Russia under the Old regime

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which dealt with 'secret' matters - that is, political counter-intelligence. Under the Department served three divisions of Gendarmes, headquartered in St Petersburg, Moscow and Warsaw, as well as many specialized detachments. The staff remained small; in 1895 the Police Department had only 161 full-time employees while the Corps of Gendarmes stayed under 10,000 men. However, in 1883 the regular police, numbering close to 100,000, were ordered to cooperate closely with the gendarmerie, which greatly increased the latter's effectives. The Minister of the Interior was ex officio Chief of Gendarmes but in time the actual responsibility was assumed by one of his deputies called Director of the Department of Police and Commander of the Corps of Gendarmes. On 9 June 1881, an order was issued exempting the gendarmerie from the authority of Governors and Governors General: their responsibility was exclusively to the Chief of Police. By this measure, the Corps of Gendarmes was set apart from the regular administrative apparatus and made law unto itself. The Department of Police and the Corps of Gendarmes continued to concern themselves exclusively with political offences; when their members chanced upon evidence of an ordinary crime, they turned it over to the regular police. Once a year, the Chief of Gendarmes submitted to the emperor a report on campaigns his organization had waged against subversives which read somewhat like a summary of military operations.

To cover up its arbitrary activities with the mantle of legality, the Ministry of the Interior attached to the Police Department a special 'Juridical Section' (Sudebnyi otdel). This bureau handled the legal aspects of the cases which came within the purview of the Ministry of the Interior - that is, offences charged under the political clauses of the Criminal Code and withheld from regular courts, as well as those committed in violation of the numerous Extraordinary and Temporary laws issued during these years. In 1898, when political life in Russia showed once again signs of stirring after many years of quiescence, and there were fears that terrorism might be revived, the 'Secret' Division of the Police Department detached a 'Special Section' (Osoboe otdelenie), a top-secret organization to serve as the nerve centre of the campaign against subversives. This Section kept close track of revolutionaries in Russia and abroad, and engineered elaborate provocations designed to flush them out. Its offices, located in St Petersburg on the fourth floor on Fontanka 16, were so isolated that none but its own employees had access to them. On 14 August 1881, the government regularized the status of 'Protective Sections' (Okhrannye otdeleniia, or, for short, Okhranki), first established in the 1870s. These too fought revolutionaries, and they did so at a rather high professional level. Formally a branch of the Special Section, they seem to have operated independently of it. The Police Department had several foreign branches to shadow