This paper examines the origins of political suicides among imprisoned Russian revolutionaries during the late nineteenth century. It links the emergence of the prison suicide to the cultural production of knowledge about mass suicides among religious schismatics some two centuries earlier (in the late 1600s), and, in particular, the practice of self-immolation (samosozhzhenie) among the Old Believers (staroobriadtsy). By arguing that pre-modern sectarian martyrdom – an ‘invented tradition’ disseminated by radical intellectuals – provided a template for its latter-day socialist equivalent, the paper begins to trace a fresh perspective on the relationship between Russian religious culture and revolutionary activism in the final years of Tsarism.
