One of the immediate consequences of the February Revolution, especially in Petrograd, was the rapid and almost complete dissolution of the tsarist police system. Yet none of the revolutionaries envisaged post-tsarist Russia without some kind of police system, and even before the final collapse of the old regime efforts were underway to assign some of the basic tasks of policing to a range of improvised organisations. In order to emphasise the break with the past, the term 'police' (politsiia) was abandoned in favour of 'militia' (militsiia). However, there was no single unified 'militia' during 1917, and although the word was regularly used by contemporaries in the singular tense, in reality it described a variety of separate organisations including: a largely theoretical state militia that the Provisional Government hoped would replace the tsarist police; autonomous municipal (or city) militias established by local dumas; voluntary workers' militias, usually linked to individual factories or city districts; and, by spring 1917, Red Guard units. Workers' militias and Red Guard units were usually formed spontaneously-in other words, without any central coordination-and the Provisional Government found it impossible to wield any influence over them. Despite its paramilitary connotations and the fact that many local militias were armed, the militia was, for the most part, regarded as a regular civilian police force, not as a substitute army; of the main political forces in 1917, only the Bolsheviks conceived of the militia as 'the people in arms'. The complex process of militia formation and organisation during the Russian Revolution has been explored in great detail by Tsuyoshi Hasegawa, V. I. Startsev, and Rex Wade, among others, and their work forms an essential starting point for any study of policing during 1917, particularly as a factor in understanding the shifting loci of power in Petrograd. This article focuses on a related but more specific question: to what extent did the revolution transform ideas about the purpose of the police system, i.e. its functions and scope? By its very nature the revolution created an opportunity to separate past from present, to reinvent the structures, functions, and ideological rationales of a whole range of political, social, economic and cultural institutions. The swift demise of the tsarist police presented contemporary political actors with the challenge of defining the functions and scope of the militia as a new civilian police system. What would it be for? To what extent were the purposes of formal policing reconceptualised? This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Europe-Asia Studies on 21

This article explores the popular and critical reception of operetta in Russia during its European heyday, which broadly coincided with the transformative reign of Tsar Alexander II (1855–1881). It argues that the genre consistently drew audiences from most social strata and should not be considered, as some historians have suggested, a uniquely ‘bourgeois’ form of entertainment closely associated with the rise of the middle classes. It also argues that operetta crystallized a range of wider concerns about Russian culture and politics during the era of the Great Reforms. Many critics attacked operetta’s frivolity and eroticism (held to be inconsistent with the aims of art), while radicals and conservatives regarded it as symptomatic of a new climate of political uncertainty (the former with hope, the latter with trepidation). The critical responses to operetta thus testified to its popularity and to the rapidity of change in Russia during the 1860s and 1870s.

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