ABSTRACT
In the mid-1890s an exception was made: the prison library acquired Lev Tikhomirov's Why I Stopped Being a Revolutionary, the pamphlet which the erstwhile leader of the People's Will had written in 1888, prior to his pardon by Alexander III and his return to Russia, where he was currently a mainstay of conservative journalism. The main founder and the intellectual guide of the People's Will, the man who they had believed would through his devotion and ingenuity keep the revolutionary struggle going on in their absence, had become a renegade, a vilifier of the cause he had served so faithfully and of the movement that under his leadership had once appeared to have dealt a deathblow to the autocracy. Tikhomirov's recollections, for all their inherent limitations, give us some tantalizing glimpses into the revolutionary mind and atmosphere of those feverish years.
