The Bolsheviks blamed the ‘provocations of the bourgeoisie’ for this bacchanalia. It was hard for them to admit that their own supporters, who were supposed to be the ‘disciplined vanguard of the proletariat’, could have been involved in such anarchic behaviour. But the recently opened records of the MRC show that many of those who had taken part in the seizure of power were the instigators of these drunken riots. Some of them, no doubt, had only taken part in the insurrection because of the prospect of loot: the whole uprising for them was a big adventure, a day out in the city with the rest of the lads, and with a licence to rob and kill. This is not to say that the Bolsheviks were simply hooligans and criminals, as many propertied types concluded at the time. But it is to say that the uprising was bound to descend into chaos because the Bolsheviks had at their disposal very few disciplined fighters and because the seizure of power itself, as a violent act, encouraged such actions from the crowd. Similar outbursts of looting and violence were noted in dozens of cities during and after October. Indeed, they were often an integral element of the transfer of power.32
All this suggests that the Bolshevik insurrection was not so much the culmination of a social revolution, although of course there were several different social revolutions — in the towns and in the cities, in the countryside, in the armed forces and in the borderlands — and in each of these there were militant forces that had some connections with the Bolsheviks. It was more the result of the degeneration of the urban revolution, and in particular of the workers’ movement, as an organized and constructive force, with vandalism, crime, generalized violence and drunken looting as the main expressions of this social breakdown. Gorky, who was, as always, quick to condemn this anarchic violence, was at pains to point out that ‘what is going on now is not a process of social revolution’ but a ‘pogrom of greed, hatred and vengeance’.33 The participants in this destructive violence were not the organized ‘working class’ but the victims of the breakdown of that class and of the devastation of the war years: the growing army of the urban unemployed; the refugees from the occupied regions, soldiers and sailors, who congregated in the cities; bandits and criminals released from the jails; and the unskilled labourers from the countryside who had always been the most prone to outbursts of anarchic violence in the cities. These were the semi-peasant types whom Gorky had blamed for the urban violence in the spring and to whose support he had ascribed the rising fortunes of the Bolsheviks. He returned to the same theme on the eve of their seizure of power:
All the dark instincts of the crowd irritated by the disintegration of life and by the lies and filth of politics will flare up and fume, poisoning us with anger, hate and revenge; people will kill one another, unable to suppress their own animal stupidity. An unorganized crowd, hardly understanding what it wants, will crawl out into the street, and, using this crowd as a cover, adventurers, thieves, and professional murderers will begin to ‘create the history of the Russian Revolution’.34
As for the Petrograd workers, they took little part in the insurrection. This was the height of the economic crisis and the fear of losing their jobs was enough to deter the vast majority of them from coming out on to the streets. Hence the factories and the transport system functioned much as normal. The workers, in any case, owed their allegiance to the Soviet rather than the Bolsheviks. Most of them did not know — or even wish to know — the differences of doctrine between the socialist parties. Their own voting patterns were determined by class rather than by party: they tended to vote as their factory had voted in the past, or opted for the party whose candidate seemed most like a worker and spoke the language of class. Among the unskilled, in particular, there was a common belief that the Bolsheviks were a party of ‘big men’ (from the peasant term bolshaki).
