In Crime and Punishment in the Russian Revolution: Mob Justice and Police in Petrograd, historian Tsuyoshi Hasegawa offers a new perspective on the revolutionary year from March 1917 to March 1918 by examining a frightening rise in violent crime that threatened the daily life of ordinary citizens in the capital city. Through the lens of crime, police behavior, judiciary ineptitude, and public response, Hasegawa demonstrates how the breakdown of political and social institutions paralyzed the city and paved the way for the rise of a new kind of authoritarianism. Below, Hasegawa introduces his study of the violent, chaotic lived experience of the revolution, and considers some of its relevance for our world today.
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The catastrophic social breakdown of Petrograd, capital city of the Russian Empire, during the Russian Revolution of 1917 is an important aspect of the revolution that has been overlooked. There was euphoric excitement after the February Revolution, with people expecting immediate improvements to their lives. But life only got worse, and the city soon became paralyzed. Provision of electricity and water dwindled and soon stopped. Garbage piled up in the streets and courtyards, uncollected. The city stank so bad that newspapers commented that even an elephant would faint. Worst of all, basic food became scarcer. People had to stand for hours in long queues for a mere loaf of bread. Horses starved to death, and warnings were posted against their consumption. Dogs disappeared, ending up in people’s stomachs. Consequently, epidemics spread, filling the hospitals.
As horrible as this all was, the most frightening change in daily life was the sharp rise of crime, especially violent crime. The Tsar was gone, and the tsarist police were also annihilated. The newly created municipal police force was inexperienced and untrained, and infiltrated by former criminals. Pickpockets became muggers. Robbers became murderers. Faith in daily exchange suffered, as people believed that merchants were taking advantage of shortages and economic decline to soak a population already suffering from rationing and deprivation.
The old court system also became paralyzed, and the temporary new courts passed erratic verdicts without solid legal basis. Soon, even the temporary courts were abolished, leaving the citizens nowhere to go to lodge their daily complaints. The prison system broke down, leading to the mass escape of criminals back onto streets already riddled with crime.
Longing for the order and security that political authorities could not provide, people took the law into their own hands. Crowds turned to mob justice. When witnessing a crime, people attempted to catch the perpetrators, even petty thieves. They surrounded them there on the spot, beat them, sometimes even tearing them from limb to limb. They paraded them through the streets by tying them on carts, or threw them into the canals and rivers to enjoy watching them drown.
This brutal violence is, in my view, one of the most prominent, frightening, and often ignored aspects of the Russian Revolution. The revolution brought out the worst of human emotions—hatred, cruelty, brutality, and vengeance.
It is important to recognize that the Bolsheviks approved and often encouraged this breakdown of social order. Lenin in fact thought mob justice was the expression of justifiable popular anger against the bourgeois order.
But Lenin spoke too soon, because things went from bad to worse under the Bolsheviks. Both crime and mob justice grew in frequency and cruelty. Moreover, under the Bolsheviks a new element of mob violence was added: alcohol pogroms. Mobs attacked wine and vodka cellars in November and December. The most violent and notorious raid took place in the wine cellar of the Winter Palace, where many drowned to death. A Bolshevik high official helplessly observed that the Bolshevik power was drowning in a sea of wine and vodka.
To deal with this unprecedented social breakdown, the Bolsheviks resorted to draconian measures: shoot to kill any criminals on the spot. This stop-gap measure proved no deterrence to further crime. In the end, the Bolsheviks proclaimed all common crimes counterrevolutionary acts to be dealt with by the Cheka, an extralegal secret police force without any institutional checks. Crime and attempts at its control became one of the most important factors in the establishment of the totalitarian state.
Gaining a deeper understanding of that process helps us now to understand the difficult transition to liberal democracy that we’ve observed in recent years as authoritarian regimes are overthrown. We can approach this issue from two directions. From the bottom, the Russian Revolution can be seen as a process of social disintegration into a state of anomie wherein commonly accepted norms and values that had sustained social cohesion disappear, and the social structure that ensured its norms crumbles. Antonio Gramsci once stated: “The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born: in this interregnum a great variety of moribund symptoms appear.” In Russia’s “interregnum,” the distinction between what was acceptable and what was unacceptable became blurred and contested; the social, legal, and political structures lost the capacity to enforce norms; and unsanctioned violence became the most effective and favored means to settle disputes.
From the top down perspective, what happened in the Russian Revolution is a clear case of the failed state. According to Max Weber, the state must possess two essential ingredients: monopoly of coercive power and legitimacy. The Provisional Government had neither. It could not monopolize the means of coercion—the military and the police—at the exclusion of private military organizations such as the workers’ militia and the Red Guards. Sharing power with the All-Russian Soviets, it never acquired legitimacy. It was a failed state that could not provide essential services to citizens.
These aspects demonstrate some of the reasons why it is exceedingly difficult for a post-authoritarian regime to restore order out of chaos and establish new norms that assure liberal democracy in the face of new forces that contest advancement of their values, and under the pressure of rising expectations. Some kind of coercive power is required to restore a semblance of law and order, which might lead to the restoration of authoritarianism that can be worse than the power that the revolution had toppled. The restoration of the state under the Bolsheviks with the use of brutal coercion, without legitimacy, was a tragic consequence of the Russian Revolution.
Does this book hold any relevance for America today? Contemporary America may seem to have little resemblance to Russia in 1917. And yet, as Mark Twain said, although history does not repeat itself, it does rhyme. Russia in 1917 was a starkly polarized society, where it was impossible to create a shared basis for democracy. It was a society in which, as my book shows, the rule of law crumbled, and violence became the common currency to settle disputes. Lenin and the Bolsheviks fanned class hatred among the masses who had already rejected civil society as their enemy, and took advantage of catastrophic social breakdown as the vehicle for their seizure of power.
We may harbor the comforting thought that America is a totally different country, where democratic principles based on the rule of law, institutional checks and balances, and freedom of the press are firmly established. What should be stressed, however, is that these democratic principles are further anchored by fundamental values such as equality, justice, and basic human rights, and the powers of reason, decency, and compassion. Without these values and norms, commitments to the constitution, the rule of law, and a free press mean little and may even endanger democracy. These were the values that Russia had no time to develop under the Provisional Government, and that Lenin and the Bolsheviks successfully destroyed with their skillful propaganda.
What is happening in America now is a wholesale assault on these norms themselves. We cannot afford to be complacent in the belief that our democratic principles are bedrock solid. Democracy is a porous system, easily destroyed by enemies from within. When I see these principles under assault in contemporary America, I see rhymes with the Russia of 1917. It is unlikely that contemporary America will descend into a revolutionary cataclysm. But my hope is that Crime and Punishment in the Russian Revolution demonstrates how precious our democracy is, and how important it is to nourish and nurture our democratic system while resisting any attempts to subvert it.
