Bandits and Swindlers, Police and Defiant Women

REX A. WADE (Fairfax, VA, USA)

BANDITS AND SWINDLERS, POLICE AND DEFIANT WOMEN

If, as Stephen Frank states, "'crime' in imperial Russia ... stood as a con- tested metaphor about social order,"' it continued to so stand in the politically and socially more chaotic and uncertain post-1914 world covered by the articles in this double issue of Canadian-American Slavic Studies. The study of crime and other forms of non-political defiance of tsarist authority that began among historians in the 1970s and 1980s has more recently extended into the war, revolutionary and Soviet eras. Indeed, both publications and presentations at schol- arly conferences (as a perusal of recent AAASS programs will testify) suggest a growing interest among historians of Russia and the territories of the former Russian Empire and Soviet Union with issues that historians of Western Europe have been exploring for a longer time. The following articles are a part of this process and reflect many of the developments underway in the study of Russia, Ukraine and the Soviet Union. As Michael Hickey observed in a panel on crime at the 2000 AAASS convention, "among the many implications of this growing literature [on crime,and related issues] is that it has helped to problematize our understanding of the constitutions of state and political power." Increases in hooliganism, crime, and anti-authority violence tended to coincide in both tsarist and Soviet eras with periods of social-political stress and transition, whether that of Baker's soldatki, the crime and conflict over police practices of the revolutionary period discussed here by Hasegawa and Hickey, the banditry and swindling in the 1920s and early 1930s explored by Pujals and McDonald, and the criminal activity during the post-war reconstruction of the late 1940s and early 1950s traced by Vladimirov (not to mention new explosions of such behavior in the Gorbachev and post-Soviet eras). Despite general images of tsarist Russia as a police state and a highly repres- , sive and control-oriented regime, it was in fact scantily policed outside of the major cities. At the opening of the twentieth century, the tsarist department of police had a total of 47,866 men for a population of about 127,000,000. Such aggregate figures are misleading, however, for St. Petersburg was much better, more densely, policed than other cities, and cities generally much better than ru-

1. Stephen P. Frank, Crime, Cultural Conflict, and Justice in Rural Russia,1856-1914 (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1999), p. 3. ■'

I ral areas (although rapidly growing industrial centers were not, as new police numbers failed to keep up with population growth). In 1900, a mere 8,456 con- stables and sergeants were responsible for a rural population of almost 90,000,000 inhabitants scattered across the huge empire. Thus, daily law en- forcement, such as it was, rested in the hands of the peasants themselves through their village communes and its officials, including elected peasant "patrolmen" who could hardly be described as police in any real sense of the term. In the first years of the twentieth century, the government took steps to expand the regular appointed police force, especially in the countryside, but outside of St. Peters- burg and Moscow the state's police presence remained very thin on the ground up to the time of the Russian Revolution. Moreover, they were burdened with a wide range of administrative tasks, resulting in very little actual police presence or security provided to the population?2 The same conditions characterized the early Soviet era, and in some ways continued much further into Soviet history. Neil Weissman notes that in the early NEP period the Soviet government set a targeted ratio of rural police to population of 1:5,000, half of what had been the target (never reached) of the late tsarist government. Even then, that modest goal was not attained. In Belo- russia the average rural policeman was responsible for eight to ten thousand citi- zens, and it was worse in some other regions, ranging up to twenty thousand people per policeman (militiaman), scattered over up to twenty dispersed villages connected by dirt roads that were often impassable.3 One militiaman in rural Moscow province (i.e., not so far away from the metropolis as most) com- plained that the "militiaman's work is most diverse: at one end of the uchastok it's necessary to take measures to liquidate hooliganism [and] liquor profiteering, at another to help peasants resolve some dispute, at a third to investigate a theft, and so on. And all this work is accomplished by traveling on foot from hamlet to hamlet, village to village...."4 Faced with scarce resources, officials tended to station militiamen at the volost or raion headquarters rather than out on regular patrol or in the villages, a policy much the same as tsarist officials had fol- lowed when faced with similarly inadequate police personnel. The capital and major cities remained, of course, better policed, as they had been earlier. The works of Stephen Frank, Christine Worobec, and Neil Weissman have made clear how poorly the police/courts/justice system before 1917 served the

2. Neil Weissman, "Regular Police in Tsarist Russia, 1900-1914," The Russian Review, 44 (1985), 47-50. See also his "Rural Crime in Tsarist Russia: The Question of Hooliganism, 1905- 1914," Slavic Review 37 (1978), 228-40 and Christine Worobec, "Horse Thieves and Peasant Justice in Post-Emancipation Imperial Russia," Journal of Social History, 21 (1987), 28f-93. 3. Neil Weissman, "Policing the NEP Countryside," in Sheila Fitzpatrick, Alexander Rabinowitch and Richard Stites, eds., Russia in the Era of NEP: Explorations in Soviet Society and Culture (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1991), p. 179 4. Quoted ibid.