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The article presents a profile of the Russian revolutionary political dissenter Ivan Dmitrievich Chugurin, highlighting his life in the first decade of the 20th-century, becoming involved in the political resistance movements of the two decades before the October Revolution in 1917. Accounts are given describing Chugurin's early discovery of the revolutionary movement in 1902, his entrance and cooperation in the Menshevik revolutionary group in Sormovo, Russia, and his later leadership in the Revolution itself.

The article presents information about an incident in the life of the early 20th-century Russian revolutionary Grigori Zinoviev, also known as Ovsei-Gershon Aronovich Radomysl'skii. It focuses on his arrest in St. Petersburg, Russia in March 1908, and release two months later. The successful petitions of his wife, Lilina, to the Russian authorities for his release are described. A general depiction of the role which such family petitions played in the treatment of political prisoners is offered, and the importance of such social structures in the success of the Russian revolution is analyzed.

This article discusses the issue of false identities in revolutionary Russia. It goes beyond the subject's usual confines in the Stalin period and traces the roots of this social phenomenon to late imperial Russia, as well as examining its continuous effects during the early decades of Bolshevik rule. The examination outlines the lives of several obscure characters between the revolutionary period of 1905 and the first half of the1930s in order to define certain common characteristics that might help identify this group of revolutionary impostors as a social prototype. The article is based on a random sample of 33 personal files from the archive of the Society of Former Political Prisoners and Exiles of the Soviet Union that concern expelled members and rejected candidates. Of these, approximately half were cases of common criminals posing as former revolutionaries and political prisoners. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]