“Imagine,” Tsuyoshi Hasegawa asks us, “if every couple of days, for months on end, groups of hundreds and sometimes thousands paraded through your hometown with the bloodied, unconscious husk of a recently beaten man. What if that parade ended with the man drowning as spectators laughed and hurled stones at his writhing body?” (167–68). Well, Hasegawa reasonably suggests, if we were put in that situation we might have a much different view about community and about the place of violence in everyday life. Terror, not of the political sort, but of the quotidian, street-wise variety, would come to “saturat[e] the atmosphere,” and the “daily struggle for survival in an essentially failed state” (168) would displace most other political thoughts and social behaviors. In his account, the increase in danger and chaos in daily life was fundamental to the experience of 1917 and helps to explain why neither the Bolshevik seizure of power in October nor the anniversary of the February Revolution a few months later significantly engaged the attention of Petrograd citizens.

In making this argument, Hasegawa joins several other recent historians, including this reviewer, in turning attention to the consequences of state failure in the revolutionary era. He has chosen a useful angle from which to approach the question by looking at criminal behaviors, the transformation of the urban police system, and the emergence of mob “justice” (samosud) and mob “injustice” (in the guise of alcohol riots) over the course of 1917 and early 1918. The book is structured around alternating chapters that trace the changes in “crime” and “punishment” in the midst of revolution. There are terrific and telling details throughout, not just in the recounting of particularly notorious crimes but also in the collation of crime statistics. These statistics show the startling changes experienced by Petrograders. Not only were they witnesses to regular lynching parades, but other crimes like simple assault more than tripled between 1916 and 1917.

Hasegawa's sensitive and detailed description of the shifting modes of policing is also noteworthy. Following Murray Frame, he identifies two competing models of policing in early twentieth-century Europe: 1) a police-state model that puts the police under centralized control and gives them a variety of administrative tasks in addition to controlling criminality and 2) a decentralized “municipal police” model that focuses almost entirely on public safety. The tsarist state adopted the former model, and the Petrograd City Duma would try to implement the second over the course of 1917. The innovation of the revolutionary era was the creation of class-based militias, the goal of which “was neither to maintain order nor to secure life and property for all citizens. Rather it was to promote the exclusive interests of the working class against its class enemies” (118). All of this was well and good, but as Hasegawa points out, the key thing to understand is that all of these varieties of policing failed, and this “erosion of … police authority” was the most important reason for “Petrograd's frightening increase in crime” (109). The absence of this core state function accounts for the lynch mobs and then the alcohol riots that focused Bolshevik attention on the need to build a new, highly coercive police regime, not just to deal with “counter-revolution” but also with crime. Indeed, the lines between counter-revolution and crime were blurred not only conceptually, but also institutionally, as the Cheka came to play an important role in urban policing during the course of the Civil War.

The sources for this monograph are varied. Hasegawa uses the work of Russian scholars effectively and utilizes archival and newspaper documents extensively. The newspaper accounts are critical, not just for illustration but also for tallying various sorts of crimes at a time when crime statistic reporting had virtually collapsed. I do wish that Hasegawa had been more explicit and consistent in his source criticism, as it is awkward to rely so heavily on sources that he describes at one point as “the breathless, sensationalist tabloid press” (172). The stain of yellow journalism seeps into the text at points, as when Hasegawa reports straightforwardly that “militia raids turned up many Chinese passed out on the floor in a haze of opium smoke,” (104) a bit of color that may well have been more journalistic flourish than accurate reporting. This is not meant to suggest that this work is fundamentally flawed. To the contrary, Hasegawa's book is an important, even essential, addition to the literature on the Russian Revolution.