A Radical Worker in Tsarist Russia : The Autobiography of Semen Ivanovich Kanatchikov / translated and edited by Reginald E. Zelnik.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Kanatchikov, S. (Semen), 1879-1940, author.

Contributor:

Zelnik, Reginald E., editor, translator.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Revolutionaries--Soviet Union--Biography.

Revolutionaries.

Working class--Soviet Union--Biography.

Working class.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (508 p.)

Place of Publication:

Stanford, CA : Stanford University Press, [2022]

Language Note:

In English.

Summary:

Semën Kanatchikov, born in a central Russian village in 1879, was one of the thousands of peasants who made the transition from traditional village life to the life of an urban factory worker in Moscow and St. Petersburg in the last years of the nineteenth century. Unlike the others, however, he recorded his personal and political experiences (up to the even of the 1905 Revolution) in an autobiography. First published in the Soviet Union in the 1920s, this memoir gives us the richest and most thoughtful firsthand account we have of life among the urban lower classes in Imperial Russia. We follow this shy but determined peasant youth's painful metamorphosis into a self-educated, skilled patternmaker, his politicization in the factories and workers' circles of Moscow and St. Petersburg, and his close but troubled relations with members of the liberal and radical intelligentsia. Kanatchikov was an exceptionally sensitive and honest observer, and we learn much from his memoirs about the day-to-day life of villagers and urban workers, including such personal matters as religious beliefs, family tensions, and male-female relationships. We also learn about conditions in the Russian prisons, exile life in the Russian Far North, and the Bolshevik-Menshevik split as seen from the workers' point of view.

Contents:

Frontmatter

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

CONTENTS

EDITOR'S NOTE

Introduction: Kanatchikov's Story of My Life as Document and Literature

Part One. Moscow

1 My First Years

2 In the "Artel"

3 In the Pattern Shop

4 "Sushchy"

5 The Beginning of My Apostasy

6 Khodynka

7 Sergey Petrovich

8 The Beginning of My Wanderings from Factory to Factory

9 I Am an Adult

10 At the Mytishchensk Factory

11 Working for a "Grater"

Part Two. St. Petersburg

12 In Piter

13 Vasilevsky Island

14 The Nevsky Gate Region

15 Our Cultural Life

16 At the Kornilov Evening School

17 My Arrest

18 In Prison

Part Three. My First Exile

19 Departure

20 The Meeting

21 Summer and Fall

22 At the Moscow Military Hospital

23 Working for a Tradesman

Part Four. Saratov

24 Introduction

25 "To Unknown Shores" (Under Special Police Surveillance)

26 The Non-Resister

27 The Liberal

28 "Auntie Marseillaise"

29 At the Volga Steel Mill

30 The Workers' Group

31 Chizhik

32 "The Artist"

33 At the Bering Factory, "Collaborator" (The Strike)

34 ''A Prison to Some, But to Me- Home''

35 Unemployed

36 The Socialist Revolutionaries

37 Our Literature and Propaganda

38 The Cooperative Workshop

39 The Saratov Social Democratic Committee

40 The Demonstration

41 Panty Denisov

42 In Prison Again

43 The Traitor

44 In Tsaritsyn Prison

45 To the Far North, Under Military Escort

46 In Exile Again

47 The Liberal Spring

EDITOR'S POSTSCRIPT

NOTES

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

Notes:

Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (publisher's Web site, viewed 24. Mai 2022)

ISBN:

1-5036-2088-3

OCLC:

1322125991