Russia under the Old regime

289

The underdevelopment of legal traditions and courts was, of course, greatly to the advantage of the bureaucracy. Some conservative Russian jurists even earnestly argued in favour of close links between justice and administration. Among these was a highly respected expert on constitutional law, Professor N.M.Korkunov, who worked out a theory of Russian jurisprudence according to which the main function of law in that country was not so much to enforce justice as to maintain order.8 This view of law was expressed more crudely but also more honestly by Count Benckendorff, the Chief of the Secret Police under Nicholas i. Once, when the editor of a publication came to him to complain that he was being harassed by censors in violation of the law, Benckendorff exploded: 'Laws are written for subordinates, not for the authorities!'* Until Nicholas i, political repression in Russia was practised in a haphazard manner. The Preobrazhenskii Prikaz of Peter the Great marked a major step forward towards the professionalization of political police functions, but the machinery which he had established was dismantled by Peter m and Catherine the Great who forbade the lodging of complaints of the 'word and deed' type. Neither Catherine n nor Alexander i, though not averse to giving political dissenters a lesson every now and then, cared much for police snooping. A Ministry of Police established in 1811 was disbanded eight years later. There existed in Russia since the second half of the eighteenth century a rural and an urban constabulary, but no special body responsible for ferreting out political opposition of the kind that existed then in many continental countries. There was also no censorship code. Nor were there specific statutes dealing with political subversion apart from some general and quite antiquated rulings in the 1649 Code and in certain of the regulations of Peter the Great. This amateurish manner of dealing with political opposition sufficed until the early nineteenth century; it was no longer adequate in the Restoration era when more sophisticated forms of dissent came into vogue in a Europe of which Russia, by its involvement in the campaigns of 1813-15, had become an intrinsic part.

The inadequacy of Russia's internal defences first became evident in connection with the Decembrist uprising. Implicated in this coup were over one hundred dvoriane, some of them members of the country's most distinguished families. This consideration of itself precluded a quiet disposal of the affair by administrative procedures such as ordinarily used with insubordinate commoners. Beyond this procedural difficulty, the revolt raised serious security questions: why should members of a class favoured by the crown with extraordinary privileges take

* 'Zakony pishutsia dlia podcfrinennykh a ne (Ilia nachaTstv ': %apiski AUksandra hanovicha Koshtltva (181S-1883 gody) (Berlin 1884), pp. 31-2. up arms against it? How were they able to plot their conspiracy without being detected?

In 1826, Nicholas appointed a Supreme Criminal Commission to investigate the causes of the rebellion and to recommend punishments. The Commission faced an unusually difficult task because at the time Russia not only lacked a Criminal Code but even a precise legal definition of anti-state crimes. Anyone who takes the trouble to look at the Commission's final recommendations will find there, as legal grounds for the sentences given the Decembrists, a puzzling allusion to the 'first two points' (po pervym down punktam). This refers to a minor ukaz of Peter i, issued on 25 January 1715 (No. 2,877 m tne Full Collection of Laws), the first two articles of which required every subject to denounce to the authorities actions harmful to state interests and, specifically, incitement to mutiny. Such were the tenuous legal grounds for prosecuting the Decembrists. Under the 'first two points' the mandatory punishment was death. But recognizing the broad range of guilt among the defendants, the Commission separated them into nine categories, for each of which it recommended a different punishment ranging from induction into the army as common soldier to death by quartering.

Nicholas, who liked order above all else, was not content widi such a state of affairs. He wanted anti-state crimes to be precisely spelled out and matched with suitable punishments. The responsibility for this task lay with Speranskii who was heading a committee preparing a general Code of Russian Laws. But this work was of necessity slow, and in the meantime steps had to be taken to prevent the recurrence of the events of 14 December 1825.

The first move was to give the empire a regular political police. This Nicholas did in 1826 when he formed a Third Section of the Imperial Chancellery. The ostensible task of this bureau was to give protection to 'widows and orphans': its official emblem, a handkerchief, which Nicholas gave to its first director, was to symbolize the drying of tears. In fact, however, the Third Section was a regular secret police with tentacles spread through all the layers of society, and as such it indubitably caused more tears to flow than it ever dried up. Its staff was small, averaging thirty or forty full-time employees. But its effectives were more numerous than that. For one, the Third Section had on its payroll many informers who frequented salons, taverns, fairs, and other public gatherings and reported any specific information they had picked up as well as their general impressions of the public mood. Secondly, attached to the Third Section and serving under its Chief was a Corps of Gendarmes several thousand men strong. Its blue-tunicked and white-gloved troops had as their specific mission the safeguarding of state security; they constituted a special political police separate from the