The 1917 Russian Revolution, at least for a time, abolished the police. Instead of a professional police force alienated from the people, Russian workers organised themselves on a mass scale to protect and govern their own workplaces, homes and rights. The Russian experience offers an important lesson: abolishing the police requires a social revolution that destroys capitalism.
Murray Frame, in a 2016 article for Europe-Asia Studies, writes that prior to the 1917 Revolution, the police of the Russian Empire “had a reputation as a steadfast pillar and hated symbol of the old order”. During the initial stages of the revolution, which began with general strikes led by women workers in Petrograd, the police confronted workers’ marches for peace and bread with arms in hand. Nearly 1,500 people were killed in the first days. As Leon Trotsky described in The History of the Russian Revolution:
“Toward the police, the crowd showed ferocious hatred. They routed the mounted police with whistles, stones, and pieces of ice ... disarmament of the [police] becomes a universal slogan. The police are fierce, implacable, hated and hating foes. To win them over is out of the question.”
The death rattle of the regime came with the king’s order to the 150,000-strong Petrograd garrison to shoot at the largely unarmed workers. When some of the soldiers’ regiments refused, the entire edifice of repression shattered. The police were suddenly outgunned and vanished from the streets of Russia practically overnight. In just five days, the 300-year reign of the Russian monarchy had ended.
The question of what would replace the police was paramount in the first days of the revolution. Prisons were opened, and arms were distributed freely from the soldiers to the populace, leading to many cases of robbery and assault.
Out of the chaos of the revolution, different social strata began to self-organise to defend themselves and assert control over their circumstances. In his 1984 book, Red Guards and Worker’s Militias in the Russian Revolution, Rex Wade documents the two broadest types that emerged in Petrograd: workers’ militias and the City Militia, the latter of which rapidly earned official recognition from the new provisional government as the successor of the old police. Similar militias were established in major cities all over the Russian Empire during the revolution.
Both the workers’ and City Militia began as volunteer self-organised groups to defend life and security in various areas of the city. The workers’ militias, however, were organised from factories, unions or working-class city districts and quickly developed a consciousness of their significance as specifically working-class bodies. As Wade explains:
“It did not take long ... for this sense of the need for arms to defend one’s liberties or viewpoint to take on more concrete forms. For the workers especially a fear of counterrevolution helped create a feeling of the need not only to be armed but also to be organized for the defense of their rights against a class foe.”
As events progressed in 1917, with the provisional government maintaining Russia’s involvement in the First World War and failing to address peasant demands for land or to improve food security, workers also increasingly came to understand “that they represented the true interests of the revolution in a way no other group did”. The notion of a workers’ militia was increasingly superseded by an armed workers’ force, a Red Guard, which would proactively fight for the victory of the revolution.
The Red Guard, which armed working-class groups came to identify as, is a stunning testament to the capacity for working-class self-organisation and is closely linked with the other radically democratic working-class organisations that arose in 1917. Governed internally through democratic elections, it was typical for Red Guard formations to be organised at the workplace level, with significant input from the workers’ elected factory committee. Guards were overwhelmingly younger men, with a significant number of women workers involved in auxiliary medical units, and were paid by their employer for their duties. While many bosses attempted to evade payment to the Guard, they were usually blocked by the workers’ hostility and organisation.
After a failed counter-revolutionary coup in August 1917 led by General Kornilov, Red Guard units in various factories undertook intensive combat training multiple times a week, either after work or during periods specifically rostered for the purpose. Red Guard units operated under strict self-discipline. A typical series of escalating punishments for infractions (such as abusing their authority or being drunk on duty) ranged from a “comradely talk”, expulsion from the Guard, or firing from the workplace and social ostracisation.
By the time of the October Revolution, according to Wade, some 200,000 Red Guards were organised across Russia, including 30-40,000 in Petrograd alone. They were well armed with rifles and ammunition, and in the largest factories in Petrograd, such as the Putilov works, they had even formed machine-gun regiments and controlled armoured cars. This was a significant expression of the desire of workers to control their own destiny.
