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This article follows the travelling concept of socialism and offers a comparative study of two Western borderlands of the Russian Empire — namely, the Kingdom of Poland and the Grand Duchy of Finland. A contrastive comparison is used to examine the birth, dissemination, and breakthrough of socialism from its first appearance until the Revolution of 1905. The multidirectional model of transfer of modern ideas is used to track different origins and influences which impacted the development of socialisms. The concept entered Polish political conversation as a self-applied label among émigrés in the 1830s, whereas the opponents of socialism made it famous in the 1860s in Finnish. When socialism became a mass movement at the turn of the century, socialist parties (re)defined the concept through underground leaflets and brochures in Poland, and through a legal labor press in Finland. The ideas moved in the space between Western influences, mainly German socialism, and the radical traditions of the Russian Empire. Despite being embedded in the same imperial setting, the Polish and Finnish socialisms did not engage in a wider cross-fertilization, which is explained by divergent political trajectories of the two regions.