The crowd is a terrible and uncontrollable force. She has her own laws, her own rules, she follows the leader like a herd, sweeping away everything in her path. What could be worse than a crowd? Only a drunken crowd. And this drunken crowd in 1905 and 1917 very often made our history.
Boiling point
The first example is the pogrom in the Narovchatsky district of the Penza province. In the village of Voskresenskaya Lashma in 1905, the distillery of Lieutenant General Ivan Alekseevich Arapov flourished. It was equipped with the latest technology: it had electric lighting and even a telegraph. On December 11, the telegraph operator Podzornov received a message about the riots in Moscow, after which he reported this to the plant manager, Paype. Podzornov was outraged by the behavior of the rioters who erected barricades in the capital, and he said that they should be sent to the gallows and hard labor. The emotional guy was heard by the workers. They did not like these words, and they … climbed to beat him! The manager saved the telegraph operator from the angry people, but information about the incident had already spread throughout the plant, acquiring more and more details. As a result, it came to the rumor about the tsarist manifesto, which ordered the workers and peasants to be whipped and hanged. The rebellious spirit of the factory workers immediately burst out: they quit their jobs and went on strike.
Pogrom
After the first shift, 80 rioters went to the office 100 yards from the plant and demanded the manager Ivan Vasin. Fortunately for the latter, only the ill-fated telegraph operator and the watchman appeared in the building, who barely managed to leave the office alive.
The room was transformed in a matter of minutes: the furniture was broken, documents were torn, the telegraph was broken, the cash desk was hacked, and 350 rubles were immediately stolen from it. The crowd also reached the manager's apartment. All valuables and 2,400 rubles in gold, silver and credit cards, for 12 thousand securities and 1,542 rubles of the manager's personal savings were taken out of it.
The thugs, who had quenched the first "hunger" of looting, returned to the plant and went straight to the department for the preparation of mash. Having picked up a fair amount, the workers went to the mill, from where they carried the sacks full of flour and unmilled rye to their homes. The entire damage amounted to 5 thousand poods of grain.
The pogrom lasted all day. The bailiff of the Narovchatsky district Gavrilov with the guards and police officers arrived only at five o'clock. However, intoxicated and out of fear, the crowd greeted them with sticks and stones. Realizing that the forces are not equal, the bailiff went for reinforcements. But the troublemakers were not stopped either by the arriving platoon of Cossacks, or by warning shots.
To avoid bloodshed, Gavrilov led his detachment to the village of Chervlenoi, after which, in the best traditions of that time, the plant was set on fire. The police did not take any measures, as a result, by the evening the workers' dwellings were already seized by fire. The total damage from drunken rebels amounted to a huge amount at that time - 60 thousand rubles. And that's not counting the credit cards that the thugs stuffed into their pockets.
The handwriting remains the same
The pogrom of 1917 had a different scale. Most sources claim that the Winter Palace was guarded by 2,700 people, and it was taken by 20,000. Other data, however, suggest that by the evening of October 25, when everything was ready for the assault, no more than a thousand people remained in the palace - cadets, Cossacks and a company of the "women's shock battalion". At this time, the palace was surrounded by thousands of Red Guards workers, soldiers and sailors, who were shooting with the besieged. The Bolsheviks occupied the bridges across the Neva, the buildings of the General Staff and the Admiralty, completely surrounding the palace.
In the besieged palace, in the small dining room of Nicholas II, there were all the ministers of the Provisional Government, except for the Minister of Food Prokopovich, who was arrested in the afternoon. Every now and then they rushed to the phone, hoping for some help. But the ministers did not wait for an answer from Prime Minister Kerensky, who left at 10.30 for help.
The Bolsheviks hoped for the cruiser Aurora, which anchored at the Nikolaevsky bridge at night. The fire of his six-inch machines could turn the Winter Palace into ruins in just half an hour. However, in order to avoid bloodshed, representatives of the Bolshevik Military Revolutionary Committee Chudnovsky and Dashkevich at 19.10 came to the palace with an ultimatum. They were refused: the besieged were waiting for Kerensky, who promised to bring help. But the soldiers and Cossacks were not going to give their lives for order to the government that had bored them.
