Crime and Punishment in the Russian Revolution by Tsuyoshi Hasegawa (review)

Tsuyoshi Hasegawa's Crime and Punishment in the Russian Revolution opens with a brief history of St. Petersburg (renamed Petrograd in 1914), a city with real and powerful social divisions and one plagued, as a result of recent decades of industrialization and urbanization, by increased criminality. With the outbreak of the Great War in 1914, law and order in the imperial capital eroded rather quickly; things deteriorated even further when, following the abdication of Nicholas II in March 1917, the Provisional Government decided to dismantle the tsarist criminal justice system and its much-hated police force. Furthermore, all incarcerated prisoners were freed, and a large number of weapons fell into the hands of hooligans and criminals. Drug abuse, theft and robbery, gambling, prostitution and venereal disease, alcoholism, kidnapping and rape, and murder became rampant. Lastly, the acute shortage of consumer goods, above all food, a housing crisis, skyrocketing inflation, the decline in real wages, as well as the roaming and brawling of drunken sailors and soldiers—both psychologically brutalized on an unprecedented scale by the carnage of the First World War—also accounted for a significant increase in the crime rate and fostered social disintegration.

The Provisional Government, whose authority was eroded by incessant political crises, failed to establish a new, centralized, and coherent legal order that would be accepted and respected in Petrograd. The same fate befell a municipal government (the city duma) that soon found itself confronted with escalating problems. Since the latter was broke, it could not provide essential social services to its citizens; for example, the city militia that replaced the tsarist police force was poorly trained and provisioned, badly coordinated across districts, too often lacking self-control, and occasionally infiltrated by former criminals; unsurprisingly, it proved to be ineffective. The fact that workers chose to patrol their own neighbourhoods through their own militias (a class-based, politicized police that revealed the powerful force of decentralization spawned by the Revolution itself) did not help either.

Unable to rely on higher authorities to protect their property and their lives, frustrated city dwellers, as they came to appreciate their own vulnerability, reacted with anger and violence. Insecure, deprived, and desperate, they turned to vigilantism; they took the law into their own hands. Mob justice (samosud), a symbol of their fleeting empowerment, thus became "the ultimate symbol of February's hopes dashed" (p. 167). This violence, frequent and extraordinarily brutal, was directed against merchants, political opponents, medical personnel, even simple thieves and robbers. Predictably, not only did it fail to stem the crime rate, but it also contributed to escalating lawlessness and violence. Lawyers and journalists, who argued that mob justice represented a serious danger to the creation of a genuine civil society, could not contain the fury of the crowd. Thus a vicious cycle of fear, rage, and violence was created—one that alienated the people from politics, contributed to the disintegration of society, and set the stage for Lenin's October coup d'état, a takeover that was largely ignored by Petrograders consumed by their daily struggle for survival. Criminality, Hasegawa concludes, had fostered conditions for state failure.

Once in power, though, the Bolsheviks were immediately challenged by the very breakdown of social order that they had helped unleash before October. Actually, social disintegration accelerated as robberies and murders increased in quantity and intensity to the point, for example, where even a funeral procession turned into a shootout. The destructiveness of the so-called alcohol pogroms (from November 1917 to January 1918) as well as a significant escalation of mob justice—a mayhem that resulted in hundreds of lives lost, property stolen, and cultural treasures ruined—affected the Bolsheviks' attitude toward crime, police, and governance in general. They convinced them that the infestation of crime in the capital had to be dealt with coercively. Lenin's government ultimately restored order by establishing the Cheka, a centralized and state-driven police force that, by using unprecedented...