Russia under the Old regime

TOWARDS THE POLICE STATE

weakening... of the basic economic, political, and national [policies of the Soviet state]... Propaganda or agitation, containing appeals to the overthrow, undermining or weakening of Soviet authority... and equally the spread or preparation or safeguarding of literature of such content carry the loss of freedom with strict isolation of no fewer than six months... " Soviet (RSFSR) Code of i960, Article 70:

Agitation or propaganda carried on for the purpose of subverting or weakening Soviet authority or of committing particular, especially dangerous crimes against the state, or circulating for the same purpose slanderous fabrications which defame the Soviet state and social system, or circulating or preparing or keeping, for the same purpose, literature of such content, shall be punished by the deprivation of freedom for a term of six months to seven years, with or without additional exile for a term of two to five years, or by exile for a term of two to five years... 12 This type of legislation, and the police institutions created to enforce it, spread after the Revolution of 1917 by way of Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany to other authoritarian states in Europe and overseas. One is justified in saying, therefore, that Chapters Three and Four of the Russian Criminal Code of 1845 are to totalitarianism what the Magna Carta is to liberty.

Under Nicholas 1 the draconian laws against political dissent were much less strictly enforced than one might be inclined to imagine. The machinery of repression was still too primitive for the police authorities to function in a systematic fashion: for this to happen, railways, telegraphs and telephones were needed. For the time being, the rules were applied in a rough sort of way. Usually, people suspected from informers' reports of meddling in politics were detained and, after being questioned, either released with a warning or sent into the provinces for some specified period of time. Sometimes the interrogation was carried out by the Emperor himself. Between 1823 and 1861, 290,000 persons were sentenced to Siberian exile, 44,000 of them for terms of hard labour. But of these exiles more than nine-tenths were ordinary criminals, vagabonds, runaway serfs, etc. Perhaps only 5 per cent suffered for crimes of a political nature (among them, the Decembrists), but many of this number were Polish patriots.13

With the accession of Alexander 11 the government made an earnest effort to put an end to the arbitrary rule of the bureaucracy and police, and transform Russia into what the Germans called a Rechtsstaat, a state grounded in law. The slogans in the air in the 1860s were due process, open court proceedings, trial by jury and irremovable judges. The judiciary reform, completed in 1864, is by common consent the most successful of all the Great Reforms and the only one to have survived (with the notable exception described below) to the end of the old regime