Storming the Winter
Meanwhile, through the unguarded windows of the palace from the side of the Neva and Millionnaya Street, the palace began to fill with rebels. They scattered through the majestic halls, sweeping away all valuables on the go. At 21.40 two blank shots from the Aurora and the signal cannon of the Peter and Paul Fortress thundered. The Cossacks who sat behind the barricades, showing the "white" flag in time, were released, and the women who followed their example were taken to the soldiers' barracks, where some of them were treated "according to the laws of wartime." However, an American eyewitness to those events, John Reed, wrote about it this way: “The City Duma has appointed a special commission to investigate the case. On November 16 (3), this commission returned from Levashov, where the women's battalion was stationed. … a member of the commission, Dr. Mandelbaum dryly testified that not a single woman was thrown out of the windows of the Winter Palace, that three were raped and that she committed suicide alone, and she left a note in which she wrote that she was “disappointed” in her ideals” … (John Reed, 10 Days That Shook the World, 1957, p. 289)
In Smolny, the message about the capture of the palace, about which the Bolsheviks solemnly announced the Second Congress of Soviets, arrived at 22.40. However, it was too early to celebrate the victory: the remaining 300 cadets were in no hurry to surrender to the new government. Opening fire, they forced the attackers to scatter. This made the Bolsheviks very nervous: after all, any delay could affect the seizure of power. And all around was going on as usual: trams were running along the streets, cabs were driving along Nevsky Prospekt, cinemas were working in the city.
At 23.20 a crushing blow was struck from the direction of Petropavlovka: one artillery shell hit the entrance, the other into the office of Alexander III, right above the dining room in which the ministers of the Provisional Government were hiding. After that, the besieged no longer fired, but the Bolsheviks decided to attack only when reinforcements from Smolny arrived. All three main entrances were open, and the crowd of attackers rushed in. The skirmish killed six people on both sides. They were looking for the ministers for a long time and only at 1.50 they were arrested and found in the canteen. The commissars barely managed to save them from lynching by sending them to Petropavlovka, the arrested cadets were released the next day. The palace was less fortunate: everything that was possible was plundered, and the rest was punctured with bayonets.
But the most important thing is that the crowd did not stop there, but rushed to the royal wine warehouses in the cellars of the New Hermitage. According to some sources, more people were drunk there and drowned in the spilled wine than died during the storming of the palace itself. Looting in the Winter Palace lasted two days. After that, only in the evening of the 27th, the commissars drove out the "victorious proletarians", and the unfinished gifts of Dionysus were lowered into the Neva. So for some time she acquired a bloody hue, foreshadowing future Russian tragedies.
Drunken May Days
In May 1917, a wave of pogroms reached Samara. From May 1 to May 3, huge crowds of distraught townspeople began to smash liquor stores, warehouses, cellars and pharmacies. There was no time and nothing to uncork the bottles. The plugs were beaten off together with the necks. In a terrible crowd, people cut their lips and hands on the edges of broken bottles, but they continued to drink, did not stop, drenched in blood and wine. The life of the city was almost completely paralyzed.
At an extraordinary joint meeting of the Soviets of Workers ', Military and Peasants' Deputies, a resolution was adopted on the adoption of decisive measures, and a curfew was imposed. Warehouses of factories and wine cellars were flooded with the help of city fire brigades. But people rushed by swimming in the formed foamy streams and drank greedily, and some drowned and drowned in these muddy, intoxicating puddles. The remnants of alcohol were destroyed everywhere by detachments of armed workers. Only in one of the shops - merchant Pyatov - 10 thousand bottles of wine and 20 50-bucket barrels were destroyed.
Then, as is usually the case in such cases, the search for enemies began. They accused the Black Hundreds, security guards, policemen, gendarmes and other "servants of the old regime", who, they say, were joined by criminal and similar "dark elements." Such coups, which swept through many provinces, gave the Bolsheviks the opportunity to arm themselves under the pretext of restoring order. And so it was, by the way, throughout our revolutionary action, when, intertwined in a terrible struggle, both blood and wine were cast in crimson color.
