Ivan Pryzhov

Russian historian, publicist, and ethnographer. Participant in the revolutionary movement of the 1860s. He was born into the family of a clerk, a freed serf. He was educated at the First Moscow Gymnasium (1848) and at Moscow University in the Medical Faculty (1848–October 30, 1850, did not graduate).

From January 18, 1852, he worked as an executor and registrar in the Moscow Civil Chamber; when the chamber was closed in 1867, he remained “off the staff” and took a job in the office of a private railway. From 1868 he was supervisor of works on the Vitebsk—Orel—Kharkov—Kiev railway.

He began publishing in 1860. He was the author of a number of works on the history of Russia and Ukraine, in which he paid particular attention to folk life (“Beggars in Holy Rus’,” 1862; “The History of Taverns in Russia in Connection with the History of the Russian People,” 1868). As a historian, he took a revolutionary-democratic position, showed the anti-popular essence of princely and tsarist power, and emphasized the significance of popular movements. His works are marked by an atheistic orientation. A significant part of Pryzhov’s works remained unpublished.

In 1869 he became acquainted with S. G. Nechaev and became a member of the “People’s Retribution” organization; in the same year he was arrested and in 1871, in the “Nechaevists’ trial,” was sentenced to 12 years of hard labor and perpetual settlement in Siberia. He served hard labor in Transbaikal, and from 1881 lived there in settlement. Even while in Siberia, Pryzhov found the time and opportunity for scholarly work. He requested the books, papers, and draft notes kept by his brother and soon began publishing in the local press under the pseudonym “Blagoveshchensky.”

“As long as his wife was alive, one of those unknown Russian heroines whose lives are a continuous self-sacrifice, Pryzhov, despite extreme poverty, still managed to get by somehow. After her death he lost heart completely, took to drink, and died at Petrovsky Zavod in