Dr Ben Phillips (University of Exeter) returns to Tromsø as part of his forthcoming MSCA-IF bid for the RSCPR research group, in order to present - and get feedback to - his project application.
The talk examines the origins of political suicides among imprisoned Russian revolutionaries during the late nineteenth century. It links the emergence of the prison suicide to the cultural production of knowledge about mass suicides among religious schismatics some two centuries earlier (in the late 1600s), and, in particular, the practice of self-immolation (samosozhzhenie) among the Old Believers (staroobriadtsy). By arguing that pre-modern sectarian martyrdom – an ‘invented tradition’ disseminated by radical intellectuals – provided a template for its latter-day socialist equivalent, the monograph resulting from this project will provide a pathbreaking study of the relationship between Russian religious culture and revolutionary activism in the final years of Tsarism.