Russia on the eve of modernity : popular religion and traditional culture under the last Tsars Introduction The traditional worldview The old believers : modernization as apocalypse The sectarians : dualism and secret history Folk eschatology The assassination of Alexander II (1881) and folk tsarism The year of famine and cholera (1891 1892) : the demonization of the nobility The Japanese war : peasant Russia and the wider world 1905 : revolution or reaction The Great War and the crisis of the traditional culture