2. From Under Every Rock:

Hooligans in Revolution, 1905–1907

The whole country is simply permeated with sedition and reeking with revolution, racial hatred and warfare, murder, incendiarism, brigandage, robbery and crime of every kind.…As far as can be seen we are on the high road to complete anarchy and social chaos.

The 1905–1907 Revolution was a major turning point in Russian history, but while historians have studied the roles played by workers, government figures, and liberal and socialist activists, we know little about the way the revolution was experienced in everyday life. In hindsight it may seem clear that the victory of October 1905 was a hollow one. Almost as soon as the diverse opposition movements came together in the assault on autocracy that forced the tsar to promise a constitution and a parliament, the balance of power began to shift back in favor of the government. Yet during those years, especially during 1906, but right up until the coup d’état of June 1907 that effectively restored the tsar’s power, the outcome did not seem assured. Immediately following the issuance of the October Manifesto the country was beset by an unprecedented number of popular disorders, which prolonged the crisis and disrupted society’s cross-class united front against the autocracy. One fact that often gets lost in the social and political history of the period is that the revolutionary process in 1905–7 was a violent one. It was violent in well-known, spectacular (but intermittent) episodes, and it was violent every day on the streets. By concentrating on the year 1905 alone and on the great achievements of that year—the labor movement’s mass general strikes and the liberation movement’s constitutional victory—historians have inadvertently minimized the role and scope of violence as it was witnessed from day to day.^[1]

Sensational incidents of violence accounted for more than 15,000 deaths in terrorist assassinations, peasant revolt, pogroms, government punitive expeditions and executions, and the street battles of armed uprisings.^[2] But such dramatic and significant occasions of violence were interspersed among other events of those tumultuous years. The ordinary inhabitants of Russian cities also witnessed an unprecedented rising tide of daily crime and criminal violence, both on the streets and in the newspapers that informed them about events beyond their immediate purview. Highly visible and widely publicized, the crime wave of the revolutionary years began accelerating in the middle of 1905, reached its crest during the summer and fall of 1906, and continued well into 1907, when police finally brought it under control. The spectacular incidents of political violence that punctuated the unfolding of the revolution occurred against a background of continual, everyday, personally threatening crime, street disorders, and public violence. Together these events shaped contemporaries’ everyday experience of revolution and contributed to the uncertainty of its outcome. While the total number of victims pales in comparison with the death tolls of other revolutions, the violence of these years haunted public discussion during the course of the revolution, and violence was uppermost in the minds of contemporaries in later years as they strove to understand its meaning.

In 1905 and especially 1906 the St. Petersburg newspapers, from the staid to the sensational, spewed out a regular diet of social disorder, popular unrest, and street violence, every day. Peterburgskii listok and Peterburgskaia gazeta reported turmoil of all kinds. Throughout the year, mass rioting and brutal fistfighting broke out on the streets. The city “teemed” with “shady characters,” beggars, vagabonds, prostitutes, and hooligans. Public drunkenness was epidemic. Even the prisons were unable to prevent rioting among prisoners. A typical crime column for those years included a daily roster of several hooligan street attacks, a murder and a couple of attempted murders, and several incidents of theft and armed robbery. Crime of every kind seemed to be out of control, and bloody government retribution, horrific as it was, could not bring about a return to order. Pchela, the Bee, a regular Peterburgskii listok columnist, wrote that violence was exceeding “acceptable” bounds: “Revolutions are bathed in blood. Freedom is bought with blood…, but Russia’s victims are too numerous.…Some [violence] is politically motivated, but some is motivated by nothing at all.”^[3]

The disorders of everyday street life are important in this study because street crime and violence were linked with the hooliganism featured in the prerevolutionary boulevard press. Massive arrests of and publicity for people identified as hooligans occurred after every major revolutionary event, beginning with the Bloody Sunday massacre in January 1905. From the summer of 1905 until the fall of 1906 hooliganism never left the pages of the commercial press. By labeling as hooligan new sorts of public disorder, Peterburgskii listok and other newspapers were implying a connection between certain street disorders of the revolutionary years and the defiance and fears that characterized hooliganism at its inception. The escalation of disorders associated with hooliganism also made the phenomenon, and the word itself, known to people outside of the circle of boulevard-press readers. As a result of its acceleration, its association with new and more violent behaviors, and its appearance in new settings and in new publications—in other words, because it occurred in the revolutionary context—hooliganism took on greater, or, simply, more sharply defined political significance as well. After 1905, hooliganism was always associated with violence and with the potential for serious social disturbances.

Hooliganism was the most prominent form of street crime and violence between 1905 and 1907. Contemporary publications are filled with references to hooligan attacks, hooligan degeneracy, hooligan brawls, and hooligan crime, but hooliganism’s place amid revolutionary unrest has been largely ignored or misunderstood by historians. Western and Soviet scholars who concede its existence persist in seeing hooliganism as either anti-revolutionary, pogromist violence or as ordinary crime, entirely divorced from the revolution around it.^[4] Nor did most contemporaries take hooligan violence seriously as a manifestation of social or political unrest. Radicals, following Marx, disparaged it as the work of lumpenproletarian “scum.”^[5] On the right, politicians and publicists dismissed it as the work of the criminal mob.^[6] The government treated hooliganism as a crime problem created, according to various points of view, by poverty or by moral or mental deficiency. In most sources, hooliganism was presented as nothing more than an unfortunate by-product of revolution, to be controlled if possible but not worth serious political consideration. As a result, a significant element of popular animosity and popular protest has been overlooked. In all these sources, however, the cultural conflict displayed in hooligan behavior and the political significance that behavior accrued are apparent even if they went unrecognized at the time.

Hooligan violence in 1905–7 sprang from a pool of hostility toward the government and its representatives and toward respectable society in general. This hostility was not expressed in “conscious” or “disciplined” actions, and it had almost exclusively negative consequences, but it was expressed in forms that were neither aberrations nor short-lived creatures of revolution. Nor was hooliganism entirely distinct from other forms of unrest during those years. Brawling and rock throwing and other forms of street violence of the revolutionary period were rooted in traditions and rituals of Russian lower-class culture and, when brought to the center of the city, reflected long-standing lower-class discontent with subordination. Hooliganism in 1905–7 was a complex phenomenon, having close, if submerged, links with revolutionary events. While hooligan acts were indeed manifestations of ordinary crime, they continued to possess the elements of class and cultural conflict that had emerged before 1905. And while hooliganism differed significantly from revolutionary labor unrest, the two shared important features, including lower-class self-assertion in protest against powerlessness and the use of public space to press demands. In addition, the hooligans themselves, as primarily casual workers, were closely related socially to the workers whose discontent fueled the revolution.

Many of the sources historians have used to study popular unrest in the 1905–1907 Revolution share the dismissive bias of contemporary political actors. The published collections of documents that we rely on were selected and edited in the 1950s and 1960s by Soviet historians who were bound by a narrow, linear view of the development of class consciousness.^[7] Consequently, these collections omitted incidents that did not serve as evidence of growing political awareness and sophistication among Russian workers or of their capacity for organization and discipline. They underrepresent the levels of street violence that actually occurred during the revolution and have given historians the false impression that popular violence disappeared, if it was ever significant at all, with the coming of class consciousness.^[8] But while hooligans were not “conscious” workers, they were often workers nonetheless, working for wages at least some of the time. Their actions should be seen as emanating from the same social and economic milieu as the developed labor movement, even though hooligan actions were not a response to labor-management conflict. Hooligans did not express the same political consciousness as workers who engaged in strikes, nor was there solidarity between striking workers and rowdy hooligans. But hooligans lived in the same neighborhoods and experienced the isolation and animosity toward privileged society that contributed to working-class activism.

