Activity

Some of these desiderata might have sounded unacceptably radical to the guardians of bourgeois order imploring the Soviet to join them in ruling, but in fact these conditions were obligingly elastic, their time frames long, often indeterminate

There were poems and prayers and imprecations.

This was an ad hoc realisation of the traditional chiliastic yearning for equal shares of the land for all who worked it – ‘black repartition’, as this redistribution was known – and the freedoms that should ensue.