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Crime and Punishment in the Russian Revolution: Mob Justice and Police in Petrograd
Russians from all walks of life poured into the streets of the imperial capital after the February Revolution of 1917, joyously celebrating the end of Tsar Nicholas II’s monarchy. One year later, with Lenin’s Bolsheviks now in power, Petrograd’s deserted streets presented a very different scene. No celebrations marked the Revolution’s anniversary. Amid widespread civil strife and lawlessness, a fearful citizenry stayed out of sight.
In Crime and Punishment in the Russian Revolution, Tsuyoshi Hasegawa offers a new perspective on Russia’s revolutionary year through the lens of violent crime and its devastating effect on ordinary people. When the Provisional Government assumed power after Nicholas II’s abdication, it set about instituting liberal reforms, including eliminating the tsar’s regular police. But dissolving this much-hated yet efficient police force and replacing it with a new municipal police led rapidly to the breakdown of order and services. Amid the chaos, crime flourished. Gangs of criminals, deserters, and hooligans brazenly roamed the streets. Mass prison escapes became common. And vigilantism spread widely as ordinary citizens felt compelled to take the law into their own hands, often meting out mob justice on suspected wrongdoers.
The Bolsheviks swept into power in the October Revolution but had no practical plans to reestablish order. As crime continued to escalate and violent alcohol riots almost drowned the revolutionary regime, they redefined it as “counterrevolutionary activity,” to be dealt with by the secret police, whose harshly repressive, extralegal means of enforcement helped pave the way for a Communist dictatorship.
In Crime and Punishment in the Russian Revolution, Tsuyoshi Hasegawa offers a new perspective on Russia’s revolutionary year through the lens of violent crime and its devastating effect on ordinary people. When the Provisional Government assumed power after Nicholas II’s abdication, it set about instituting liberal reforms, including eliminating the tsar’s regular police. But dissolving this much-hated yet efficient police force and replacing it with a new municipal police led rapidly to the breakdown of order and services. Amid the chaos, crime flourished. Gangs of criminals, deserters, and hooligans brazenly roamed the streets. Mass prison escapes became common. And vigilantism spread widely as ordinary citizens felt compelled to take the law into their own hands, often meting out mob justice on suspected wrongdoers.
The Bolsheviks swept into power in the October Revolution but had no practical plans to reestablish order. As crime continued to escalate and violent alcohol riots almost drowned the revolutionary regime, they redefined it as “counterrevolutionary activity,” to be dealt with by the secret police, whose harshly repressive, extralegal means of enforcement helped pave the way for a Communist dictatorship.
355 pages, Hardcover
Published October 25, 2017
About the author
Tsuyoshi Hasegawa
24 books16 followersTsuyoshi Hasegawa is a Japanese-American historian specializing in modern Russian and Soviet history and the relations between Russia, Japan, and the United States. He taught at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where he was director of the Cold War Studies program until his retirement in 2016.
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
October 28, 2019
At the time I read this book, in September 2019, I had already read a fair amount of works on the fall of tsarism and the Russian revolution, both histories and memoirs, but I had never read a book like this one. Hasegawa’s book is a tremendously enlightening work that helps us understand the Era as it was experienced by those who lived through it. As the title points out, the book is not focused on higher (and not so higher) politics but mainly on aspects of Petrograd life that are directly linked to the activity of criminal elements and bands, and with their impact on daily life. By concentrating on these criminal aspects of life, largely potentiated by the destruction of tsarist police in February 1917 and the disintegration of central authority with the concomitant birth of several concurrent militia bodies and factory red guards, we are given a startling picture of what was life in Russia (mainly in Petrograd) between February 1917 and the early times of the Bolshevik regime: the incredible increase in all types of crimes, from thefts, assaults, and burglaries, down to assassinations, not missing widespread corruption of the militias and unruliness of the armed forces. This dreadful picture of social disintegration is compounded with the spiraling of public life down to anarchy, with frequent occasions of wine riots and mob violence. Not surprisingly, in the mist of this chaos the takeover of power by the Bolsheviks was not felt as much more than one additional episode in the madhouse that Petrograd had become, and one that did not look that relevant at first… But then the Bolsheviks were organized, determined, inspired by ideological certainty, and embodied with a tactical flexibility that resulted in the final control in almost all of the former Empire and its life, including the curbing of the criminal aspects that had run amok from the start of 1917 until the first half of 1918, when the renewed centralization of power, together with the empowerment of the Cheka and the ever increasing ruthlessness of the civil war, would definitely change the picture. This is an extraordinarily interesting work about these incredibly important times.