The role hooliganism played in the revolution has been hidden from history because it does not fit neatly into existing categories of popular unrest. Historians of labor unrest and popular violence categorize incidents according to such criteria as the participants’ degree of political consciousness, the nature of their motives and goals, their level of organization, and their place in the social structure. Although historians have recognized gradations along these scales, this sort of categorization sets up a number of false dichotomies: political;sheconomic, organized;shspontaneous, radical;shreactionary, proletarian;shpeasant. It also creates illusory distinctions between workers and criminals and between the respectable poor and the riffraff. To make the past comprehensible, categorization of some kind is necessary, but it suggests the existence of a world far more orderly than the fluidity of social reality. The impossibility of fitting hooliganism into the existing categories of crime, violence, unrest, and protest makes it clear that the whole picture of popular violence and lower-class unrest will come into focus only when we view organized labor protest as but one manifestation of lower-class discontent. We need to see the links connecting the remarkable acts of conscious workers with the unpalatable and destructive acts carried out by their less fortunate, less educated, and less disciplined brothers and sisters, and we need to understand the forms of unrest and protest in between these poles. We must look beyond the obviously political to see others forms of social and cultural conflict, which in the case of hooliganism had wide-ranging political consequences even if they had only minimal political motivation. We can see the hooligans’ destructive rage on the streets as an essential part of the revolutionary experience, and we can see the importance of the cultural aspect of the workers’ struggle for power in their own lives. We can also appreciate a wider range of fears that mass activism provoked during the revolution and after it subsided.

The boulevard-press portrait of the revolution in St. Petersburg differs in significant ways from that painted by modern social historians. In the pages of the boulevard press, Petersburgers witnessed diverse forms of unrest, including incidents of individual and collective hooligan violence alongside working-class strikes and political activism on all fronts. The press not only portrayed crime and violence as crucial ingredients in the revolutionary situation but also presented them as socially and politically significant. While hooliganism in Peterburgskii listok and Peterburgskaia gazeta bore only a tenuous relation to explicitly political unrest, it was implicitly portrayed as a manifestation of social and cultural conflict that had political repercussions, and as such was a part of the overall dynamic of revolution. This is not to say that Peterburgskii listok presented hooliganism sympathetically. On the contrary, from the beginning hooliganism was depicted in sharp contrast to “legitimate” labor protest, strikes, and working-class demands for political and economic improvements, which Peterburgskii listok consistently supported.

It should be noted that while other sources reported hooliganism in this period, it is not always clear how they used the term. Peterburgskii listok and Peterburgskaia gazeta were unusual in their use of consistent labels and categories to describe incidents of unrest. As they began to call new forms of disorder hooliganism, the connotations they popularized began to appear elsewhere, making their pioneering usage an influential standard.

Three kinds of incidents were labeled hooliganism during the 1905–1907 Revolution in the boulevard press. They were, first, the kinds of hooligan muggings, rowdiness, and displays of “immorality” that had appeared at the turn of the century but multiplied rapidly in 1905; second, massive public brawling, rioting, and destruction of property; and, third, violent attacks on policemen. These were all characterized by a lower degree of political motivation or consciousness than labor unrest but also by greater political content and consequences than ordinary crimes. If we view them all along a political continuum, we can see them strung out between labor unrest and ordinary crime. A continuum also allows us to keep in mind the fluidity of the lines dividing degrees of political consciousness and significance, social origin, and cultural conflict. Peterburgskii listok and Peterburgskaia gazeta specifically identified the differing degrees of political intention and significance implicit in them, and this underlined, in a way no other source did, the social and cultural dimensions of popular discontent as a whole.

“Masters of the Street”

Beginning immediately after Bloody Sunday (January 9, 1905, when government troops ignited the popular revolution by shooting on a demonstration of unarmed workers) and escalating throughout 1905 and 1906, reports of hooligan rowdiness and back-street hooligan muggings rose dramatically in number, appearing more often than reports of other street disorders. Each day the newspapers reported at least one and usually as many as three or four different hooligan incidents (in addition to increased numbers of other crimes, including thefts, robberies, murders, and arson). Still, most commentators agreed that only a fraction of hooligan incidents were reported to the police or in the newspapers. It was estimated, for example, that only one-fifth of the incidents on the Peterhof Highway were reported, although hooligan robberies there had become a nightly occurrence.^[9]

The rise in crime was widely acknowledged and discussed, which seemed to contribute to the general panic over the unprecedented visibility and danger of “shady characters” (temnye litsa) and pitiful or unsavory types.^[10]Peterburgskii listok published a slew of serious articles analyzing the rise in crime and its relation to the revolution. It also publicized the anxious responses of city dwellers and journalists. “These ‘lowlifes’ (shpana) hold the local populace in terror,” concluded the article about the Peterhof Highway, and a number of writers observed that “the license of the capital’s hooligans [was] beginning to reach terrifying proportions for peaceful people” and “the hooligans’ ‘insolence’ (beztseremonnost’) knows no bounds.”^[11]

After the government suppressed the militant labor movement in December 1905, radical workers ceased to pose a serious political threat to the government, and the focus of the political movement shifted from mass politics to the State Duma and from the city streets to the villages, where peasant rebellion was gaining momentum. But St. Petersburg remained in the grip of social turmoil that had been unleashed by the revolutionary upheaval, though the roots of the turbulence lay in the decades before 1905. Strikes, while diminishing in number, continued to interrupt the restoration of normal economic life during 1906 and 1907.^[12] The city government was besieged by thousands of unemployed workers, locked out and blacklisted, who were well organized and vocal in demanding work and food.^[13] Many of the social ills afflicting the poor population that predated the revolution continued unabated and in the wake of the mass movement appeared in sharper relief. The legions of beggars who had always surrounded churches and government offices swelled with the rising number of unemployed and surged to the center of the city.^[14] According to numerous sources, it was “not a rare phenomenon to see totally passed-out drunkards on the street”; not a new phenomenon surely, yet on a scale that shocked and irritated people in 1906.^[15] Prison populations, now swelling with political offenders, never returned to pre-1905 levels, even after political and administrative prisoners had been transferred or released. Housing was, as always, scarce and expensive; so flophouses and other shelters—for vagabonds, beggars, young waifs, alcoholics, and the homeless—were filled far beyond capacity. In the summer, when nights were warmer, the streets and parks and the open fields on the city’s outlying islands were alive with transients. The “shady characters” who had begun to make their presence felt on central streets a few years earlier now occupied whole neighborhoods. Everywhere in the city they behaved as they wished, exhibiting neither fear of arrest nor deference to respectable pedestrians.

Both the number of hooligan incidents and the brazenness of the hooligans reached new heights. Muggings occurred with a frightening regularity and an equally frightening inexplicability. On Easter in 1906, for example, victims of more than fifty hooligan attacks were treated in one city hospital alone. In September 1906, one “hooligan beast” stabbed a doorman who refused him entry to the “People’s Hall.”^[16]

The typical attack in the revolutionary period resembled the back-alley muggings of previous years: an unsuspecting pedestrian, sometimes drunk, usually lower class, was ambushed by a group of young men:

The peasant Feodosei Bezhurkin, a typesetter, age nineteen, was attacked by several youths while walking along Zakharevskaia Street and received one wound to the head. He fell. They ran off. A passerby grabbed one hooligan, but then he was knifed, and the hooligan got away.^[17]

But as hooligan incidents increased, people began to take matters into their own hands:

On May 21, late in the evening, a pharmacy clerk was surrounded by about fifteen hooligans on his way home from work.

—Hey, big shot (shliapa), why don’t you walk with us?

—Beat him up, boys. What are we waiting for?

—Hey, Mister, off with your clothes!

The noisy, threatening crowd began more “decisive” actions. Suddenly the victim produced a revolver.

—Watch out, you creeps (Proch’, merzavtsy), or I’ll shoot.^[18]

As in earlier years the crime-column reports usually appeared without editorial comment. But when analysis did appear, even in reports of the most dangerous muggings and knife attacks, it still stressed hooligan nakhal’stvo—brazen, defiant insolence—as often as the physical danger of attacks. In the cases noted above, it was the “insolence” and “license,” not the danger hooligans posed, that were most notable. Another entry in the crime column noted sarcastically that during the revolution hooligans had gained the temerity to attack in the light of day:

We have had more than one occasion to mention the exploits and heroic deeds performed by hooligan gentlemen on Nevskii Prospekt. At night the hooligans are in complete control. And now these gentlemen are not too inhibited to display their daring during the daylight hours, when Nevskii is teeming with people. The fourteen-year-old daughter of a nobleman was harassed on Nevskii by the type of person who wears multicolored scarves and his cap askew. He followed and stabbed her. The hooligan was the sixteen-year-old son of an artisan, Grigorii Ivanov.^[19]

As before, nothing provoked as much outrage in Peterburgskii listok as the appearance of hooliganism in the center of town, where the hooligans took increasing advantage of the breakdown of authority and the impotence of the police:

On the Fontanka Embankment, next to the building of the Ministry of Communications and near a flophouse that is always filled with representatives of the hooligan “proletariat” and the dregs of society, among whom human blood is worth less than Neva water, two casual laborers (chernorabochie) sixteen and seventeen years old began fighting with each other. One stabbed the other in the back.^[20]

Hooligan brazenness and the enormous upsurge in the number of hooligan incidents took on new political significance in the revolutionary context as powerful evidence of the breakdown of official police authority and the ebbing of informal social authority and control over neighborhood streets as well. During the revolution hooligans acted as if they thought the streets were theirs and control over their own behavior was a right they had won, a sign of their power. Evidence of the hooligans’ new-found power was conveyed in dozens of Peterburgskii listok reports on neighborhoods where hooligans reputedly controlled the streets. “ ‘The hooligans have conquered,’ cry the capital’s inhabitants,” is how one relatively sober analysis began.^[21] Traditionally high-crime districts such as Smolensk and Harbor Fields on Vasilevskii Island or “Ligovka” (Ligovskaia Street) near the Nikolaevskii Station were “overrun” with hooligans and other “shady types” by late 1905.^[22]According to another report, even the police preferred not to enter Smolensk Field, because it was “the hooligans’ kingdom.” “In some places,” it was reported, “they simply own the streets, playing cards, passing around vodka, making love with their girlfriends right on the sidewalk.”^[23] Peski, a district several blocks from the Nikolaevskii Station across Nevskii from Ligovka, was the scene of repeated hooligan incidents, including mass gatherings, huge brawls, and individual harassment of the decreasing number of pedestrians who ventured onto its streets. According to one account: “Hooligans have completely taken over the square and with the air of victors they act far from humbly.”^[24] Even if such statements were exaggerated for dramatic effect, they were repeated so often during the revolutionary years that they clearly reflected, and possibly helped create, a climate of fear on many of Petersburg’s best streets. Whether or not the hooligans “controlled” the streets in any conventional sense, they were capable of making public life so unpleasant and dangerous as to keep people out of certain neighborhoods and off their own streets. In the eyes of the hooligans and their respectable neighbors this was de facto power, and it was a hooligan victory.

The police began to turn the tide against street crime only after St. Petersburg was placed under a state of Extraordinary Security in 1906.^[25] In fact, court statistics for hooligan crimes actually decreased during the revolution, because the majority of hooligan cases were processed outside the law under binding decrees issued according to the state-of-siege provisions of the Extraordinary Security statute.^[26] These decrees put teeth in the police campaign begun in 1905 to initiate a series of street sweeps (chistki) or roundups (oblavy, obkhody) to recover the public space in the center of the city from hooligans. According to Peterburgskii listok unofficial reports, approximately 16,000 hooligans and other “shady characters” were detained and expelled from the city under these decrees. This is in addition to the approximately 114,000 people convicted of petty hooligan offenses in normal court procedures in the period 1905–7 (see tables 3–6 in the Appendix).

Campaigns of this sort were not unprecedented, but they hardly made a dent in the crime problem in the capital. For decades the police periodically descended on well-known criminal haunts and flophouses. The search for “suspicious types” and their arrest or expulsion from the city (usually for lacking proper residence documents) were common newspaper items before 1905.^[27] The first major street sweeps of the revolutionary period were carried out during the summer of 1905, but the roundups ceased with the resurgence of political unrest that fall.^[28] When they were renewed in 1906, most of the effort was directed at purging the central streets, but forays were also made into working-class neighborhoods and traditional criminal haunts to root out the problem at its source, as the police viewed it. In April 1906, Peterburgskii listok reported that 2,520 beggars, thieves, hooligans, and others were arrested in the capital. On one night, 150 people were arrested on the central streets between 11:00 P.M. and 4:00A.M.^[29] In July approximately 3,000 fell into the police net in one police district alone.^[30] In another district (in the Narva borough) the police reported a surprisingly good catch when 250 hooligans were seized in one day.^[31] During the second half of 1906 the roundups continued. In the beginning of August 3,150 hooligans were reported exiled from the capital, and approximately 1,200 additional hooligans were said to have been arrested in nocturnal roundups.^[32] In September the newspapers reported the roundup of even larger groups. According to police figures, 2,916 people were seized on the Petersburg Side and another 795 in the Vyborg quarter.^[33] After September, arrests and exiles decreased considerably, with Peterburgskii listok reports accounting for about 1,000 hooligans picked up in the three-month period between October and December.^[34]

Peterburgskii listok seemed intent on celebrating the police effort to restore order. On August 1, 1906 an article appeared reporting that the gradonachal’nik had ordered the police, “under his personal responsibility,” to take immediate steps to discontinue disturbances and eliminate prostitutes and hooligans from Nevskii Prospekt and other central streets.^[35] A week later, in an article reporting the exile of 750 hooligans apprehended in tearooms, dives, parks, and elsewhere, Peterburgskii listok announced the firm intention of the police to purge St. Petersburg of “all these types,” by no later than September 1.^[36] Later in the month, Peterburgskii listok published an unsigned accolade to the belated police campaign. The author concluded that “in general the police are beginning to exhibit some energy in their effort to clean the capital of its filth. And none too soon.”^[37]Peterburgskii listok, however, does not seem to have made an effort to report arrests systematically, and on that account these figures cannot be considered reliable in any statistical sense. But if Peterburgskii listok was not overly concerned with providing precise indicators of police activity, the intent of the publicity was clear. Regular reports of successful police sweeps might have allayed public fears and public charges of official inaction and, perhaps most important, might have conveyed a sense of order returning to the city. But judging from the continued outcry over hooligan outrages and hooligan “control” of the streets well into 1906, it seems likely that the large number of detentions for street disorders may have only underlined the dimensions of the hooligan problem. Complaints about police laziness, cowardice, and impotence did not decrease.^[38]

During the revolution loss of control and fear of assault—physical, verbal, and visual—intensified the anxiety that permeated the boulevard press. As before, these disparate forms of hooliganism had developed into a public battle over the control of street life. That this was a conflict over power is repeatedly echoed in press reports on street life. Despite the efforts of the police to clear the streets, the most common cry in the crime columns relayed the idea that “hooligans have captured the Petersburg streets and behave as if they were the masters there.”^[39]

Brawling and Rioting

During the 1905–1907 Revolution the label hooliganism was expanded to include two forms of popular violence: massive public brawling and attacks on policemen. In terms of political motivation, brawling did not display any greater consciousness than rowdiness and mugging, but the boulevard press endowed it with greater significance because it was a more massive display of hooligan self-assertion and street power, and it was violently destructive on a much larger scale. Attacks on policemen, which will be discussed below, exhibited somewhat greater political intention and had more deeply resounding political repercussions.

Nothing better exemplifies the spread of hooligan violence and the powerful impression it left during the revolution than the massive public brawling and destructive riots that occurred during 1905 and 1906. Memoirs and police sources suggest that brawling had long been a favorite pastime among workers in Russian cities as well as villages.^[40] But massive public brawls made a dramatic entrance onto the scene inhabited by the rest of the population in the spring of 1905. Beginning in March, public brawls and riots escalated in number and scale, reaching a peak in the summer of 1906 and continuing until the winter of 1906–7, when they began to taper off. Estimates of the number of people involved in these incidents ranged from a few dozen to 2,000. Destruction occurred in every Petersburg neighborhood, from solidly working-class districts on the periphery to the very center of Nevskii Prospekt. However, the majority of incidents reported in Peterburgskii listok and Peterburgskaia gazeta took place not in the distant industrial suburbs but in the mixed neighborhoods adjacent to the center of the city where the peaceful population had been feeling its control slipping away since hooligans had appeared at the turn of the century.

The most violent incidents took place during the spring and summer of 1906 and ranged from mass fistfights involving a few dozen men to full-scale rioting lasting several days. Twice in June and July fierce and, to passersby, terrifying brawling broke out on the Anichkov Bridge, which was located right on Nevskii Prospekt.^[41] Both fights on Nevskii prompted outraged complaints about the moral and civic decline of the city and the desperate need to restore order.^[42] In August 1906, Peterburgskii listok reported that a brawl involving hundreds of people in the Vyborg district was averted by the police only at the last moment. Several other mass fights broke out on streets and in taverns throughout the city that month.^[43]

On a number of occasions what started as mass fistfights evolved into full-fledged riots. One of these occurred on Vereiskaia Street, located in a relatively high-crime district near the Obvodnyi Canal, a neighborhood inhabited by workers in nearby factories and by petty criminals, beggars, and vagabonds who lived in the local flophouses. There was still enough of a “respectable” population, as the newspaper account put it, “to have been begging for ages and in vain to clean out the vice-ridden spots (zlachnye mesta)” along the street. These “dens of the lowest sort” were physically ravaged when a fight, which began between “various types of rowdies,” led to a destructive rampage. The police could halt neither the fighting nor the destruction, and the crowd dispersed only after Cossacks arrived. Why did hooligans destroy the flophouses and taverns where they lived and worked? Curiously, the newspapers at the time did not wonder about this. But it was probably for the same reason that the local residents could not have the buildings shut down: they were owned by “rich” outsiders, who received a sizable income in rent.^[44]

Extensive damage was done in several neighborhoods by brawling and rioting in June and July 1906. On three separate occasions, rioting lasted for three days, once in the working-class Kolomenskaia district and twice in mixed neighborhoods on the Petersburg Side. In Kolomenskaia in June, as in April, the rampage began as a mass brawl between “various groups of the city’s lowlife (podonki)”: rival bathhouse workers and other locals, the latter identified only as bosiaki (tramps) or hooligans. Apparently, the bathhouse workers began to beat up one of the hooligan “patrons” of the baths, and someone else began to beat up the dvornik, and then the whole local population, “everyone in the surrounding buildings,” joined in the fray. At some point, men on both sides quit beating one another in order to vent their rage on the bathhouse itself. Within half an hour every window and door was broken, and the interior was thoroughly destroyed. The police appeared with their weapons drawn, which momentarily calmed the crowd, but then “stones started flying and all hell broke loose.” The whole street was littered with hooligans, shouting, whistling, swearing, and breaking windows and walls. It was not until one o’clock in the morning that the police were able to pacify the crowd, estimated at about 2,000, but some fighting went on all night.^[45] Two nights later the scene repeated itself, this time at a brothel, where a fight led to a riot that demolished the building and a nearby government liquor store.^[46]

While hooligans were destroying property throughout the night in the working-class quarters southwest of the city center in late June, riots also raged for three days on the Petersburg Side. The same crime column that reported the “enormous brawl on the Anichkov Bridge” recorded the end of three days of rioting on the Petersburg Side.^[47] On the same day Novoe vremia reported brawling and rioting in half a dozen locations, many of which, it pointed out, were spots frequented by respectable society—parks, squares, and theaters, including popular theaters and clubs.^[48] Then, at the end of the month, rioting broke out again on the Petersburg Side, again lasting three days. Major streets in the neighborhood had become so dangerous that even the normally intrepid cabdrivers (izvozchiki) refused to drive there at night. Meanwhile, the police were “standing around in pairs at their posts,” but doing nothing. The violence of the rioters and the passivity of the police allowed hooligans to destroy completely several taverns and shops and permitted these “knights of the night” (nochnye rytsari) to terrorize and extort money from anyone foolish enough to venture out on the streets.^[49] In other isolated incidents during July 1906 hooligans wrecked a boardinghouse in the Okhta district and demolished two restaurants near the center of town, one close by the Marininskii Theater, and in the middle of July a crowd of young hooligans broke windows and wrecked storefronts along a whole block on Sadovaia Street near the Haymarket, including a tea shop run by the reactionary Union of Russian People.^[50]

The attention paid to these incidents in the boulevard press suggests that they held more than simple human interest for readers, yet they are difficult to analyze and classify. Distinctions we would like to make or that have been made in other studies of collective violence—between political and nonpolitical violence, between primitive and conscious protest, or between preindustrial and industrial forms of protest—are blurred here. This is not only because the reports are incomplete but because the incidents themselves combine elements that have been seen as straddling traditional categories. The question to ask here is not, Why do these accounts omit the details we would like? but, Why did Peterburgskii listok consider these accounts full enough?

At first glance these brawls and riots seem entirely unconnected with the political events going on around them, suggesting that they were a classic example of the actions of a revolutionary “mob.” The mob was a familiar feature of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century literature on collective violence, which portrayed the mob as representing the criminal dregs of society and depicted its actions as devoid of all reason, intention, and morality. Most historians now reject such characterizations as a reflection more of their authors’ fears than of the actual composition and intent of violent crowds.^[51] The majority of boulevard-press descriptions of hooligan mass violence also counter the classic depiction of the mob. In fact, the boulevard press tended to minimize the “irrational” elements of these incidents and to endow the brawls with meanings that implicitly linked them to the revolutionary movement. In most cases the authors of reports expected to find at least some reason for the mass street fighting and destruction of property, and they reported what motive they could discover. Although the damage done always seemed out of all proportion to the cause of the fighting, and this was portrayed as incomprehensible, the fighting itself was not dismissed as irrational or motiveless.^[52]

At the same time, Peterburgskii listok never portrayed these incidents as politically motivated acts. The boulevard press consistently and clearly distinguished between revolutionary and hooligan destruction of property. Participants in these brawls were almost always identified as hooligans, lowlife, vagrants, and the like, not as workers; thus they were associated more closely with the criminal element of the lower classes than with the activist, revolutionary working class.^[53] The boulevard press also distinguished carefully between what it considered to be hooligan vandalism and legitimate revolutionary violence. When hooligans ransacked shops, restaurants, and other enterprises in the cases discussed above, reports of the incidents appeared in the newspaper’s daily chronicle of crimes, fires, and accidents. When destruction occurred in connection with events the newspaper considered politically legitimate the incidents were reported in the daily chronicle of revolutionary events, which included strikes, rallies, and demonstrations. In July 1906, for example, when dairy workers shattered the windows of their shops and vandalized their inventories, the report of the incident appeared among the day’s political events and was not labeled hooliganism. The dairy workers’ justification for resorting to violence was specifically labor related: they destroyed the shops after their employers refused to close up at the promised hour of 7:00 P.M., which resulted in their having to work overtime.^[54]Peterburgskii listok sympathized with the dairy workers’ cause and presented their violence as a legitimate protest against economic exploitation, even though the dairy workers’ violence was no different from the hooligans’ destruction of the shops and taverns along Sadovaia Street and elsewhere. A similar distinction was made in a comparison in Peterburgskii listok between the capital’s hooligans and the bosiaki of Odessa. The word bosiak comes from the Russian word for “barefoot” (bosoi) and is usually translated as “hobo” or “tramp”; but Odessa’s bosiaki were rootless in a much more limited sense. They were the unskilled casual workers who performed the menial jobs in the city’s mammoth ports, and in 1905 they were responsible for some of Odessa’s most violent demonstrations.^[55] Unlike hooligans, however, according to Peterburgskii listok, bosiaki were “serious” and “willing to work…, [and] so, when the port is working well, Odessa is calm.”^[56] Whatever the truth of these observations, Peterburgskii listok wanted to emphasize the logic and work ethic of the bosiaki, in contrast to the attitudes and actions of the hooligans, who shunned work and engaged in violence without a clear economic or political motive.

But while no radical motives were apparent, neither was hooligan violence portrayed as reactionary or anti-revolutionary in any way. Brawling hooligans were not implicated in the violence between workers who were reluctant to go on strike and the radicals imploring them to put down their tools, despite the fact that the boulevard press reported numerous incidents of this kind. The Petersburg boulevard press never associated hooligans with the reactionary Black Hundreds, known for their violent resistance of revolution activity, for violence against all suspected agents of revolution, and especially for violence against Jews.^[57] In fact, one of the more destructive battles of the wild summer of 1906 occurred when hooligans attacked a Black Hundreds tearoom that had recently opened on Sadovaia Street.^[58]

The distinction between hooligans and reactionaries is worth stressing because, as noted earlier, in the southern and western regions of the empire, especially in the Pale of Settlement, pogromists, who were also particularly active during this stage of the revolution, were frequently labeled hooligans. It is also worth stressing because hooligan violence was similar in some ways to pogromist attacks. Both were negative, destructive responses to social, economic, and cultural tensions that were triggered by the cultural conflicts of urbanization and the revolutionary breakdown of authority. In St. Petersburg, in the absence of one large ethnic minority that would make cultural differences eminently clear, hooligans were people who directed their hostilities (also profoundly cultural) against class rather than ethnic enemies. It may well be that some people engaged in hooligan riots as well as in fights with radical workers, and even in political demonstrations. But the boulevard press, which reported each kind of incident, made clear distinctions between them in 1905–7. When labor unrest was again on the upswing after 1912, such distinctions would not be drawn so sharply, but even in that period hooliganism would be implicated in labor radicalism, not in the popular anti-radicalism of the Black Hundreds.

It is possible, of course, that the boulevard press characterized brawling as hooligan violence instead of legitimate political protest in order to diminish its significance, just as elite nineteenth-century observers denigrated genuinely political collective action as the work of a mob. But the fact that the newspapers made careful distinctions among various kinds of violence and even singled out certain forms of violence as possessing a legitimacy equivalent to strikes suggests that this is unlikely. There are no hints in the boulevard-press reports or in any other sources to suggest that these brawls resembled Luddism or food riots or had any other political agenda, whether denied by contemporaries or hidden from historians.

The key to understanding the significance of street brawls and their place in the revolutionary upheaval is the boulevard press’s labeling of this violence as hooliganism. By no means were all the forms of crime and violence that proliferated during the revolution referred to as hooliganism in the boulevard press. The identification of brawling and rioting with hooliganism links them with the prerevolutionary escalation of rowdy and outrageous public hooligan offenses. Brawling and rioting resembled hooliganism in their ostentatious violations of public order and property, their contempt for legal and social authorities, the participants’ assertion of their power to dominate street life, and their appearance in the center of the city. The identification of brawling with hooliganism is a reminder that street violence forced peaceful citizens off the streets they considered to be their own, and displayed, in a terrifying manner, the potential power of the lower classes when they chose to vent their rage. In the revolutionary context, hooliganism dramatized the dangers that seemed to be inherent in the awakening of mass public activism. By following on the heels of political events, by taking advantage of the breakdown of order and authority, by continuing to assert themselves in 1906–7 even after the labor movement had been crushed, hooligans represented the underside of popular political activism.

In a much more direct way violent public brawling and rowdiness accentuated the revolutionary breakdown of order. Hooligan violence undermined efforts to restore governmental authority and proved a serious problem for the local agencies of law enforcement. To suppress street fighting and violence the ordinary police continually needed special gendarmes and Cossack units as reinforcements. Curiously enough, the hooligans’ ability to prevent the restoration of order did not provoke a reactionary campaign for “law and order” or a call for extra-legal solutions, at least not in the boulevard press.^[59] On the contrary, judging from boulevard-press reports, the violence seemed to reinforce the popular loss of faith in authority that accompanied the revolution by exposing the weakness of the police, who proved almost totally ineffective against street violence. By the end of 1905 some Petersburgers, including workers, had become sufficiently disturbed by the danger of hooliganism and the absence of any protection from arbitrary attacks that they petitioned the City Duma with requests to establish a volunteer militia. Articles also appeared in Peterburgskii listok and other newspapers calling for the establishment of a militia or armed guard against hooliganism. One writer suggested “arm[ing] ourselves with Brownings,” and workers in the Moscow Gates section of the city organized a neighborhood surveillance system to watch out for hooligans and vagabonds.^[60] The City Duma approved the idea in principle, noting that the existing police force was incapable of performing the duties required of it, and a commission was created to set up a militia. Nothing, however, came of it.^[61]

To deny hooligan violence conscious political intent is neither to diminish its significance in the urban unrest of the period nor to suggest that the hooligans were nothing but mindless ruffians. Despite a lack of political goals, hooligan rioting and the conscious labor movement drew from similar sources of hostility. Even though brawling pitted members of the lower classes against one another, their refusal to remain within the boundaries of their own neighborhoods and their ability to seize public spaces and intimidate the rest of society conveyed a broadly defined challenge to authority that paralleled the “legitimate” working-class protests against political, social, and cultural authority in the workplace at a time when workers also moved en masse into public view for the first time. Furthermore, the hooligans’ choice of targets may not have been as irrational and self-destructive as it appears. Though hooligans patronized the flophouses, brothels, taverns, and liquor stores they destroyed, it is quite possible that all these buildings were, like the Vereiskaia Street flophouse, owned by outsiders who were perceived as wealthy, condescending exploiters. It seems likely that the hooligans did not feel that they had any particular stake in the maintenance of someone else’s property. This is not to argue that hooligan rowdiness, brawling, and rioting were identical with workers’ protests in strikes and demonstrations, nor is it to argue that workers sympathized with or supported hooligans; many did not. But the two groups should not be seen as entirely distinct—they occupy different points on a single continuum of lower-class responses to powerlessness.

The consequences of hooligan violence are hard to discern because they do not fall easily into established categories. The boulevard press portrayed hooligan street violence as criminal, apolitical events and as an unfortunate but simple result of the revolutionary upheaval. But we can see that while brawling and rioting displayed no clear political motives or goals, they did represent something more than simple, motiveless destruction. In exhibiting their violence on Nevskii Prospekt or destroying rows of shops in their own neighborhoods, hooligans were asserting their authority over the streets and venting the rage of people with no other means of expression. They had an impact because they contributed to the breakdown of order, they added an attack on property to the assault on government authority, and they continued to demonstrate their anger long after both the government and the opposition leadership (liberal and radical) thought popular unrest should subside. These characteristics of hooligan violence are even more apparent in the hooligans’ ambushes of the police.

Attacks on the Police

The police force was incapable of controlling street crime even before 1905, and it bore much of the blame for the proliferation of crime and violence during the revolution.^[62] As ordinary policemen were commandeered to help the political police root out subversion, and as criminal and political violence escalated, public faith in the ability of the police to protect person and property, much less halt the decline of public morals, diminished (see fig. 6). But if, in fact, the policeman on the street was reluctant to confront hooligans, he had good reason. Beginning in 1905 and accelerating in 1906, armed attacks on policemen became common and dangerous.^[63]

Soviet document collections and Soviet historians have recognized confrontations with the police only when they could be construed as evidence of working-class militance. The incidents that appeared in these works showed workers and policemen in conflict after rallies or strikes at which revolutionary party orators have spoken, revolutionary songs have been sung, and red banners have been unfurled.^[64] Even on the rare occasions when hooligan “types” appeared at such events, their presence was explained, though without substantiation, in politically positive terms—as testimony to the spread of political consciousness.^[65]Peterburgskii listok and Peterburgskaia gazeta reported a far greater number and variety of clashes with the police (and with soldiers and other authorities) and as a result presented a fuller and more complex picture of the lower-class challenge to authority during the revolution.

The newspaper reports on street attacks pose problems of analysis similar to those encountered for reports on brawling. It is never entirely clear who was participating in the attacks or to what extent they were motivated by political or other considerations.^[66] Certainly, working-class animosity toward the police has been well documented,^[67] but far from all the attacks that occurred during the revolution were motivated by political militance. Violent confrontations with the police took a variety of forms that represented the whole spectrum of street violence seen during these years. If one views these attacks as part of the larger phenomenon of street violence during the revolution, one comes to the conclusion that the attacks were motivated by a wider set of causes, and that they were not simply evidence of the hostility of 1905 lingering into 1906 and 1907, but part of a broader and more long-term wave of social disorder, with a more complex composition, that crested only in 1906.

Some attacks were clearly associated with conscious political activity or followed closely on the heels of political events. In one case, workers leaving a government warehouse after their shift broke out singing the “Marseillaise.” When a policeman demanded that they stop they threw rocks at him. In another case, workers using their fists and rocks to persuade cab drivers to go on strike were interrupted by policemen who shot into the crowd. The workers responded by hurling their rocks at the police; one unfortunate policeman was caught, disarmed, and “beaten half to death.” The boulevard press also included numerous examples of violent confrontations after police and troops tried to break up rallies or demonstrations.^[68]

Other attacks were associated with ordinary crime. A twenty-seven-year-old baker, “in a violent mood,” was pestering people on the street, yelling and shoving, until he finally attracted the attention of a policeman. Irritated at being stopped, the baker attacked the policeman and tried to swipe his revolver. Shouting “Comrades, to the rescue!” he was quickly joined by a group of friends who tried to free him. More policemen arrived to disperse the crowd and take the baker off to the precinct.^[69]

The great majority of cases, however, fall in between overtly political and criminal situations. They did not occur in connection with revolutionary events and do not seem to have been motivated by a conscious, politically determined hostility toward the police; yet they seem to possess more in the way of rebellious content than the personal animosity or immediate material incentives that marked other attacks. The following two reports are typical of these incidents. The first was reported in a separate, but unsigned, article entitled “Attack on a Policeman Conducting Prisoners”:

A policeman was attacked for the purpose of freeing the prisoner he was conducting to the precinct station, a hooligan who had been arrested in connection with a row (debosh) he had started in the tavern “Peking” near the Triumphal Gates. The policeman was taking him to the station of the Fourth Narva Precinct when about ten people—unemployed and loafers (bez opredelennogo zaniatii)—standing not far from the station began throwing stones at him. The policeman held the hooligan’s arm tight. Suddenly a shot came from the crowd. Five bullets all missed him. Then one hooligan slashed his ear and shoulder with a knife. [The policeman] took out his revolver just as other policemen arrived (attracted by the sound of shots), and the crowd dispersed. On the street lay a bootmaker, famous here as Isaac the Ataman, his head bleeding from a gunshot wound.^[70]

The second comes from the crime column and is headed “An Attack on a Policeman”:

At 10:00 P.M. on June 27th, an enormous crowd assembled along Zabalkanskii Prospekt, near the Novomoskovskii Bridge on the Obvodnyi Canal. Disorder was provoked when drunken hooligans and workers attacked a policeman who was trying to disarm them. The policeman suffered a knife wound but managed to draw his sword and wound his attacker. Then some other workers came to the aid of the policeman. They fetched more police, who were able to disperse the crowd.^[71]

The first thing to notice here, as in the case of brawling, is that Peterburgskii listok did not dismiss either of these as the work of an irrational “mob” composed exclusively of criminals or social outcasts. These events were portrayed as even more goal-oriented than the hooligan brawls. In the first example the goal was to free a comrade, a fairly common cause of attacks even before the revolution, and in the second case to avoid surrendering weapons. Neither is, strictly speaking, a political act (the “comrade” under arrest had been picked up for a civil disorder—raising a ruckus in a bar). Yet it is the targets not the goals of the attacks, and the profusion of assaults on policemen during this period, that give this form of street violence deeper political overtones than brawling or other forms of hooliganism.

As with the incidents of brawling and destruction one must ask whether these clashes were in reality some kind of revolutionary political protest that had been attributed in the boulevard press to a criminal element to diminish their importance. But again placement of the reports and the language used in describing the incidents show that the boulevard press was able to grant legitimacy to events it considered politically motivated, while still distinguishing between clearly criminal acts and the murkier incidents of hooligan violence. The first hooligan incident cited above was published as a separate article of special interest, the other in the crime chronicle. Confrontations with the police with clear (or clearer) political connections, such as those involving the public singing of revolutionary songs, were reported in the daily list of revolutionary events.^[72] Hooligan attacks on the police differed from other lower-class actions, such as strikes and demonstrations, in both goals and methods, in much the same way that hooligan rioting differed. Striking workers called for economic improvement and political reform in a system Peterburgskii listok also regarded as deplorable; thus these acts were endowed with a certain legitimacy. The lack of such goals and the use of violence against authorities for comparatively trivial reasons deprived hooligan attacks of that legitimacy. On the other hand, hooligan attacks were not prompted by criminal or purely material gain. Both the incidents cited here demonstrated a willingness to confront and resist authority; both displayed a conflict with authority that had specific and rational goals. Thus, while maintaining distinctions among various forms of street violence, the boulevard press placed these examples in between the activities of the revolutionary labor movement and the work of “mobs” or criminal gangs. In terms of political content they stand closer to legitimate protest than hooligan brawling does by virtue of their direct attack on figures of authority.

That hooligan violence against the police straddled traditional categories of politics and crime is even more apparent when we look at the participants in the attacks. Again the key to understanding these incidents is their identification as hooliganism and the identification of some attackers as hooligans. In the two cases cited above the participants were described as a combination of hooligans and workers. Isaac the Ataman combined the two in a single identity: he was a shoemaker, a worker, but his nickname was a typical one among the leaders of hooligan youth gangs and professional criminal gangs. In contrast, participants in labor actions were always identified as workers, and participants in massive brawling and destruction were almost exclusively referred to as hooligans. Perpetrators of ordinary crimes were usually identified with their crimes rather than with a social group: thief, murderer, drunkard. Clearly some care was taken in the boulevard-press sociology of lower-class unrest to classify participants, but we can be more specific than this, and even more so in this period than in the years before 1905.

When participants in lower-class unrest were identified by occupation in the press reports they were almost exclusively from the ranks of marginal and casual workers—chernorabochie, podenshchiki or “former workers,” “loafers,” “people without specified occupation.”^[73] These were all people on the bottom lower-class rung of the social ladder, whose hold on economic security was tenuous even in the best of times. Under revolutionary conditions, the insecurity of the casual labor population was intensified. Strikes and lockouts increased the number of unemployed through closures and blacklisting and generally limited the opportunities for gainful employment. Moreover, with the forces maintaining law and order “vanishing into thin air” the opportunities for illegal or semi-legal activities increased in scope. Casual laborers and unskilled workers were the most likely to cross back and forth between the worlds of work and crime. Thus the majority of people likely to engage in the forms of street violence that straddled criminal and revolutionary mass actions were drawn from a social group that also allowed crossover between two worlds. It also stands to reason that many people who participated in hooligan actions enjoyed a bit of brawling or rabble-rousing in the evenings after a hard day at work or a long day of looking for work, or a day of choosing not to look for work. But it is important to remember that these were people who participated, however tangentially, in the working-class world. Their responses to their own economic problems, to revolutionary agitation, and to the revolution itself were assertive, dramatic, destructive, and misogynist, but these response were forged in the same neighborhoods that produced labor’s heroes. Given these connections with the working class, hooligan attacks on the police should be considered as related to the workers’ movement. Since the revolution unleashed a torrent of such hooligan demonstrations, they should be considered a part of the revolutionary experience. But how was hooliganism related to revolutionary acts and relevant to an understanding of the revolution? What are the politics of crime and violence?

A Politics of Hooliganism

The relationship between political and criminal or “mob” collective action, especially when such acts involve violence, has long been recognized as problematical. The basic dilemma was neatly formulated by William Rosenberg and Diane Koenker in their comparison of two main theoretical models. In Louis Chevalier’s work, the “laboring classes” came to be identified with the “dangerous classes,” and real differences between the two were ignored. Marx and Engels, on the other hand, categorically distinguished the proletariat from the lumpenproletarian “scum,” a view that overlooked not only the real social milieu of the lower classes, in which workers mingled with “the poor, pickpockets, street hawkers, and deserters,” but also the fact that individuals could cross boundaries between the various worlds of work and crime. I would add that more recent historical works cannot resolve the problems this relationship raises, because they focus on forms of collective violence, such as food riots or agrarian revolts, that have much more easily recognizable political origins and can more clearly be identified with existing categories of political action.^[74] Hooligan violence, however, and hooligans themselves do not fit into either of these models.

As the kinds of violence discussed here indicate, attempts to distinguish between political and criminal violence have been troublesome because the categories have been too rigidly defined, leaving little room for events that fell outside them. Individuals might engage in both kinds of activities, and some behavior, like hooliganism, can share characteristics with each. It is even possible that the marginalization of the labor movement in 1906 and 1907 may have pushed some workers across the line that separated organized labor activism from undisciplined expressions of rage. The suppression of the labor movement in December 1905 and the subsequent lockouts and blacklisting made everyday life much harder for thousands of workers, and that made “legitimate” labor actions more difficult to organize, opening the door to frustrated and explosive displays of anger.

Hooligan violence makes it clear that it is time to address popular unrest in less narrowly political terms. The politics of crime and violence in 1905 and 1906 shows that struggles for power take less overt and less constructive forms among people with limited access to the beneficial weapons of the strong, such as literacy, education, relative financial security, and hope. Social and cultural rebelliousness can be an expression of protest on the part of the marginal, inarticulate, and hateful. Is that protest political? Hooligan challenges during the revolution had little to do with constitutional politics or labor politics, but hooligans’ assertion of power on the streets was political in two ways. First, hooligans who brought their rowdy, dangerous, and destructive actions to the central streets were engaged in a politics of everyday life, which involved negotiating for control over public behavior and symbols of control. Second, the hooligans who were lashing out at symbols of authority or authority figures themselves were protesting their powerlessness in a society that oppressed them as members of the lower classes. The same political and social milieu can spawn both people drawn to organized and disciplined movements for change and those who engage in ugly, self-destructive, and unsympathetic attacks on individual strangers, property, and symbols of authority. We need to recognize that lower-class struggles against the autocracy, the police, or respectable society’s cultural authority can take a variety of forms, from the unsavory to the heroic. In his work on resistance to racism among Blacks in Great Britain, Paul Gilroy describes the ways that social and political structures limit the protest options of the dispossessed: the unemployed, for example, cannot organize and go on strike even if they perceive the economy to be the cause of their troubles. Gilroy goes on to say that when anarchic or destructive actions result societies deflect responsibility for them by denying the political significance of violent destruction or rioting and calling it crime.^[75] We need to resist the temptation to dismiss hooligan violence, as most did at the time, as motiveless or incomprehensible. In so doing, Russians closed their eyes to a critical form of lower-class hostility.

Rather than view hooliganism as a phenomenon entirely distinct from the labor unrest of 1905–7, it makes more sense to see both as variants of lower-class protest against diverse forms of oppression. Despite the many significant differences between the hooligans’ mentality and that of radical working-class demonstrators and despite the differences between the acts they engaged in, their hostility to society sprang from similar sources of powerlessness and defiance. The revolution brought out other connections. Hooligans’ assaults on respectable culture resembled conscious workers’ political demands for control over their lives and cultural demands for respect. All forms of hooligan activity and working-class protest were performed in public by members of the lower classes, all were marked by a historically unprecedented willingness to confront established authorities directly, all were perceived as signs of social or class hostility, and all exhibited, on a mass scale for the first time in Russian history, the novelty of lower-class visibility and power.

Hooligans also shared with workers an abiding hostility toward certain aspects of the culture of the middle and intelligentsia classes. Many different forms of this antagonism existed, although it only gradually became apparent to Russian civil society. Political studies of 1905 have shown that, despite the alliance of workers with liberals during the fall of 1905, workers distrusted the liberal intelligentsia, whose social condescension was never entirely hidden by political support.^[76] The social gulf was often symbolized by cultural differences—in manners, education, and expectations of submission—as well as by political differences. After the liberation movement’s constitutional victory in October 1905, politics and culture were entwined in the increasingly pessimistic discussions of the relations between the intelligentsia and the people that permeated the liberal press around the time of the election campaign for the First Duma. M. I. Fridman, for example, writing in Rech in April 1906, believed that the Kadets had the most to offer the workers as a political party, but he feared that “the workers’ distrust of the intelligentsia…had created insurmountable barriers against [our] enlightenment (in the broadest sense of the word) work among the property-less and ‘dark’ strata of the population.”^[77] This hostility bears some similarity to the well-known tensions that arose between conscious workers and the radical intelligentsia before 1905.^[78] The boulevard press noticed exactly this form of cultural conflict and social animosity in the behavior of hooligans even before the 1905–1907 Revolution. Some of the same issues that drove a wedge between workers and radical intellectuals and workers and liberals were the issues at stake in the street war between hooligans and respectable pedestrians: manners, hegemony, and submission.

In all of these cases, class differences and political tensions were experienced and recorded in explicitly cultural terms. Semen Kanatchikov repeatedly felt humiliated before his middle-class acquaintances by his inability to match their manners and poise. Liberals and radicals alike dazzled, irritated, amused, and infuriated the earnest young worker-intelligent, and these experiences formed a backdrop for the main themes in his tale of coming to consciousness. Visits to the homes of well-off, fashionable liberals in St. Petersburg or socialist bohemians in Saratov often included confusing and embarrassing moments when Kanatchikov and his friends faced mysterious behavioral norms and “alien way[s] of life and thinking.”^[79] On one occasion Kanatchikov was mortified when he misunderstood and mispronounced an unfamiliar word and on another when his nervousness intensified his unrefined table manners.^[80] These blunders left Kanatchikov forever ambivalent toward the social elite, but, unlike those who became hooligans, he was simultaneously determined to master the “proper” behavior and culture of the intelligentsia. Most important, cultural difference contributed to his determination to establish an autonomous workers’ movement for genuine change.

Hooligans reported the same pressures but were affected differently by them and drew different conclusions from them. Aleksei Svirskii, a writer of popular sketches of the city, who himself began life in a working-class family, recorded the “burning shame” of a nineteen-year-old hooligan, who told the following story to explain why he abandoned the life of a respectable, if poor, youth:

I remember how I became friends with one of the boys in my class. His name was Trikartov. He was a strong boy and fearless, which was why I liked him. He was also rich, while my father was a poor, simple man, a saddle maker. Once Trikartov invited me to his house, and I went. When we arrived, it turned out that he lived in a private house with a fancy doorman and coachman. I wanted to run off in the other direction, but it was too late.…When his mother came up to us in rustling silks…I bowed my head and stuck out my hand.…Then we were called to the table, and that is where my torment began. I didn’t know what, how, or with what to eat. I got confused and blushed. After dinner Vitenka took me to his room, where we played, wrestled, and read until it got dark. As I got ready to go home Vitia led me to the stairs, but on the landing he stopped me and said, “Zhenia, you are going to be offended by what I say, but I want to give you some advice. You should never eat fish with a knife. It is not done. And also when a lady greets you, never be the first to proffer your hand.” I didn’t walk down the stairs but rolled down like a ball. In my burning shame even tears came to my eyes. Oh, God, you could never understand. A year went by, and still I remembered everything. At night I would lie in bed and suddenly recall how I ate my fish at the Trikartovs’, and I would see it lying in a pool of blood. That’s how ashamed I was.^[81]

Zhenia’s response to the experience was to seek revenge. With two robberies and one attempted murder on his record, he never outgrew the particular pleasure of shocking ladies and girls on the central streets of the city. “It’s amazing,” he said, “how cowardly people can be. I can frighten a whole streetful of people all by myself.”^[82] In contrast, Kanatchikov’s response to his embarrassment produced satisfactions of a more enduring nature, but in both men’s lives, intense emotional experiences of their cultural shortcomings played major roles in shaping their consciousness. In retrospect we can see the political potential of this sort of cultural conflict as an indication of the polarization to come.

Even in 1905 at the height of class unity in opposition to the autocracy, between the verkhi, or upper classes, and the nizy, or lower classes, the euphoria of political alliance could not efface social and cultural tensions. The boulevard press portrayed social tensions along with social unity, and during the revolution awareness of a generalized lower-class animosity was also dawning among educated elite. Even among liberals, who were far less prone than conservatives to dismiss lower-class violence as mob lawlessness, fears of a jacquerie or Pugachevshchina were never far from the surface. Significantly, some recognized the cultural content and the power of symbols in the social tensions. In an article on the liberals’ dilemma, E. N. Trubetskoi, an eminent Kievan professor of philosophy, warned radicals against encouraging an armed uprising. The article was written after the October Manifesto and after the waves of hooligan, peasant, and pogromist violence that followed during the “Days of Freedom,” but before the armed uprisings of December:

The wave of anarchy that is advancing from all sides, and that at the present time threatens the legal government, would quickly sweep away any revolutionary government: the embittered masses would then turn against the real or presumed culprits; they would subject to destruction the entire intelligentsia; the masses would begin indiscriminately to slaughter all who wear German clothes [i.e., the well-dressed]—conservatives, liberals, revolutionaries.^[83]

This is not a simple dismissal of all mass action as mob irrationality; it is an acknowledgment of the depths of the social chasm in Russia and the bitterness of lower-class hatred. It is also a statement that would make no sense if one’s perception of 1905 excluded hooliganism. What is important here for understanding the role hooligans played in the revolution is Trubetskoi’s recognition of a generalized hatred for all the verkhi, and its expression in cultural terms. He specified that the masses would slaughter not the wealthy or the educated or the powerful, but the well-dressed, wrapped in foreign ways.

As the “organ of everyday life” it claimed to be, Peterburgskii listok recorded the everyday experience of the revolution and devoted much attention to analyzing the sources and content of hooligan hostility. Again and again one hears the same two refrains in the chorus of outrage over the hooligan question. First, hooligans had only contempt for respectable society and its values. As a biologist put it in an interview in Peterburgskaia gazeta, “They spit on everything.”^[84] Second, they refused to act properly—that is, submissively, as tradition and their social status dictated—something no civilized Western European capital would permit.^[85] What had been implicit in the prerevolutionary boulevard press, that hooliganism challenged established authority and threatened Russia’s march toward civilization, now became explicit in the revolutionary context. In May 1905, one of Peterburgskii listok’s regular columnists wrote in reference to hooliganism that

cars and trams run along the streets, women appear in the latest Parisian fashions, but look at humanity and you see that civilization is no farther along than our ancestors in the Bronze Age.…As always in times of transformation, from under every rock crawls some dark, anti-social being.^[86]

As for the hooligans themselves the revolution did not create hooliganism or its challenge to social authority and respectable culture, but it provided the environment for hooliganism to multiply “with the speed of a microbe,” as one hooligan put it a few years later.^[87] Hooliganism coincided with social and political unrest, but it did much more than simply coexist with revolution. It was an integral part of the upheaval that occurred in Russia as the old regime began to disintegrate and people of all kinds pressed their claims. Hooligans, unlike activist workers, lacked the skills, motives, and courage needed to initiate a serious assault on government power, as discussed in the previous chapter. They surfaced where authority was already vulnerable, but, unlike the Black Hundreds or other reactionary groups, Petersburg hooligans were neither reacting to changes they found distasteful nor attempting to preserve the status quo. And their actions before 1905 make it clear that they were also no mere by-product of revolution. Hooligans were expressing their bitterness at their position in society with the only tools available to them. The visibility, assertiveness, and increasing discontent of politicized workers, the absence of police authority, and respectable society’s inability to exert social control all gave hooligans license for increasingly defiant exhibits of rage. They, in turn, pushed the revolution in new directions, sapped official strength when it was badly needed, created new rifts between social groups—rifts along social and cultural rather than exclusively political lines—and took the revolution along “the high road to complete anarchy and social chaos.”^[88]

The connections between hooligans and labor are not meant to demonstrate that hooliganism was a form of nascent labor protest. Clearly, hooligans and hooliganism were different in many ways from activist workers and their movement. Nor are the links between the two meant to attribute some incipient heroism to the hooligans or to justify their obnoxious behavior and terrifying violence. But the history of hooliganism does show that hooligan violence was an integral feature of the revolutionary experience, with strong social and cultural ties to the labor movement and important political repercussions. It shows that destructive acts can originate in the same environment and spring from some of the same impulses that motivate constructive ones. It also demonstrates that even the most senseless violent crimes can express a form of rage that societies ignore at their own risk.

In these respects the portrait of revolutionary violence that appeared in the boulevard press differs substantially from models of collective violence elaborated by historians of Western Europe. Hobsbawm, Rudé, Thompson, and Tilly, to name only the most eminent, each presented a historically linear model of collective action in which “primitive” or “premodern” forms of collective violence gave way to “conscious” or “modern” forms that were characterized by politically evolved motives, methods, and goals. In each of these models, earlier forms of protest were displaced by the more advanced forms, as the working class developed “class consciousness.” But linear models do not fit the Russian revolutionary situation. This is not to deny that a portion of the Russian working class did develop a conscious political outlook, eschew violence, and engage in disciplined activity, or that this conscious element dominated and led the working-class movement. However, conscious workers were only a small portion of the work force, not to mention of the entire lower-class population. Their actions did not displace less politicized collective violence but rather coexisted with it.^[89] Street violence did not disappear or even diminish with the arrival of the conscious labor movement. Both movements increased in scope and scale beginning in 1905, and they did so in tandem.

Hooliganism was as much a product of Russia’s rapid industrialization and government intransigence as the radical labor movement was. The breakdown of informal mechanisms of social authority that maintained control over the public behavior of the lower classes was a problem that arose everywhere in Europe with the appearance of modern industrial cities, and that remains in the postindustrial age. The specific anxieties street crime provoked, the social interaction it represented, and the political consequences it entailed are all associated with the kind of cultural conflict and class interaction that occurred when massive urban in-migration produced new interclass experiences and perceptions and a new balance of power on city streets. By shifting our focus from economics to culture we can see that hooligan street violence was not a “primitive” or “premodern” conflict but a quintessentially urban and modern one. Recently historians have argued that more generalized forms of anti-authoritarianism did not appear in Russia until the resurgence of labor protest in 1912, following the government massacre of striking workers at the Lena Gold Fields in Siberia. This discussion of hooliganism shows that such unrest began much earlier and was recorded in the boulevard press, whose audience was especially sensitive to it, but that it began to be noticed by the old intelligentsia and educated elite only after 1912.^[90]

Yet while hooligans shared much with workers—in many cases they were workers—hooligans were not workers acting qua workers. Their demonstrations were not labor-management disputes, they pressed no demands to improve their positions as workers, and their political significance was not manifested in actions against the state. In some respects, hooliganism bears a stronger resemblance to peasant forms of mass action and specifically to the peasants’ revolutionary movement of 1905–7, with which it coincided. Like peasants, hooligans felt their subordination acutely and with resentment, yet they had little confidence in their ability to transform the social order. But if neither peasants nor hooligans were capable of mounting an independent assault on state or social power, they were both willing to exploit a power vacuum when they found one. John Bushnell made a similar argument for another “special case of Russian peasant rebellion”: the mutinous soldiers of 1905–6. Under normal conditions, when the government’s power seemed intact, the soldiers did their duty, but “when they believed the regime’s writ had expired, soldiers mutinied.”^[91]

It is no accident that hooligan violence, like peasant rebellion and soldiers’ mutinies, escalated in late 1905 and continued into 1906. In 1905, major hooligan surges often peaked in the aftermath of events that displayed the government’s weakness. In the days following the Bloody Sunday massacre an eyewitness wrote, and not in the commercial press, that “whatever disturbances occurred after Sunday evening were due to hooligans and [the] worst elements of the town, who recognized the moment as favorable.”^[92] Another great wave of hooligan violence began during the backlash that followed the issuance of the October Manifesto, and continued throughout 1906, peaking in the summer when political crises followed hard on each other’s heels. During that period, from late 1905 through the summer of 1906, the political atmosphere was saturated with violence and discussions of violence. From October to December 1905, radical newspapers openly encouraged violence and openly debated the efficacy of armed uprising. Until December the government seemed too weak to respond.^[93] Then in June and July 1906, when rumors about the dissolution of the Duma circulated amid contrary rumors about the creation of a liberal cabinet, political instability enabled the least politicized elements of society to assert themselves again. Demonstrations of political unrest often “spilled out from the factories onto the streets,” mingling hooligans and conscious workers, despite efforts by the radical intelligentsia and the militant workers to separate themselves from less reputable elements.^[94] The peasant rebellion also peaked, as is well known, in the summer of 1906. Activism among the least skilled workers and the unemployed was on the rise at the same time.^[95] In addition, hooligans may have provided links between urban and rural revolution. Even the police conceded that when hooligans were expelled from the capital, they had no trouble making their way back to the city from their villages. And as we will see in the following chapter, rural authorities, from this period on, complained about the disruptive influence of hooligans in the countryside.

While hooligan behavior can exist independently of revolution (as it did in Western Europe at this time), hooliganism in some form also seems to be an inevitable companion of revolutionary strife. The kind of anti-authoritarian hostility that hooligans exhibited, with its destructive eruptions and symbolic cultural content and targets, is a common denominator in modern cities. The conflicts inherent in the city’s mixed and transient populations and the inevitable presence of the utterly dispossessed guarantee a measure of alienation and bitterness. This hostility may not be capable of leading to conscious revolutionary or even reform movements, but in times of uncertainty and vacillating authority it is an inescapable, destabilizing factor in urban social life. In times of transformation (such as 1900–1905) it manifests itself, and in times of revolution (such as 1905–7) it can rage out of control.

The newspapers of the street were committed to reporting everything happening on the street, and that included escalating crime, rioting, and the ambush of police authority, along with explicitly revolutionary activity. The boulevard press shaped its readers’ perceptions of the revolution by distinguishing categories of unrest and labeling them. But while these categories neither exhausted the variety of lower-class behavior during the revolution nor fully explained it, the boulevard newspapers reported disturbances that most other sources were only beginning to acknowledge. Consequently the boulevard press gives us perspective on a kind of discontent that has been ignored by historians but was certainly not fabricated by the press.

The raw rage of the marginal poor became an inescapable fact of life in Russia during the 1905–1907 Revolution, and it was a harbinger of things to come. The origins of class hostility and social polarization that became clear in 1914 were already in operation at least as early as 1905. Even before 1905, hooliganism was an early warning sign of lower-class responses to respectable culture and to the power of the privileged classes. The everyday experience of the 1905–1907 Revolution introduced hooliganism, in its most violent forms, to Russian society at large. In the years that followed, hooliganism erupted in new settings, and, in a society haunted by memories of revolutionary hooliganism, it evolved new forms and meanings.

Notes