ABSTRACT
This description of the forged internationalist socialist identity, taken from the ‘Bolshevik memoir’ written in the Soviet Union by a former Polish member of the Social Democracy of Polish Kingdom and Lithuania Party is also an exercise in counter-memory. When investigating identities of any kind in Russian Poland at the turn of the twentieth century, one must bear in mind their political dimension. It was a time of intensified questioning of any established polity and any existing community. Popular political mobilisation in Russian Poland around the 1905 Revolution, and socialist agitation, in particular, occurred in a specific social context. New political experiences intervened in the lives of people who, even if they had any hopes for upward mobility, both in professional and intellectual dimensions, had hardly any chance to put them into practice. Stanislaw Pestkowski is an example of an intelligentsia agitator embracing the working-class culture.
