It is impossible to imagine the Russian Revolution without the cultural-political preparation that lasted for many years. It is equally impossible to imagine the Revolution without the “advanced,” “vanguard” industrial workers; they were part of this radical political culture. Donald Raleigh put it well: “Revolution became a tradition in Russia before it was a fact” (Experiencing Russia's Civil War, 23). Therefore it is important to study revolutionary culture in order to understand the Revolution itself, and it is a complicated research task.
Deborah Pearl studies revolutionary “bestsellers,” written by radical intellectuals in order to disseminate their ideas among peasants and workers. These books formed the canon, and this canon was the core of the radical workers' political culture. Pearl's book examines the creation of these texts, their publishing, their dissemination, and their reception.
The author continues several historiographical traditions. Famous researchers of the Russian workers are especially important for this project. The well-known works of Roger Chartier were also a source of inspiration for the author, in particular Chartier's reconstruction of the perceptions of revolutionary “bestsellers” among reading audiences. Reconstructing these perceptions is a difficult task, and in order to answer this question Deborah Pearl studies memoirs of writers and readers, police investigations files, and judicial court cases (she uses collections of the Russian State Historical Archive in St. Petersburg and the State Archive of the Russian Federation in Moscow). In addition, she has found many interesting publications in various libraries in Moscow and St. Petersburg.
There are five chapters in this book. The first offers the general outline of revolutionary culture; the others examine different genres: propaganda tales, political economy essays, revolutionary songbooks, and French, German, and Italian novels translated into Russian and used for revolutionary propaganda. Most of these texts were printed illegally or they were released overseas and smuggled into Russia. Some censored editions were also used, however. For example, collections of songs included popular verses of Nikolai Nekrasov, and this reading thus prepared the audience for Populist ideas.
The book explores the role of reading and its impact over the process of political socialization and radicalization of industrial workers. The People's Will activity was especially significant, as members of this group were the real founders of the “revolutionary pedagogy”: they created important and influential texts that were used for decades by different political groups.
Deborah Pearl demonstrates the limits of our traditional approaches to the history of the Russian revolutionary movement. Historians usually take selected political groups and political parties as the privileged objects of their research, and these approaches do not allow us to explore different processes of workers' politicization. Protest movements have been depicted according to party and ideological lines. Such simplistic taxonomy ignored complicated socio-political reality: the Marxists often used Populist texts, and Populist propaganda was strongly influenced by Marxism. The common frame of the revolutionary political culture influenced tactics and polemics; it created opportunities for the united actions of different political groups. The reconstruction of the radical circles' curriculums demonstrates that their organizers used similar texts—in spite of their ideological differences.
Deborah Pearl's research reminds us of Antonio Gramsci's thesis on cultural hegemony, but her book raises new research questions. The reader can feel the extraordinary creativity of the young and ambitious authors who composed important texts in 1870s and 1880s; can see that they offered an important political resource to the next generations of revolutionaries. What were the reasons and causes for this explosion of creativity? We can guess that the situation of cultural interactions, multiple dialogs and conflicts of different social, estate, and ethnic groups stimulated authors and translators. The dialogue with the Russian “big culture” texts (Nekrasov, Ivan Turgenev), the impact of the French and Polish revolutionary traditions, the influence of popular European fiction—all affected the revolutionary Populists in their writings, in their publishing projects, and therefore had an impact upon Russian radical political culture. Simultaneously, Russian popular texts were translated into other languages—Yiddish, Ukrainian, Polish.
The culture of the intelligentsia was created at that very time, and had great impact over the “advanced” workers, some of whom described themselves as the working class intelligentsia. The role of this cultural group was extremely important, its members acted as authoritative “interpreters” of the radical texts in the working class milieu. The production and circulation of this literature, its readings and quotations were crucial for dominating the “discourse of socialism” that—as Steve Smith correctly argues—dominated in 1917.
There are some small errors in the book. The Provisional Government never declared the “Workers Marseillaise” to be an anthem of the new Russia (169), even though in practice different versions of this melody was used as an anthem. In actuality, there were no official decisions concerning the anthem, national flag, and coats of arms at that time.
The revolutions of the 21st century have shown us that political culture is an important resource for political mobilization, and Deborah Pearl's book helps us to understand this important dimension of the Russian Revolution.
