This politicization became manifest in the dramatic upsurge of strikes which crippled the country from September onwards. Because of the general effects of inflation, it was far more widespread than previous strike-waves: unskilled labourers and semi-intelligentsia groups, such as hospital, city and clerical workers, were forced to cast aside their usual reluctance to strike in the struggle to keep up with the rising cost of living. Yet because strikes were ineffective — and even counter-productive — in combating inflation, they were often accompanied by broader political demands for the whole economy to be restructured. Industrial strikes, still the most common, were also much more likely to end up in violence. They were no less than a battle for the control of the workplace and the city economy as a whole. The trade unions and factory committees, which tended to have a moderating influence, soon lost control of these militant strikes. They spilled on to the streets and sometimes even ended in bloody conflicts between the workers — armed, trained and organized by the Red Guards — and the government militias. Employers and managers were assaulted; and where they resorted to lock-outs, the factory buildings were stormed and occupied by the workers. Some strikes spread to involve the residents of whole urban districts in attacks on bakeries and shops, house searches and arrests of the burzhoois whom the crowd suspected of hoarding food. There was also a steep rise in looting and crime, drunkenness and vandalism, ethnic conflicts and anti-Jewish pogroms during September and October.93 To the urban propertied classes, these final weeks before the Bolshevik seizure of power appeared like a descent into anarchy.
September also saw a violent upturn in the peasant war against the landed estates. With the approach of the autumn ploughing, the time seemed ripe for a final reckoning with the old agrarian order. The peasants were fed up with waiting for the Provisional Government to deliver on its promises about the land, and most villages now had their own band of soldiers from the army ready to lead them in the march on the manors. The pogrom, or violent sacking of an estate by the mob, became a widespread phenomenon in the central black-soil regions, whereas in previous months the peasant movement had been mainly confined to disputes over rent, the confiscation of cattle and the organized seizure of the arable fields by the village committee. In Tambov province hundreds of manor houses were burned and vandalized — the aim ostensibly being, as the peasants put it, to ‘drive the squires out’. This violent wave of destruction seems to have started with the murder of Prince Boris Vyazemsky, the owner of several thousand hectares in the Usman region of Tambov. The local peasants had been demanding since the spring that Vyazemsky lower his rents and return the hundred hectares of prime pasture he had taken from them as a punishment for their part in the revolution of 1905. But on both counts Vyazemsky had refused. On 24 August some 5,000 peasants from the neighbouring villages occupied the estate. Fortified by vodka from the Prince’s cellars, and armed with pitchforks and rifles, they repulsed a Cossack detachment, arrested Vyazemsky and organized a kangaroo court which decided to despatch him to the Front, ‘so that he can learn to fight as the peasants have done’. But there were also cries of ‘Let’s kill the Prince, we are sick of him!’, and he was murdered by the drunken mob before he even reached the nearby railway station. Vyazemsky’s manor house was then destroyed, the livestock and tools divided up and carted back to the villages, and his arable land ploughed by the peasants.94
Similar pogroms followed on dozens of other estates, not only in Tambov but also in the neighbouring provinces of Penza, Voronezh, Saratov, Kazan, Orel, Tula and Riazan’. In Penza province some 250 manors (one-fifth of the total) were burned or destroyed in September and October alone. One agronomist left a vivid description of the plundered estates in Saratov province during the autumn of 1917:
As far as the manor buildings are concerned, they have been senselessly destroyed, with only the walls left standing. The windows and doors were the worst to suffer; in the majority of the estates no trace is left of them. All forms of transport have been destroyed or taken. Cumbersome machines like steam-threshers, locomotives, and binders were taken out for no known reason and discarded along the roads and in the fields. The agricultural tools were also taken. Anything that could be used in the peasant households simply disappeared from the estates.
