One sees a similarly renewed vigour and variety in religious life and spirituality among the lower classes, especially after the upheavals of 1905. Among 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, possession, 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 denominations, notably Baptists, and various forms of deviant popular Orthodoxy and mysticism.[24] 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 workers' 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 religious 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.[25]
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 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'.[26] 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.[27] 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.[28]
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 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 industrialisation 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.[29] Working conditions had been eased in the late 1800s by 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 exhausting 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 benefits 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]
24
In addition to previous references, also Gregory Freeze, 'Subversive Piety: Religion and the Political Crisis in Late Imperial Russia',
25
A. S. Prugavin,
26
Aleksandr Benua,
pp. 343-4.
28
A. V Lunacharskii,
29
A. G. Rashin,
30
See esp. Leopold Haimson, 'The Problem of Social Stability in Urban Russia, 1905-1917' (pt. 1),