Russia under the Old regime

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regular constabulary. The responsibilities of the Third Section and its Corps of Gendarmes were vaguely denned, but they did include, in addition to uncovering and forestalling subversive actions, surveillance of foreigners and religious dissenters, and a certain amount of censorship. Like its forerunner, the Preobrazhenskii Prikaz, it was exempt from supervision by other government agencies and reported directly to the emperor himself. The founders and early directors of the Third Section were Baltic Germans (A.Kh.Benckendorff, its first Chief, and M.Ia. von Vock, his assistant), but before long native specialists in work of this kind took over.

Another preventive measure taken at this time concerned censorship. Nicholas persuaded himself that the main cause of the Decembrist rising lay in the exposure of Russian youth to 'harmful', 'idle' ideas, and firmly decided to keep these out of the country. In Russia there has always been the presumption that the government had the right to determine what its subjects could publish or read. But prior to the reign of Nicholas there were few occasions to exercise this right: all the printing presses (until 1783) belonged either to the government or the church, and the literate population was so small that it was hardly worth the trouble to investigate its reading habits. In the seventeenth century, the authorities ordered the destruction of Old Believer books and of some religious works published in Kiev which the clergy considered polluted with Latinisms. In the eighteenth century, censorship was entrusted to the Academy of Sciences, which exercised its authority so sparingly that until the outbreak of the French Revolution Russians were free to read anything they chose. Censorship began in earnest in 1790, when Catherine impounded Radishchev's Journey and ordered its author to be imprisoned. Under Paul, many foreign books were prevented from entering Russia; thousands were burned. But with the accession of Alexander I censorship was once again reduced to the point where it hardly mattered. The Censorship Code which Nicholas approved in 1826 represented therefore a major innovation. As subsequently amended, it required that prior to their distribution all publications had to secure an imprimatur from one of the newly created 'censorship committees'. To qualify, printed matter published in Russia in the reign of Nicholas 1 had not only to be free of'harmful' material, but also to make some positive contribution to public morals: an early hint of that 'positive censorship' which was to become prevalent in Russia in the 1930s. Subsequently, the rules of censorship were alternately tightened (e.g. 1848-55) and relaxed (in the second half of the century), but some form of censorship remained in force in Russia until the Revolution of 1905, when it was done away with; it was reintroduced in full vigour thirteen years later. For all its formidable rules and large