Activity

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.

the careful prolixity of autodidacts

Nomenclature was tangled: Russia that year was riddled with committees, caucuses, congresses, permanent and semi-permanent, standing and not-standing. Meetings proliferated ad well-minuted infinitum. [...]