Plebeian Modernity sheds light on the outlook, mentality, and way of life of lower-class urban-dwellers in early twentieth-century Russia. They rarely framed their perceptions and lives using elite discourses like nationalism or social democracy, though they sometimes borrowed selectively—and often incompetently—from them. Even their words as reported in official records and the press were usually “involuntarily (or purposefully) edited by a more literate record keeper” (25). Yet Ilya Gerasimov, a founding editor of Ab Imperio, has figured out ways to “read” the behavior of what he calls Russian “subalterns,” members of the lower classes, people without their own discourse. Gerasimov reveals four patterns of behavior that, at various times and sometimes in combination, structured their “social practices.” First, even some elites pretended they did not realize that the elite discourse had invalidated archaic rules of conduct (patriarchality). Second, ordinary people strived to find a common (often) nonverbal language within an extraordinarily diverse social environment (the middle ground). Third, they punched and were punched to make sense of their environment (indiscriminate violence). Finally, they ignored official rules, laws, and regulations in pursuit of pragmatic ends (illegality). What results from this study is not an understanding of individual attitudes or consciousness, but rather “collective portraits construed by identifying typical social gestures” (51).

Massive archival research in St. Petersburg, Kyiv, Odessa, Kazan΄, Vilna, and Nizhnii Novgorod—as well as imaginative work in wide-ranging scholarship and theoretical literature—gives this book rare intellectual depth and scope. Gerasimov's sources include extortion letters, anonymous denunciations to the authorities, police reports, the periodical press, and personal ads. Among his subjects are swindlers, prostitutes, brawlers, and adulterers.

An analysis of anonymous letters in Chapter 1 reveals how lower-class people found diverse ways of expressing themselves by borrowing from established discourses of revolutionary activism, entrepreneurship, and professional criminality without understanding them fully. For example, extortion letters and death threats often included a hodgepodge of expressions like “darling,” “war needs,” “baron of millionaires,” and “anarcho-communists.” Such stumbling attempts at textuality within plebeian society show that its members, while eager to borrow from elite discourses, had no “authentic ‘voice of [their] own’—other than social practices” (53).

Abundant evidence presented in Chapter 2 shows that the multiethnic and multiconfessional populations of Odessa, Kazan΄, Vilna, and Nizhnii Novgorod typically did not buy into the elite discourse of ethno-confessional tension and hatred, as they felt their way toward (often) nonverbal mutual understanding. Antisemitic insults and rhetoric were regularly adopted as terms of abuse unrelated to Jews, and in general “ethnicity was used as a label or metaphor rather than as part of public discourse” (71). Indeed, victims of ethnically- or religiously-motivated violence repeatedly claimed they had never previously experienced anti-Jewish or anti-ethnic actions. Likewise, offers of services and personal ads published in newspapers indicate that people did not typically categorize themselves or others by confession or ethnicity. Similarly, Jews, Tatars, and others joined together in friendship or in committing crimes or as victims of crimes, suggesting that lower-class strangers found ways of agreeing “on a modus vivendi beyond the norms of institutionalized society” (80). Both they, and also sometimes elites, like the extraordinarily paternalistic Vilna Police Chief Deminskii, discussed in Chapter 3, idealized bygone practices as a way “of avoiding the explosive effective of discourses” (87). Chapter 4 argues that the violence of 1905 inculcated “revolutionary rhetoric … because it was more prestigious to be an ‘expropriator’ than a prosaic ‘robber’” (110), but in lower-class society, violence was above all a mode of self-expression. Bending or breaking rules, the focus of Chapter 5, was simply another way for ordinary people, who had never bought into the established elite rules, to work out “a new solidarity of shared experience” (150). The result was a gradually emerging plebeian society with its own pragmatic, ad hoc, but still rational approach to cooperation and self-organization.

No wonder Russian subalterns were more responsive to Bolshevik rhetoric of direct action than to liberal and socialist discourse and adapted well to Bolshevik violence and Soviet material privatization. Their pragmatic lawlessness, forbearance, tolerance of differences, and extraordinary adaptability helped create in the USSR a plebeian civilization rather than a Soviet modernity.

One might wish for more demographic analysis concerning the division of late imperial society's divide into plebeian, middle, and upper segments—social mobility among them—and cultural gradients across both the empire and Eurasia. Nevertheless, this is a brilliant work. Its pages (and endnotes) brim with powerful insights and clever observations. It sets an agenda for much future research and will appeal primarily to scholars and advanced graduate students.