Self-improvement was a natural enough aspiration among skilled workers, like Kanatchikov, who were anxious to rise above their peasant origins and attain the status in society which their growing sense of dignity made them feel they deserved. Many harboured dreams of marrying into the petty-bourgeoisie and of setting themselves up in a small shop or business. They read the boulevard dailies, such as the Petersburg Sheet (Peterburgskii listok), which espoused the Victorian ideals of self-help, guided its readers in questions of good taste and decorum, and entertained them with sensational stories about the glamorous and the rich.
It was only to be expected that this search for respectability should be accompanied by a certain priggishness on the part of the labour élite, a fussy concern to set themselves apart from the ‘dark’ mass of the peasant-workers by conducting themselves in a sober and ‘cultured’ way.fn14 But among those peasant-workers, like Kanatchikov, who would later join the Bolsheviks, this prudishness was often reflected in an extreme form. Their sobriety became a militant puritanism, as if by their prim and ascetic manners, by their tea-drinking and self-discipline, they could banish their peasant past completely. ‘We were of the opinion that no conscious Socialist should ever drink vodka,’ recalled one such Bolshevik. ‘We even condemned smoking. We propagated morality in the strictest sense of the word.’ It was for this reason that so many rank-and-file Bolsheviks abstained from romantic attachments, although in Kanatchikov’s case this may have had more to do with his own dismal failure with women. The worker-revolutionaries, he later admitted, ‘developed a negative attitude toward the family, toward marriage, and even toward women’. They saw themselves as ‘doomed’ men, their fate tied wholly to the cause of the revolution, which could only be compromised by ‘contact with girls’. So strait-laced were these pioneering proletarians that people often mistook them for the Pashkovites, a pious Bible sect. Even the police sometimes became confused when they were instructed to increase their surveillance of ‘revolutionary’ workers who drank only tea.51
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It was through his tea-drinking friends that the young Kanatchikov first became involved in the underground ‘study circles’ (kruzhki) devoted to the reading of socialist tracts and the education of the workers. In the early days most of these circles had been organized by Populist students, but by the late 1890s, when Kanatchikov moved to St Petersburg and joined a circle there, the Marxists were making the running. For him, as for many other ‘conscious’ workers, the circle’s main attraction was the opening it gave him to a new world of learning. Through it he was introduced to the writings of Pushkin and Nekrasov, to books on science, history, arithmetic and grammar, to the theatre and to serious concerts, as well as to the popular Marxist tracts of the day. All this gave him the sense of being raised to a higher cultural level than most workers, who spent their leisure time in the tavern. But he and his comrades were still ill at ease in the company of the liberal middle classes who patronized their groups. Occasionally, as Kanatchikov recalls, they would be taken ‘for display’ to fashionable bourgeois homes:
Our intelligentsia guide would introduce us in a loud voice, emphasizing the words: ‘conscious workers’. Then we were regaled with tea and all manner of strange snacks that we were afraid to touch, lest we make some embarrassing blunder. Our conversations with such liberals had a very strained character. They would interrogate us about this or that book we had read, question us about how the mass of workers lived, what they thought, whether they were interested in a constitution. Some would ask us if we’d read Marx. Any stupidity that we uttered in our confusion would be met with condescending approval.
On leaving these parties, Kanatchikov and his friends ‘would breathe a sigh of relief and laugh at our hosts’ lack of understanding about our lives’. While on the surface they agreed with their student mentors that the liberals might be useful to the revolutionary cause, ‘a kind of hostility toward them, a feeling of distrust, was constantly growing inside us’.52 It was precisely this feeling of distrust, the workers’ awareness that their own aspirations were not the same as the liberals’, that hastened the downfall of the Provisional Government in 1917.
