Pryzhov, Ivan Gavrilovich

Born Sept. 22 (Oct. 4), 1827, in Moscow; died July 27 (Aug. 8), 1885, in Petrovskii Zavod, now the city of Petrovsk-Zabaikal’skii in Chita Oblast. Russian historian, political writer, and ethnographer. Participant in the revolutionary movement of the 1860’s.

The son of a freed serf who had become a clerk, Pryzhov studied ethnography, folklore, and Russian history at Moscow University from 1848 to 1850. He began publishing in 1860. In 1869 he met S. G. Nechaev and became a member of Narodnaia Rasprava (People’s Vengeance). He was arrested that year and in 1871 was sentenced at the Trial of the Nechaevtsy to 12 years at hard labor and lifelong exile to Siberia. He served his sentence in Transbaikalia, living in exile there beginning in 1881.

Pryzhov wrote a number of works on the history of Russia and the Ukraine, devoting particular attention to the people’s way of life. These works included Beggars in Holy Rus’ (1862) and The History of Taverns in Russia in Connection With the History of the Russian People (1868). As a historian, Pryzhov had a revolutionary democratic point of view, stressing the antipopular nature of princely and tsarist authority and the importance of popular movements. His works are atheistic in orientation. Many of them have never been published.