Ilya Gerasimov. Plebeian Modernity

Writing history “from below” has been a major effort of social historians over the past fifty years. In American historiography of Russia, this effort produced the influential revisionist trend. Revisionist studies focused on the lives of ordinary people and subaltern social groups, as an alternative to the old “totalitarian school,” which denied the so-called “dark” Russian masses any role in influencing history. The title of Ilya Gerasimov’s book Plebeian Modernity: Social Practices, Illegality, and the Urban Poor in Russia, 1906–1916 clearly suggests history “from below.” Gerasimov explores imperial Russia’s urban subaltern population, which he calls the urban “plebeian” majority, both Russian and non-Russian, Christian and non-Christian. But Gerasimov goes further: while questioning the totality of textual evidence as a source of writing history from below, as alternative he proposes the “physical body that can be read as a text” (7). Gerasimov has selected four Russian imperial centers, Vilnius, Odessa, Nizhny Novgorod, and Kazan, and focuses on the decade between 1906 and 1916, which preceded the October 1917 Revolution. Gerasimov’s book is ambitious because it not only focuses on “plebeian society” but also attempts to offer a cultural analysis of imperial Russian inter-revolutionary society and goes well beyond the title’s time framework in drawing long-term conclusions, as suggested by the section entitled “The Early Soviet Union as a ‘Plebeian Civilization’” (186).

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