The Bandit Churkin (original: “Razboinik Churkin”) was written by Nikolai Ivanovic Pastukhov and first appeared as “The Bandit Churkin,” Moskovskii Listok (Jan. 29, 1882-Spring 1885). Pastukhov (1822-1911) was a writer, editor, and journalist. He was the editor of The Moscow Leaflet (original: Moskovskii Listok), Moscow’s first penny newspaper. Like the other material in the Leaflet, Pastukhov’s work was reactionary, antisemitic, and very popular.

The titular character in Bandit Churkin was based on a real person. Vasilii (or Vaska) Churkin (?-1880) was a Moscow factory worker who became a notorious horse thief, extortionist, and bandit chief who operated in the countryside near Moscow and provinces around Moscow in the late 1870s. He was captured and sent to Siberia, but escaped and resumed outlawry. He died in 1880, although accounts differ as to the cause.

The Churkin of The Bandit Churkin is a swashbuckling, charismatic anti-hero and bandit who is well-liked by peasants and hated by the bourgeoisie and aristocrats. He is bloodthirsty and crude, but honorable, although he has nothing of chivalry in him and is self-centered. Churkin is extremely strong, “solidly built, broad shouldered, and as quick in his movements as a tiger.”¹ He had originally been a dye factory worker but his respectable salary was not enough to satisfy his greed, so he began stealing from the factory. He was caught and fired for this and turned to criminality, at first on a small scale but progressing in size and ambition until, at the height of his power, he commanded dozens of men and stole on a grand scale. The first episode of “The Bandit Churkin” begins with:

Muscovites have undoubtedly heard of the celebrated bandit Vasilii Churkin, who in his time spread panicky fear with his daring raids, brigandage, and robbery against the inhabitants of the district of Bogorodsk and the neighboring districts of Vladimir, Riazan, and other provinces.²

As the series progresses Churkin, his brutish friend Osip, and Churkin's band of thieves adventure from Bogorodsk, in Moscow Province, to western Siberia and then back again. Churkin murders and steals and fights off soldiers sent to capture him. He is eventually killed by an oak branch falling on his head.

In the 1870s and early 1880s cheap magazines and broadsheets were widely consumed by the lower classes in the Russian countryside. The printed stories were transformed into oral stories and consumed by the illiterate. Bandit stories were among the most popular genres of stories. Russian history is full of bandit chiefs, such as the Cossack leader Stenka Razin (1630-1671), and Russian literature had similar protagonists, like Gogol’s Taras Bulba. Schiller’s The Robbers had been popular in Russia since 1792, with a notable success on stage in Moscow in 1814, and Russian versions of the räuberromane were common. Turning the real Churkin, who was a brutal thug, into a Karl Moor-style hero (see: The Robbers) was a logical step. However, Pastukhov’s use of a real person for his heroic outlaw turned out to be especially popular with lower-class readers, so much so that “Churkin” became the most popular nickname for stray dogs, stories of Churkin-like outlaws were popular (as opposed to knights and James Fenimore Cooper-like [see: The Last of the Mohicans] stories of America), and children wanted to play bandits rather than knights.³ The upper classes, and the Tsar himself, were appalled at this development, and after Pastukhov was harshly punished in a libel suit he was told (either by Prince V.A. Dolgorukov, the governor general of St. Petersburg, or by Pastukhov’s conservative editor M.N. Katkov) that he had one issue in which to kill off Churkin.⁴ This may explain the abrupt and distinctly unheroic fashion in which Churkin dies, as well as the implication that it was God’s will that the branch kill him. This did not destroy Churkin’s popularity, and he remained a heroic protagonist of serials throughout the mid-1880s.

Churkin’s popularity with lower-class readers is curious. The fictional Churkin displays no particular sympathy toward the lower classes, and is as likely, if not more so, to murder the poor as to do anything to help them. Churkin has no class sympathies, seeing the lower classes rather as sheep too poor to make their shearing worth it. But he is also a subversive figure in that his attitude toward the authorities is defiant and contemptuous, and they prove completely unable to apprehend him or hamper him in any way. He is a type of wish-fulfillment figure, representing, like the heroes of Taras Bulba, unchecked id, rampant egotism, unbridled libido, supreme ability at violence, and complete freedom from consequences or responsibilities. In this respect his popularity with the lower classes is understandable. This threat of subversion and the popular response to it prompted the backlash, an action similar to the 1883 American reaction to stories of similar outlaw heroes (see: The Deadwood Dick Adventures, The James Brothers Adventures).

On the other hand, there were good reasons for Bandit Churkin being the Tsarist Russia equivalent of a bestseller. Bandit Churkin’s popularity has much to do with the anti-authoritarian nature of its preferred inscribed narrative:

Literature for the mass reader, whether in the form of cheap popular newspapers or pulp fiction, reported and commented on urban-industrial society in ways that helped the less educated negotiate the promises and perils of modernity and thus constituted an arena in which migrant workers could imaginatively engage with new identities and new forms of self-expression¼one of the most popular subjects of serialized fiction was the tale of the bandit at war with society, a tale that allowed readers vicariously to experience worlds of adventure, luxury, sexuality, crime and depravity¼bandit stories, although presenting rebellious and self-assertive individuals, ultimately sent a rather conservative message about the perils of disorder, even as they allowed newly literate readers to explore strange, enticing scenarios in which conventional notions of law and freedom were tested [emphasis mine].⁵

Bandit Churkin is primitive as fiction, but played a necessary role for its readers, as both an imaginative space in which to dream of greater freedom than the Tsarist government allowed them, and as a kind of pressure valve in which the pressures of daily life under the Tsars and in urban and rural Russia in the 1880s could be handled and dissipated. An apposite comparison would be to the dime novels that published The Deadwood Dick Adventures during their anti-Eastern, anti-capitalist heyday. Both texts appealed to readers psychologically and emotionally as well as for the content of the texts. Both texts presented fictional environments into which real-life awfulnesses could be projected and satisfactorily handled. And both texts provided their young male readers—the majority of the readers of both texts—with fantasy figures to idolize and if at all possible emulate.

Print: Nikolai Ivanovic Pastukhov, “The Terrible Bandit Churkin,” 221-230, Entertaining Tsarist Russia: Tales, Songs, Plays, Movies, Jokes, Ads, and Images from Russian Urban Life, 1779-1917, James von Geldern and Louise McReynolds, eds. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1998.

Jeffrey Brooks, When Russia Learned to Read: Literacy and Popular Literature, 1861-1917. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2003.

James von Geldern and Louise McReynolds, eds. Entertaining Tsarist Russia: Tales, Songs, Plays, Movies, Jokes, Ads, and Images from Russian Urban Life, 1779-1917. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1998.

¹ Nikolai Ivanovic Pastukhov, The Bandit Churkin, qtd in Jeffrey Brooks, When Russia Learned to Read: Literacy and Popular Literature, 1861-1917 (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University, 2003), 184.

² Pastukhov, The Bandit Churkin, 179.

³ Brooks, When Russia Learned to Read, 185-186.

⁴ Brooks, When Russia Learned to Read, 187.

⁵ S.A. Smith, Revolution and the People in Russia and China: A Comparative History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 100-102.