Primitive Rebels? Reflections on Collective Violence in Imperial Russia

Abstract

For the past twenty years or so, historians have been making special efforts to study social history below that is, to see the world as ordinary workers or peasants saw it, instead of looking through the eyes of employers, officials, or intellectuals. The innovators in this effort have been specialists in British, European, and North American history. Ironically, those of us who study Russia find ourselves in a condition of relative backwardness, jealously eyeing the accomplishments of Western colleagues. Russians learned centuries ago that backwardness can offer distinct advantages to the latecomer, but borrowing from foreign sources can be a perilous process. Can we learn from the work of Hobsbawm, Tilly, Thompson, or Rude without forcing Russian history into an alien mold? This, in a nutshell, is Daniel Brower's dilemma. He is asking important questions, yet I find his answers unsatisfactory and incomplete. It seems to me that he has not looked closely enough at either the Russian or the European experience of collective violence and that his attempt to put forth a new synthesis is fraught with contradictions. On the one hand, he depicts the Russian rioters as primitive rebels 'a la Hobsbawm, while on the other he underscores their revolutionary might and struggle against the capitalist system. He insists that previous writers have paid too little attention to the Russian workers' violent behavior, yet his own description is impressionistic and inconsistent. What do we mean by collective violence? Colleagues in British and European history have argued persuasively that riots and other seemingly uncoordinated mass actions can express the beliefs and concerns of the inarticulate, for example, a sense of justice and social order, or in E. P. Thompson's phrase, a moral economy. Does this mean, though, that a pogrom reflects the same beliefs as a clash with police or that a fistfight in a tavern should be equated with a fistfight on a picket line? Surely violence has many forms and uses, and one of the first steps a historian must take is to categorize them. Here a few additional examples may prove instructive.