The emergence of workers’ militia was greeted with hostility by the provisional government. Alongside the reformist Menshevik and Socialist Revolutionary parties, the government sought to integrate the workers’ militias into the “apolitical” City Militia, modelled on the British police force. Murray Frame summarises the reformist ideal for the police:
“The key elements were democratic accountability within the militia, alongside its decentralisation to municipal authorities in order to prevent political misuse of the policing apparatus by the state, and a narrower set of functions [than under the tsar].”
A conference of workers’ militiamen held in the working-class Vyborg district in May 1917 condemned the provisional government and reformist attempts to mount “a full restoration, under the title of militia, of a police force of a west European type, hated by the majority of people across the world, mainly the poorest classes”.
When Lenin returned to Petrograd from exile in April 1917, he remarked in an article in the Bolshevik newspaper Pravda that “the organisation of a workers’ militia to be paid for by the capitalists is a measure of tremendous ... importance, both practically and in principle”, which must urgently be generalised across the entire country to defend and develop the revolution.
Lenin and the Bolsheviks, which he led, made the point that the significance of the Red Guard and workers’ militias was that they presaged the development of “the universal arming of the people”, both men and women, which would break down the old instruments of oppression, including the police. The Red Guard was central to the smashing of the old, capitalist state, which would lead to a liberated and socialist society:
“Replacement of the old organs of oppression, the police, the bureaucracy, the standing army, by a universal arming of the people, by a really universal militia, is the only way to guarantee the country a maximum of security against the restoration of the monarchy and to enable it to go forward firmly, systematically and resolutely towards socialism, not by ‘introducing’ it from above, but by raising the vast mass of workers ... to the art of state administration, to the use of the whole state power.”
Despite the efforts of the provisional government to disband the workers’ militias, by cutting their pay, banning factories from paying their salaries and giving official recognition to the City Militia, they were unable to smash Russian workers’ efforts to self-organise.
Thousands of workers’ Red Guards fought on the front lines of the insurrection to ensure the transfer of power to the workers’ and peasants’ soviets (councils) in the October Revolution. A top priority of the new Bolshevik-led soviet government was to work out how the new workers’ state would incorporate the Red Guards. The militia system of the old provisional government was formally abolished on 2 December 1917, and for nearly the next year the Red Guards served both as police and, increasingly, as an expeditionary military force.
As documented by Wade, around half of Petrograd’s Red Guards volunteered to fight in defence of the workers’ revolution across the territory of the old Russian Empire against counter-revolutionary White Armies, becoming the core of the Red Army formed in March 1918.
When the Bolsheviks came to power, in keeping with the aspirations of the working class, the hope was that democratic working-class institutions like the Red Guard, the factory committees, the unions and the soviets would form a new kind of state, “a state which is no longer the state proper”, as Lenin put it, that would allow a transition to socialism. However, while the Russian workers could form this new kind of radically democratic state, it was another thing for them to maintain it in the conditions of the revolution’s isolation and under siege from international imperialism.
Just as with the factory committees and soviets, slowly the Red Guards were sapped of their vitality as factories were shuttered, the population of Petrograd and Moscow collapsed, and thousands of working-class militants left to fight. By October 1918, as a “temporary measure”, a full-time police force in the style proposed by the provisional government was established by the Bolshevik government and has remained in its essentials up to the present day in Russia.
What the Russian Revolution and its experience of abolishing the police prove for us today is that the police cannot be seen as a discrete and separate problem under capitalism, which can be made nicer with some reforms. The police serve a fundamental role as defenders of the social order in all capitalist societies, from the old Russian Empire to modern Australia. Only a working-class revolution that upends capitalism and smashes the state of which the police are a central part can abolish the police and replace them with a genuinely democratic militia of all citizens.