July 16, 2018
crazy mobs of suffering
June 21, 2025
Hasegawa presents in detail the social problem of crime and disorder, of mob justice and the unruliness of society, but he doesn't conduct a sufficiently political investigation of the 'revolutionary law' of the workers and broader toiling masses enacting collective discipline through their own organisations. He provides a useful account of how issues of social order were sites of contest, how fighting crime and other antisocial behaviour was not just a top-down measure by bourgeois and reactionary forces, but was also a spontaneous sentiment, particularly in the formation of militias and in the concerns of housing committees and residents' organisations. However, his discussions of things like bottom-up militias is more a presentation of a very troubled but ultimately common effort of all groups for social order, rather than a site of deeper political conflict. The actually revolutionary efforts at social order, in the factory committees and soviets, is not given its due consideration. There was a political dynamic to the question which is not sufficiently captured in Hasegawa's analysis; in the context of class struggle there is more than one solution to any problem, each at least seeming coherent.
It is important context to see that life in Russia 1917 was rough, and society seemed to be falling apart. But, importantly, mob justice was not revolutionary self-activity, which was to be found in the mass organisations, but was instead a phenomenon of desperation. Mob justice was reactionary, sometimes explicitly, even though it often invoked the revolution; some attacks on merchants had anti-Semitic overtones. Mob justice was often very cruel relative to the crime. It did not often involve politically advanced workers, it more involved desperate urban poor and some impoverished petty-bourgeois. The urban poor lived off wage labour, so they were workers, but their position was a socially isolated one, often like artisans, and so they constituted the backwards dregs of the workers. That Hasegawa argues the urban poor to be neither lumpenproletarian nor petty bourgeois is a useful observation of the stratification of the working class. Nevertheless, it had to be the advanced guard of the toiling people to lead the revolution, and so the interests of the revolution were not to be found in the proliferation of mob justice, but instead in the formation of a firm revolutionary state power of the workers and broader toiling masses, enforcing a new social order, with its own judiciary. The problem of mob justice was not about crowd psychology, but was a problem of the undirected spontaneity of the politically backwards sections of society.
So it's very questionable that Hasegawa would seek to identify the social unruliness with the Bolshevik seizure of power as if the latter benefited from the former rather than that they provided a solution to the general social condition. He slams Lenin for not being concerned with fighting crime, though it should be obvious why Lenin might not have wanted to feed in to the idea of giving more power to the existing government for genuine political and not opportunistic reasons. This was not a situation of Lenin desiring mob justice for his own ends, despite what Hasegawa says. He laughably argues that the February revolution was better because it was democratic, and likens October to mob justice because it was 'in a context of political apathy', a ridiculous argument considering that February was spontaneous and October was not, and that the latter was organised after Soviet vote. That the social fabric had degraded over the course of the year was true, and political consciousness in support of the Bolsheviks certainly would have had a stern and bitter edge. But saying that such a circumstance was one of apathy is not established. There was certainly not some kind of perfect purely deliberative democracy leading up to or after October, but to abstain from action until achieving such a dream would have been to walk oneself into bloody defeat. The analysis is poisoned by Hasegawa's ideological anti-communism and predisposition to identify Lenin with Stalin and totalitarianism. There are silly concepts invoked to do this, like the very one-sided idea that a principle of the revolution was political decentralisation.
The issue of crime in general evokes the question of power, but in bourgeois society such sentiment spontaneously takes a direction into supporting bourgeois power or otherwise reactionary social mobilisation, even in revolutionary situations. So it's not something easily related to by the left. Although, the socialist parties taking part in developing a proletarian response to the issue was legitimate, and was part of developing a proletarian social power. However, it's not clear that crime was in itself an issue which politically motivated the seizure of power, despite Hasegawa's argument that the Bolsheviks took advantage of social breakdown. Crime is not an issue that the left ought to see as needing to solve, but neither is crime some kind of effective political resistance to or undermining of bourgeois rule; it is an unfortunate product of an unjust world.
The provisional government understood as a 'failed state' is a partial truth about the conditions for seeing Soviet power as necessary. Though this condition wasn't just a product of cold economic facts and desperation, but was also a product of the political life of the mass organisations and their intransigence, the real irreconcilability of fundamentally hostile political institutions. Mob justice was more a fault of the barbarism of tsarist social development, more than being a problem of the revolution and its aspirations. Though without the Bolsheviks, social breakdown could have given way to the provisional government increasingly encroaching on the soviets and wrapping up the mass organisations, and something much worse would have most likely followed, in the way of 1848. The book repeatedly notes of recurrent sentiment of longing for a return of political authoritarianism because the regime of freedom had brought only chaos and social breakdown, though a properly political analysis is absent. Hasegawa's book, despite his intentions, is not a social history but a sociological history, and this comes with weaknesses. However, such studies are still useful for their concrete research.
