Radishchev, Cossacks, and Haiti: Universalizing Peasant Revolution in Russia's Radical Enlightenment

• In Event: Left Perspectives on Narrative I: Literatures as Political Practice and Critique

Abstract

The talk explores visions of peasant revolution in Radishchev’s “Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow” (1790). Against a dominant focus on the leading role of the intelligentsia and backwardness of the Russian masses, I will explore Radishchev’s interpretation of the Pugachev revolt and Cossack democracy of the Zaporizhian Host suppressed by Catherine II. Writing at the time of French and American revolutions, and on the eve of Haitian slave revolution, Radischev aligned insurrections within the Russian Empire with French idioms of natural law of resistance and current critiques of European colonization and Atlantic slavery. As I will demonstrate, this interpretation was not a theoretical fantasy from above but built on actual experiences and discourses of peasants, Cossacks, and indigenous steppe rebels.

Author

• Kirill Ospovat, U of Wisconsin-Madison