October: The Story of the Russian Revolution

by China Miéville

‘Anarchy essentially ruled over Petrograd,’ said K. I. Globachev. A former chief of the Okhrana, he had himself spent the days between February and August in the dark castle of Kresty jail, in punishment for that role. His observations, though, were fair. ‘Criminals multiplied to an unimaginable extent. Every day robberies and murders were committed not only at night, but also in broad daylight.’ The prisons could not hold the prisoners: due to the political upheavals, or the inadequacy of the guards, countless inmates simply walked out of jail to freedom. Globachev himself, fearful of how a secret policeman of the old regime would fare on the post-February streets, remained by choice behind Kresty’s walls. In Ostrogozhsk, a town in Voronezh, looters targeted an alcohol store over three violent days that culminated in a vast conflagration. When troops finally suppressed this apocalyptic nihilo-drunkenness, fifty-seven people were dead, twenty-six of them burned alive. The paper of the Right SRs, Volia naroda, editorialised about the growing anarchy with a terse, jittery, bullet-pointed list of ‘virtually, a period of civil war’. A mutiny in Orel … In Rostov the town hall is dynamited. In Tambov Governorate there are agrarian pogroms … Gangs of robbers on the roads in Pskov … Along the Volga, near Kamyshin, soldiers loot trains. How much worse, the paper wondered, could things get? It blamed Bolshevism.