It is important context to see that life in Russia 1917 was rough, and society seemed to be falling apart. But, importantly, mob justice was not revolutionary self-activity, which was to be found in the mass organisations, but was instead a phenomenon of desperation. Mob justice was reactionary, sometimes explicitly, even though it often invoked the revolution; some attacks on merchants had anti-Semitic overtones. Mob justice was often very cruel relative to the crime. It did not often involve politically advanced workers, it more involved desperate urban poor and some impoverished petty-bourgeois. The urban poor lived off wage labour, so they were workers, but their position was a socially isolated one, often like artisans, and so they constituted the backwards dregs of the workers. That Hasegawa argues the urban poor to be neither lumpenproletarian nor petty bourgeois is a useful observation of the stratification of the working class. Nevertheless, it had to be the advanced guard of the toiling people to lead the revolution, and so the interests of the revolution were not to be found in the proliferation of mob justice, but instead in the formation of a firm revolutionary state power of the workers and broader toiling masses, enforcing a new social order, with its own judiciary. The problem of mob justice was not about crowd psychology, but was a problem of the undirected spontaneity of the politically backwards sections of society.
So it's very questionable that Hasegawa would seek to identify the social unruliness with the Bolshevik seizure of power as if the latter benefited from the former rather than that they provided a solution to the general social condition. He slams Lenin for not being concerned with fighting crime, though it should be obvious why Lenin might not have wanted to feed in to the idea of giving more power to the existing government for genuine political and not opportunistic reasons. This was not a situation of Lenin desiring mob justice for his own ends, despite what Hasegawa says. He laughably argues that the February revolution was better because it was democratic, and likens October to mob justice because it was 'in a context of political apathy', a ridiculous argument considering that February was spontaneous and October was not, and that the latter was organised after Soviet vote. That the social fabric had degraded over the course of the year was true, and political consciousness in support of the Bolsheviks certainly would have had a stern and bitter edge. But saying that such a circumstance was one of apathy is not established. There was certainly not some kind of perfect purely deliberative democracy leading up to or after October, but to abstain from action until achieving such a dream would have been to walk oneself into bloody defeat. The analysis is poisoned by Hasegawa's ideological anti-communism and predisposition to identify Lenin with Stalin and totalitarianism. There are silly concepts invoked to do this, like the very one-sided idea that a principle of the revolution was political decentralisation.
The issue of crime in general evokes the question of power, but in bourgeois society such sentiment spontaneously takes a direction into supporting bourgeois power or otherwise reactionary social mobilisation, even in revolutionary situations. So it's not something easily related to by the left. Although, the socialist parties taking part in developing a proletarian response to the issue was legitimate, and was part of developing a proletarian social power. However, it's not clear that crime was in itself an issue which politically motivated the seizure of power, despite Hasegawa's argument that the Bolsheviks took advantage of social breakdown. Crime is not an issue that the left ought to see as needing to solve, but neither is crime some kind of effective political resistance to or undermining of bourgeois rule; it is an unfortunate product of an unjust world.
The provisional government understood as a 'failed state' is a partial truth about the conditions for seeing Soviet power as necessary. Though this condition wasn't just a product of cold economic facts and desperation, but was also a product of the political life of the mass organisations and their intransigence, the real irreconcilability of fundamentally hostile political institutions. Mob justice was more a fault of the barbarism of tsarist social development, more than being a problem of the revolution and its aspirations. Though without the Bolsheviks, social breakdown could have given way to the provisional government increasingly encroaching on the soviets and wrapping up the mass organisations, and something much worse would have most likely followed, in the way of 1848. The book repeatedly notes of recurrent sentiment of longing for a return of political authoritarianism because the regime of freedom had brought only chaos and social breakdown, though a properly political analysis is absent. Hasegawa's book, despite his intentions, is not a social history but a sociological history, and this comes with weaknesses. However, such studies are still useful for their concrete research.
June 23, 2018
This is a very well researched, scholarly view of the crime conditions that were rampant after the fall of the tsarist regime. It showed the descent of the society and the rise of criminal behavior when the Provisional government took over and how conditions dramatically worsened with the rise of the Bolsheviks. I have read a lot about late Russian, early Soviet history and have never encountered much of the information presented in this book.
I highly recommend this book for anyone who is interested in research on social conditions during this critical time period. I DO NOT recommend it for anyone with a mere passing interest who is looking for a light read.
I highly recommend this book for anyone who is interested in research on social conditions during this critical time period. I DO NOT recommend it for anyone with a mere passing interest who is looking for a light read.
August 24, 2021
Having not read any modern Russian history so far this year, this seemed like a reasonable monograph to try. To begin at the end, Hasegawa concludes with a plea for a better theory of state failure, as the Great War broke the state and society of Czarist Russia, to the degree that the provisional republic could not put the pieces back together again, with the lawlessness, criminality and mob action of Petrograd being both symptom and reinforcing process. The problem is that the Bolsheviks' organicist theories of classes knowing their own interests were also shown up, as all there was were fragmentary communities trying to secure their own security to the best of their ability; until Lenin unleashed the Cheka on general society. The author doesn't pretend to have any good answers to his question of how does one thread a path between chaos and coercion; consent and legitimacy are mostly the residue of past promises kept, and that is a question of time.
August 3, 2018
Liberty is the fruit of regulation.
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews