SUMMARY:

The article reconstructs the history of revolutionary militia units organized by workers in and around Shlisselburg near Petrograd in the wake of the February Revolution of 1917. It traces the social and ideological mechanisms of popular mobilization that caused the workers to join these units (the Red Guard, a workers’ battalion), as well as their political and military function. In the wake of the Russian imperial state’s collapse and the developing civil war, paramilitaries were filling the void of authority and forming new power institutions at a local level. A gradual shift in motivation to join the militia, from volunteering to coercive drafting, was linked to the crystallization of new state structures.