Monday, January 05, 2015

The Revolution as a Drinking Party

A revolution may not be a dinner party, but they sometimes involve a great deal of partying. From Stephen Kotkin’s recent biography of Stalin, here’s something that seems to have happened during the “storming” of the Winter Palace in the October revolution:
Red Guards … never actually “stormed” the Winter Palace: they, finally, had just climbed unopposed through unlocked doors or windows, many going straight for the storied wine cellars, history’s most luxurious. Each new Red Guard detachment sent to prevent a ransacking instead got drunk, too. “We tried flooding the cellars with water,” the leader of the Bolshevik forces on site recalled, “but the firemen … got drunk instead.” (Kindle locs. 4793-4796)
Apparently there was a great deal of revolutionary drinking at the time:
With or without red armbands, looters targeted the wine cellars of the capital’s countless palaces; some “suffocated and drowned in the wine,” an eyewitness recorded, while others went on shooting sprees. On December 4, 1917, the regime announced the formation of the Commission Against Wine Pogroms under a tsarist officer turned Bolshevik, Vladimir Bonch-Bruevich. “Attempts to break into wine-cellars, warehouses, factories, stalls, shops, private apartments,” the Soviet’s newspaper threatened, “will be broken up by machine-gun fire without any warning”— a stark indication of the uninhibited violence. (Kindle locs. 5234-5239)
Kotkin really brings out the “fractal” breakdown of norms in the early days of the revolution, and the “dadaist” character of Bolshevik pronouncements at the time.

4 comments:

  1. Freud lists intoxication as the first of many "palliative measures" that people use to cope with civilization. Perhaps the problem with revolution is that, once accomplished, everything taken for granted is no longer operative. Such a realization might be too much to bear.

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    1. But Adam, the revolution had not been accomplished at the time.

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  2. Vladimir Bonch-Bruevich wasn't in the tsar's army, he was Lenin's personal secretary. Vladimir's brother Mikhail was the tsarist officer.

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    1. ChrisM - you are right, I think! Kotkin must have gotten them confused - elsewhere in the book he does note that Mikhail was the officer, and Vladimir worked for Lenin.

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