Some 8,000 prisoners were liberated on the 27th, the vast majority of them common criminals. They had a vested interest — and took the lead — in the destruction of the police stations, along with their records, the Palace of Justice, the court buildings and the prisons. And they were to blame for much of the crime which took over the streets from this time. ‘Tonight the city reverberates with the most terrifying noises: broken glass, screams, and gunshots,’ wrote the Director of the Hermitage in the early hours of the 28th. Armed gangs looted shops and liquor stores. They broke into the houses of the well-to-do and robbed and raped their inhabitants. Well-dressed passers-by were mugged in the streets. Even wearing spectacles or a white starched collar was enough to mark one out as a burzhooi. A retired professor, who had been a Populist for nearly fifty years, came on to the streets on the evening of the 27th to celebrate the ‘victory of the revolution’ and immediately had his glasses smashed and his gold watch stolen by the very ‘people’ he had sought to liberate. This was clearly not the bloodless victory of liberty, equality and fraternity which the democratic intelligentsia had so long hoped for — and which they later mythologized as the ‘Glorious February Revolution’ — but more like a Russian peasant riot, ‘senseless and merciless’, as Pushkin had predicted, which sought to destroy all signs of privilege. The idea that the February Days were a ‘bloodless revolution’ — and that the violence of the crowd did not really take off until October — was a liberal myth. The democratic leaders of 1917 needed it to legitimize their own fragile power. In fact many more people were killed by the crowd in February than in the Bolsheviks’ October coup. The February Revolution in Helsingfors and Kronstadt was especially violent, with hundreds of naval officers killed gruesomely by the sailors. According to the official figures of the Provisional Government, 1,443 people were killed or wounded in Petrograd alone. But a friend of Prince Lvov’s told Claude Anet, the French journalist, that the true figure was up to 1,500 people killed and about 6,000 people wounded.23
Gorky took a dim view of all this violence and destruction. On the 28th Sukhanov found him in a gloomy mood:
For an hour by the clock he snarled and grumbled at the chaos, the disorder, the excesses, at the displays of political ignorance, at the girls driving around the city, God knows where, in God knows whose cars — and forecast that the movement would probably collapse in ruin worthy of our Asiatic savagery.
It seemed to Gorky that all this was just ‘chaos’ and not a ‘revolution’ at all. The next day he wrote to Ekaterina:
Too many people are falsely according a revolutionary character to what in fact is no more than a lack of discipline and organization on the part of the crowd … There is much more here of an absurd than a heroic nature. Looting has started. What will happen? I don’t know … Much blood will be spilled, much more than ever has been spilled before.24
These, of course, as Sukhanov noted, ‘were the impressions of a man of letters’, of a man who hated violence in all its forms. Many people today might be similarly inclined to condemn the ‘needless killing’ of the crowds. That certainly has been the recent trend among conservative historians of both the Russian and the French Revolutions.25 But one may prefer Sukhanov’s view:
that the excesses, the man-in-the-street’s stupidity, vulgarity, and cowardice, the muddles, the motor cars, the girls — all this was only what the revolution could not in any circumstances avoid, and without which nothing similar had ever happened anywhere.26
This is not to condone the violence but to understand it as the almost unavoidable reaction of a people angry and with much to avenge. It is to recognize that all social revolutions are bound by their nature to spill blood; and that to condemn them for doing so is tantamount to saying that any form of social protest which might end in violence is morally wrong. Of course there are distinctions that need to be made: the blood spilled by the people on the streets is different from the blood spilled by parties, movements, or armies, claiming to be acting in their name; and it must be analysed and judged in different ways.
