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 compulsion - 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 possibility 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 public opinion was older. Especially since the late 1800s, voluntary associations had proliferated, including learned societies, literacy and temperance societies, business and professional associations, philanthropic and service organisations, 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, including 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 offering an important space for individuals to engage with the emerging public life.[17]
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, evidenced by rising numbers of factories and other businesses and innovations in technology; the size and populations of urban areas grew; a commercial 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 between city 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 positive and confident: stories of scientific knowledge and technical know-how; entrepreneurial success and opportunities for upward mobility; the increasing role of institutions of culture (museums, schools, libraries, exhibitions, theatres); the growth ofcivic 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 practices 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.[18]
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 individuaclass="underline" personal autonomy, rights to privacy and happiness and the rule of law. But these accounts also dwelled on the need for sexual order, rationality and control, reflecting anxieties about unleashed individualities.[19] 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.[20] Urban mass entertainments particularly disturbed the 'culturalist' intelligentsia as the consumption of crass and debasing pleasures rather than the acquisition of uplifting knowledge or the improvement of taste. City spaces filled with opportunities for unenlightened public pleasure: music halls, nightclubs, cafes chantants, '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.[21]
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 approaching '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 traditions. 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 behaviour and 'trans-rational' words and images meant to herald the new and transcendent. [22]
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 searching known as God-Seeking. Writers, artists and intellectuals in large numbers were drawn to private prayer, mysticism, spiritualism, theosophy, Eastern religions 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, bringing together prominent intellectuals and clergy to explore together ways to reconcile the Church with the growing if undogmatic desire among the educated for spiritual meaning in life. Especially after 1905, various religious societies arose, though much of this religious upheaval was informaclass="underline" circles and salons, seances, private prayer. Some clergy also sought to revitalise Orthodox faith, most famously the charismatic Father John of Kronstadt, who, until his death in 1908 (though his followers remained active long after), emphasised Christian living and sought to restore fervency and the presence of the miraculous in liturgical celebration.[23]
17
On civil society, see esp. Edith Clowes, Samuel Kassow and James West (eds.),
18
This summary of images of the modern city in the daily press is drawn primarily from the St Petersburg mass-circulation dailies
19
Laura Engelstein,
21
Ibid., 113-41; Richard Stites,
22
S. A. Vengerov (ed.),
23
A. S. Pankratov,