoy as well as popular Tolstoyan movements;

the charismatic movement known as the ‘Brethren’ (brattsy), which attracted

thousands of workers to an ideal of moral living, to the promise of salvation

in this life and to impassioned preaching; and growing congregations of reli-

gious dissenters and sectarians. The Orthodox Church hierarchy frequently

branded these and other movements as sectarian, and the Church actively tried

to restore its inﬂuence among the urban population by challenging ‘sectarians’

to debates, attacking them in a ﬂurry of pamphlets and on occasion (as

against the Brethren) anathematising and excommunicating the most visible

leaders.

While these organisational forms reveal the shape and extent of Russia’s

religious upheaval, its signiﬁcance as a sign of these unsettled times and of

the widespread search for answers and meanings is most evident in the words

and images individuals created to speak of what troubled them spiritually

about the world and of what they desired and imagined. The strong desire

in these years to reinterpret the world was joined by a desire to re-enchant

it as well. In 1902, Aleksandr Benua (Benois), the leader of the World of Art

movement, noted the widespread feeling that the reigning ‘materialism’ of

25 In addition to previous references, also Gregory Freeze, ‘Subversive Piety: Religion and

the Political Crisis in Late Imperial Russia’, Journal of Modern History 68 (June1996): 308–

50; Laura Engelstein, Castration and the Heavenly Kingdom (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University

Press, 1999); Christine Worobec, Possessed: Women, Witches, and Demons in Imperial Russia

(DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2001); Steinberg, Proletarian Imagination,

ch. 6.

26 A. S. Prugavin, ‘Brattsy’ i trezvenniki (Moscow, 1912); A. I. Klibanov, Istoriia religioznogo

sektantstva v Rossii (Moscow, 1965); Engelstein, Castration and the Heavenly Kingdom.

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mark d. steinberg

the age was too ‘astonishingly simple’ to answer essential questions about the

meaning of the world, too shallow in its answers to satisfy what people needed,

and was therefore being replaced, in all the arts, by the ‘mystical spirit of

poetry’.

Symbolist writers like Andrei Belyi sought to penetrate appearances

to discover the spiritual essences of things (and of the human self), by exalting

imagination, elemental feeling and intuition. Many visual artists, especially

after 1905, were similarly drawn towards a spiritual understanding of the power

and function of images.

In intellectual circles, a sensation-creating volume

of essays appeared in 1909 under the title Vekhi (Landmarks or Signposts),

authored by a group of leading left-wing intellectuals, mostly former Marxists,

who bluntly repudiated the materialism and atheism that had dominated the

thought of the intelligentsia for generations as leading inevitably to failure

and moral disaster. At the same time, some writers were drawn to a new

Messianism, an apocalyptic (if often dark) faith in a coming catastrophe out of

which a great redemption would come. The discontent with materialism and

the allure of religious and mystical perceptions and imagination reached into

unexpected places in these years. Among Marxists, a group associated with

the Bolshevik Party (including the future leader of the Proletkul’t, Aleksandr

Bogdanov, the future commissar of enlightenment, Anatolii Lunacharskii,

and the popular writer Maxim Gorky) elaborated in 1908–9 a re-enchanted

Marxism known as God-Building. Feeling the cold rationalism, materialism

and determinism of traditional Marxism inadequate to inspire a revolutionary

mass movement, they insisted on the need to appeal to the subconscious and

the emotional, to recapture for the revolution, in Lunacharskii’s words, the

power of ‘myth’, in order to create a new faith that placed humanity where

God had been but retained a religious spirit of passion, moral certainty and

the promise of deliverance from evil and death.

Proletarians

Marxists tended to take an essentialist view of the proletariat: this was the

class destined by the logic of history to emancipate humanity from injustice

and oppression. No Marxists, least of all the Bolsheviks, believed this would

27 Aleksandr Benua, Istoriia russkoi zhivopisi v XIX veke (Moscow: Respublika, 1998),

pp. 343–4.

