A History of Dissent

In its 400 year history, Saratov has continually felt the touch of populist dissent. In 1670-71, Saratov was one of the centers of the violent peasant revolt led by Stepan Razin; it was the administrative center for the Cossack troops that sympathized with the rebel. A hundred years later, the peasant revolt that struck Catherine the Great’s reign gripped the city; in 1773 the town was captured by detachments of E. I. Pugachyov.

Soon after the Pugachyov revolts, the writer Alexander Radyshchev wrote a book, A Journey From St. Petersburg to Moscow, on Russia’s social problems and the corruption that stood in the way of correcting them. Catherine, worried about the French Revolution and the aftermath of the Pugachyov rebellion, called Radishchev a rebel “worse than Pugachyov” and exiled the writer to Siberia. One hundred years later, in 1885, Saratov’s art museum – the first in Russia ever open to the general public – was founded by Alexei Bogolyubov, grandson of Radyshchev.

The writer Nikolai Chernyshevsky, who argued that socialism – through the peasant commune – was a positive means to development of society (and helped inspire the “going to the people” of the late 19th century), was born in Saratov in 1828. His book, What is to be Done?, published in 1863, while he was in prison in St. Petersburg, was hugely influential (and soon banned), notably on Lenin. Chernyshevsky spent most of his adult life in internal exile, but returned to Saratov in his later years (still under house arrest), and committed suicide when faced with another term of internal exile. His apartment in Saratov is now a museum.