Revolutionary Philanthropy: Aid to Political Prisoners and Exiles in Late Imperial Russia by StuartFinkel. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2024. ix + 336 pp. $115.00. ISBN 978‐0‐19‐891610‐9

Political Red Cross in Soviet Russia but became absorbed in exploring the origins of aid to political prisoners and exiles in the tsarist era."Political philanthropy or revolutionary humanitarianism," as Finkel terms it, developed in imperial Russia during the government's suppression of the populist movement from the mid-1870s to the 1890s and attracted benefactors both inside and outside the country (p.12).In the present work, Finkel examines the thirty-year legacy of humanitarian assistance to tsarist political prisoners that inspired the Soviet Political Red Cross created in 1918, the subject of his next book.Recognizing politics and philanthropy as "two very different, seemingly incompatible, modes of social action," Finkel argues that the paradoxical combination of philanthropic and political efforts to assist the victims of tsarist oppression drew liberal sympathizers as well as radical activists into Russia's revolutionary movement (p.5); moreover, revolutionary philanthropy united clashing factions among the radicals themselves and contributed substantially to the impact and durability of the revolutionary movement.Russia's first prison welfare society was founded in St. Petersburg in 1819 by aristocratic circles imbued with Enlightenment humanism as well as Orthodox Christian charity.In the aftermath of two failed revolts against the tsarist state, the Decembrist uprising of 1825 and the Polish uprising of 1830, citizens of the empire awakened to the exceptional horrors of the Siberian punishment imposed on political convicts.More than one hundred Decembrists and thousands of Poles, many of them noble officers, were sentenced to lengthy terms of Siberian imprisonment followed by "settlement" into lifelong Siberian exile.Though designated "state criminals" by tsarist officialdom, the Decembrists, along with the wives who undertook to share their banishment to Siberia, came to epitomize heroic self-sacrifice in the subculture of the revolutionary movement.The socialist collectives and mutual aid societies that the Decembrists established in Siberian imprisonment and exile served as models for their fellow political convicts from Poland and subsequently for every generation of tsarist rebels sent to Siberia: the Polish insurrectionists of 1863, the populist propagandizers of the 1870s, the populist terrorists of the 1880s, the Marxists and the neo-populist terrorists of the 1905 revolution.In Russia's radical subculture, each successive wave of Siberian prisoners and exiles joined the pantheon of martyrs for the revolution.Literary circles and student mutual aid societies by the 1860s were surreptitiously contributing funds for arrested and imprisoned comrades.The mid-century formation of Red Cross societies across Europe to care for soldiers wounded in warfare gave rise not only to the official Russian Society of the Red Cross affiliated with the royal family, but also to "political Red Cross" circles of revolutionary supporters and sympathizers who provided aid to the burgeoning numbers of activists sent to Siberia in the 1870s and 1880s.Most significant among the "political Red