28 Gray, Russian Experiment in Art.

29 A. V. Lunacharskii, Religiia i sotsializm, 2 vols. (St Petersburg, 1908 and 1911). See also

Kline, Religious and Anti-Religious Thought in Russia, ch. 4; Jutta Scherrer, ‘L’intelligentsia

russe: sa qu

ete da la “v

erit

e religieuse du socialisme”’, Letempsdelar

eﬂexion, 1981,

no. 2: 134–51. See also Steinberg, Proletarian Imagination, ch. 6.

Russia’s ﬁn de si

ecle, 1900–1914

happen until workers were brought to ‘consciousness’ (soznatel’nost’) of their

historical situation and mission. But the content of consciousness was not

in doubt: a conscious ‘proletarian’ understood the dehumanising essence of

capitalism, felt a sense of collective identity with his class, and recognised the

destiny of workers to overthrow capitalism through revolution in order to

create, for all humanity, a socialist order. This imagined proletariat was not

entirely a fantasy. But the real history of workers in the early twentieth century

was considerably more complex. Ultimately, both this ideological construct

and the actual conditions and visions of workers would play a critical part in

the history of the revolution and the Soviet experiment.

The most visible (and, for many, troubling) sign of Russia’s industriali-

sation and urban development since the late 1800s was the great visibility

of large numbers of industrial workers (42–3 per cent of the populations of

St Petersburg and Moscow in 1910–12, and 49 per cent in Baku, for example),

uprooted from the countryside and left to fend for themselves in the harsh

world of the city.

Working conditions had been eased in the late 1800sby

labour legislation, which established a factory inspectorate, regulated female

and child labour and limited the working day.But conditions remained difﬁcult:

overcrowded housing with often deplorable sanitary conditions, an exhaust-

ing work-day (on the eve of the war a ten-hour work-day six days a week

was the average), widespread disease (notably tuberculosis) and high rates of

premature mortality (made worse by pervasive alcoholism), constant risk of

injury from poor safety conditions, harsh discipline (rules and ﬁnes, at best,

but sometimes foremen’s ﬁsts) and inadequate wages. The characteristic ben-

eﬁts of urban industrial life could be just as dangerous from the point of view

of social and political stability. Acquiring new skills, even simply learning to

cope with city life, often gave workers a sense of self-respect and conﬁdence,

raising desires and expectations. The elaborate commercial culture of early

twentieth-century Russian cities nurtured desire and hope as well as envy and

anger. And urban workers were likely to be or become literate, exposing them

to a range of new experiences and ideas. Indeed, the very act of reading and

becoming more ‘cultured’ encouraged many commoners to feel a sense of

self-esteem that made the ordinary deprivations, hardships and humiliations

of lower-class life more difﬁcult to endure.

30 A. G. Rashin, Naselenie Rossii za 100 let (1811–1913 gg): statisticheskie ocherki (Moscow:

Gosudarstvennoe statisticheskoe izdatel’stvo, 1956), pp. 320–47.

31 See esp. Leopold Haimson, ‘The Problem of Social Stability in Urban Russia, 1905–1917’

(pt. 1), Slavic Review 23, 4 (Dec. 1964): 619–42; Reginald Zelnik, ‘Russian Bebels’, Russian

Review 35, 3 and 4 (July1976 and Oct. 1976); Bonnell, Roots of Rebellion.

mark d. steinberg

The most visible sign of worker discontent was strikes and, beginning in

1905, the growth of trade unions. The upheavals of 1905, in which economic

and political demands were constantly interconnected, were unprecedented in

vehemence and scale, though foreshadowed by widespread strikes in 1896–7,

1901 and 1903. During 1905, strikes broke out in almost every industry and every

part of the country, and workers began forming illegal trade unions, which,

along with strikes, were legalised in the wake of the October manifesto (strikes

in December 1905, unions in March 1906). The government clearly hoped (and

radicals feared) that legalising strikes and unions and allowing workers to

vote for representatives to the new State Duma would give workers effective

channels for redressing their grievances, thus leading the labour movement

onto a more peaceful path. Initially, this appeared to be precisely what hap-

pened. Thousands of workers joined the legal unions and concentrated on

attaining better economic conditions. The leaders of these unions, and many

members, became increasingly cautious, so as not to give the government

an excuse to close the unions down. And, among the socialist parties, work-

ers tended to choose as their leaders Mensheviks, who emphasised, for the

short term, legal struggle for realisable and mainly liberal-democratic gains.

