All Russia Is Burning!: A Cultural History of Fire and Arson in Late Imperial Russia

An absorbing study of the role of fire in 19th-century Russia Shows that the history of fire and arson in rural European Russia is a history of cultural meanings in the late imperial campaign for modernity In this absorbing study of the role of fire in 19th-century Russia, Frierson offers insights on a wide variety of other aspects of life of the period: agricultural practices; the relationship between peasants, for whom fire was the principal source of energy, and the educated urban elite who wanted to control both the energy source and the peasants; arson as a weapon and as a tool of social protest; early fire-fighting organizations as examples of interclass cooperation. Using sources ranging from literary representations and newspaper articles to statistical tables and court records, Frierson demonstrates the many meanings fire held for both peasants and the educated elite. To peasants, it was an essential source of light and warmth as well as a destructive force that regularly ignited their cramped villages of wooden, thatch-roofed huts. Absent the rule of law, they often used arson to gain justice or revenge, or to exert social control over those who would violate village norms. Frierson shows that the vast majority of arson cases in European Russia were not peasant-against-gentry acts of protest but peasant-against-peasant acts of self-help law or plain spite.