me constituted a large portion of the people of Russia, and as late as 1917 the country consisted of a population that was classified as four-fifths peasantry by official classification (Pipes 143). Gorky's own radicalization involved his understanding of the underclass and of the despair that could come over people in such a lowly position in life. He notes in his book that village life was filled with "joylessness" and was not at all the healthy, sincere life people in town thought it was:
. . . all I could see were peasants engaged in an incessant toil which was almost prison-like. among them were many sick people, broken by hard work, and there were hardly any cheerful ones (Gorky 117).
However, energizing this huge population to revolutionary fervor was a diffi
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