This moderation of the labour movement might have continued had not the

tsarist government acted in ways that aggravated workers’ political attitudes.

Although trade unions were legal, they were under the close surveillance and

control of the police, who regularly closed meetings, arrested leaders and shut

down union papers. Meanwhile, employers endeavoured, often with success,

to take back economic gains workers had made in 1905, and to form their own

strong organisations. When the strike movement revived in 1910–14, workers’

frustrations were sharply visible, not only in the stubborn persistence of strik-

ers and the revival of political demands but also in the growing popularity of

the more radical Bolsheviks. In the autumn of 1912, Bolsheviks won a majority

of workers’ votes to the Duma in almost all industrial electoral districts. Many

unions elected Bolshevik majorities to their governing boards.

It bears remembering that social and political discontent is a social and

cultural construction as much as a natural response to material conditions,

tangible relationships or political restrictions. Workers had to see their con-

ditions not as the inevitable lot of the poor but as correctable wrongs. They

needed a language of justice and right and a belief that alternatives existed.

Workers constructed such a vocabulary partly out of traditional sources of

moral judgement: religious ethics and communitarian values, for example.

32 Bonnell, Roots of Rebellion; Haimson, ‘The Problem of Social Stability’.

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But fresher sources abounded. Magazines, newspapers, pamphlets and books

widely disseminated ideas about universal rights, the natural equality of all

human beings and the mutability of every political order. Whatever the

sources, notions of justice, entitlement and progress were becoming unset-

tlingly widespread among Russia’s urban poor. These arguments were evident,

for example, in demands presented during strikes. Beside appeals for economic

or political change (higher wages, shorter hours, civil rights), many demands

focused on what have been termed ‘moral issues’ (or ‘dignity issues’). The

most obvious of these was the demand for ‘polite address’. But even ordinary

economic demands for higher wages, shorter hours and cleaner lavatories,

were interpreted as necessary so that workers might ‘live like human beings’.

In the trade union press, we often hear workers speaking of their identity as

‘human beings’ not ‘machines’ (or ‘slaves’ or ‘cattle’) and their consequent

human ‘rights’. Popular discontent, of course, was not simply about justice,

democracy and rights. It also contained a great deal of anger and resentment.

Once aroused to open protest, workers could express a desire to punish and

humiliate, even to dehumanise, those who stood above them and whom they

blamed for their sufferings. In this spirit, workers put foremen or employers in

wheelbarrows, dumped trash on their heads and rolled them out of the shop

and into the streets, or, less ceremoniously, beat them, occasionally to death.

Plebeian lives encouraged the poor to dream of revenge and reversal as well

as of justice.

Evidence of worker ‘consciousness’ and protest hardly exhausts the story

of working-class mentalities in the pre-war years. As any ‘conscious’ worker

would readily admit (and often complained) too many workers were lost in a

direstate of ‘unenlightened melancholy,impenetrable scepticism, and stagnant

inertia’.

In practice, according to frequent accounts by dismayed working-

class activists, this meant (and the talk here was mainly about men) too much

alcohol, workers lying to their wives about wages squandered on drink (along

with contempt for, and violence against, women), vulgar swearing, sexual

licentiousness and crass tastes in boulevard ﬁction, the music hall and trashy

popular cinema. Working-class women were viewed as victims in all this and

as lost in ‘backwardness’ and ‘passivity’. In a way, the cultural behaviour of

ordinary workers could be seen as a type of deﬁance against elite moral norms

and, by extension, a form of protest against class domination. But, activists

constantly worried, such rebellion did not point to any alternative. On the

33 See Bonnell, Roots of Rebellion.

34 A. Zorin [Aleksei Gastev], ‘Sredi tramvaishchikov (nabrosok)’, Edinstvo 12 (21 Dec. 1909):

11.