Crime and Punishment in the Russian Revolution: Mob Justice and Police in Petrograd by Tsuyoshi Hasegawa (review)

Tsuyoshi Hasegawa's new book is one of the most important ever written on the Russian Revolution. Its great merit is to reconcile the best political and social approaches to the subject. In so doing, it reconceptualizes the course of the revolution in 1917 and of the establishment of the Bolshevik dictatorship. Most important, the revolution is understood as a dramatic break (and not a continuation of worldwide crisis), driven over the summer by popular anxiety about social breakdown (and not utopian expectations), and resulting in the establishment of an authoritarian dictatorship as the only apparent way to resolve Russia's descent into rampant disorder.

Focusing on Petrograd (formerly St. Petersburg) and drawing upon abundant archival and contemporaneous newspaper sources, as well as the latest relevant scholarship, the study develops an argument Hasegawa first advanced in 1992 that crime and public disorder steadily increased popular disgruntlement throughout the summer of 1917. The present book is built around this fundamental observation.

Hasegawa opens his study with a survey of historical scholarship on the Russian Revolution, which he finds wanting. Instead, he proposes to reinterpret its course in the light of two insights: the sociological theory of anomie, understood as a complete shattering of socio-political authority, and the political concept of the failed state. After the tsar abdicated in March 1917, authority in Russia gradually dissipated and the state's power diminished. Russia became a failed state in which anarchy reigned. Almost immediately after the abdication, "the very heart of the city, a safe area before the February Revolution, was suddenly a scene of brutal and senseless violence" (37). The following chapters catalogue and analyze the rise in crime in Petrograd, detail the dismantling and failed reconstruction of the police forces, scrutinize the complete breakdown of public order and an emergent "epidemic of mob justice" (167), recount the continued flourishing of criminality after the Bolsheviks took power in October 1917, and conclude with their establishment of "a new kind of police state that rejected the liberalizing and centrifugal aims of the revolution that helped bring the Bolsheviks to power" (193).

The author provides detailed statistics on the dramatic increase in criminality of all kinds almost immediately after the revolution, beginning in May and spiking in August or October, depending on the type of crime. Factory workers in blue-collar districts organized "red guard" units to protect themselves and their property. Other precincts of Petrograd were left to fend for themselves, since police protection was completely unreliable. Ordinary people routinely took the law into their own hands, murdering suspected pickpockets and other criminals, sometimes in the grisliest manner. Hasegawa uses the crowd psychology theory of Gustave Le Bon to explain this trend. "Crowds," writes Hasegawa, "not only subsume individuals but also lend them a sense of empowerment…. Liberated by anonymity and empowered by consensus, the crowd indulged in cruelties its members would never have countenanced otherwise" (188). By fall, preoccupied with mere survival and coping with lawlessness, "the majority took little notice of the Bolsheviks' usurpation of power" (191). Even thereafter, mob psychology continued to animate mass action. Crowds went on rampages, breaking into huge state and private liquor supplies. Amid the violence, hundreds died, millions of rubles in property were stolen, and priceless cultural treasures perished. Ironically, before October the Bolsheviks had characterized such popular disorder as justified expressions of dissatisfaction, but once in power and faced with the alcohol pogroms, they referred to rioters as "the 'dregs,' willing tools of counterrevolution" (239).

The author has supplied excellent maps, informative statistical charts and tables, and amusing contemporary illustrations, mostly political cartoons, which together facilitate comprehension and reading pleasure.

Some factual errors and typos crept into the text. The specialized criminal police were not established in the 1890s, but in 1866 and 1908 as noted elsewhere (112, 113). The founding of the anti-pogrom...