The popular culture of urban and rural Tsarist Russia revealed a dynamic and troubled world. This collection of essays by Western and Russian scholars questions conventional interpretations and recalls neglected stories about popular behaviour, politics and culture. What emerges is a new picture of lower-class life, in which traditions and innovations intermingled and social boundaries and identities were battered and reconstructed. The contributors convey the vitality as well as the contradictions of social life in old regime Russia, while also confronting problems of interpretation, methodology and cultural theory. They tell of peasant death rites and religious beliefs, family relationships and brutalities, defiant peasant women, folk songs, urban amusement parks, expressions of popular patriotism, the penny press, workers' notions of the self, street hooliganism, and attempts by educated Russians to transform popular festivities.