Russia under the Old regime

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bureaucracy, however, imperial censorship was not strictly enforced. It is astonishing to a person familiar with more recent forms of repression to learn that between 1867 and 1894 - a period spanning the very conservative reign of Alexander in - only 158 books were forbidden to circulate in Russia. Some 2 per cent of the manuscripts passed on by preliminary censorship in one decade were turned down. Censorship of foreign publications was also rather lax. Of the 93,565,260 copies of books and periodicals sent to Russia from abroad in one late nineteenth-century decade only 9,386 were stopped.8 All of which suggests that imperial censorship was more of a nuisance than a barrier to the free flow of ideas.

The Code of Laws, on which Speranskii had been working since the beginning of Nicholas's reign, came out in 1832. The Fifteenth Volume in this series contained the Criminal Code which embraced also offences against the state; but because it did nothing more than arrange in an orderly fashion the chaotic statutes issued until that date, including the 'two points' of 1715, it was immediately judged inadequate. Speranskii was asked to draft in its place a new systematic Criminal Code, but he died before completing the task which was taken over by D.N.Bludov. It finally came out in J 845. The new Criminal Code turned out to be a milestone in the historical evolution of the police state. Political crimes were dealt with in two chapters: No. 3 'Of felonies against the government', and No. 4 'Of felonies and misdemeanors against the system of administration'. These two sections, covering fifty-four printed pages, constitute a veritable constitutional charter of an authoritarian regime. Other continental countries also had on the statute books provisions, sometimes quite elaborate, for dealing with crimes against the state (a category of crime unknown to English and American jurisprudence); but none attached to them such importance or defined them as broadly and as loosely as did Russia. According to the 1845 Code:

1. All attempts to limit the authority of the sovereign, or to alter the prevailing system of government, as well as to persuade others to do so, or to give overt expression to such intentions, or to conceal, assist or fail to denounce anyone guilty of these offences, carried the death penalty and the confiscation of all property (Articles 263-65 and 271);

2. The spreading by word of mouth or by means of the written or printed word of ideas which, without actually inciting to sedition, as defined above, raised doubts about the authority of the sovereign or lessened respect for him of his office, were punishable by the loss of civil rights and terms of hard labour from four to twelve years, as well as corporal punishment and branding (Articles 267 and 274).

Chapters 3 and 4 of the Russian Criminal Code of 1845 are the fount-tainhead of all those misty generalizations which ever since have enabled