"Not an army is purely pillowed." Russian mobilization in the First World War provoked hundreds of drunken pogroms across the empire

“Every day they drive new and new spare. Even to go nowhere. Of course, there are no uniforms or weapons. And all this walks dirty, broken. As they bring out, you can not think that it is an army, but purely pillowed. There are also bullies, of course . . . constantly the masses of the people do not count - they walk somewhere. Obviously, the organization of this case is grain. For example: we have been sent a lot of infantry to us, and now they have been told back somewhere.

" Video of the day this passage of a letter of August 8, 1914, an unknown soldier, who was engaged in mobilization in Kazan, is given by historian Vladislav Aksyonov in a study about the psychological state of different social strata of the population of the Russian Empire in 1914-1918. The royal order on the general mobilization parted by the country in the evening of July 31, and the Kazan military district had one of the first to immediately send troops to the front.

But the war caught everyone suddenly. Although the population felt its approaching in the spring of 1914. In April, the Ministry of Internal Affairs sent a secret circular in all the provinces of the empire, which said: in the event of hostilities, vodka trade should be completely banned. And that the orders were secret, the more convincing the rumors of it were in the people.

Already in May, the State Duma was unreasonably concerned that in the event of a war without significant vodka restrictions, mobilization would just break. However, alcohol trade was a state monopoly in Russia and gave 27% of budget revenues. Nevertheless, finance Minister Petro Bark was for the implementation of dry law.

When a letter was written in Kazan about a pathetic variety of recruits, his author probably already knew about a pogrom that happened a couple of days before that in the neighborhood of Bashkir Steritamak. In this county town, the mobilization service worked hard and collected more than 10 thousand spare.

"Hungry, because they defeated the kitchen at once, and they did not receive fodder money, the mobilized defeated the wine warehouse, several shops, injured the ward and his assistant, opened the shooting on the police guard. The whole city, which is actually left without protection, has frozen in anticipation of robberies and arson, ” - describes the rebellion historian Sergey Rudnik.

Steritamak and his 25,000 inhabitants were in power of 12,000 drunk and hungry mobilized men, to whom the whole local criminal element joined, as the mayor of Rostovtsev in the telegram to the capital noted. He reported that the city, "cut off by 100 miles from the railway, was in a state of siege. " The next day, even more alarming news came from the Tomsk province. In less than five days, the conscripts have defeated more than 20 wine shops and warehouses.