Russia under the Old regime

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Russian imigrh, the principal of which was located in the Russian Embassy in Paris. In their work, these foreign agencies were often assisted by local police authorities, acting either out of political sympathy or greed.

The elaborate and rather flexible political police system established in Russia in the early 1880s was unique in at least two respects. Before the First World War no other country in the world had two kinds of police, one to protect the state and another to protect its citizens. Only a country with a deeply rooted patrimonial mentality could have devised such a dualism. Secondly, unlike other countries, where the police served as an arm of the law and was required to turn over all arrested persons to the judiciary, in imperial Russia and there alone police organs were exempt from this obligation. Where political offences were involved, after 1881 the Corps of Gendarmes was not subject to judiciary supervision; such controls as it had were strictly of a bureaucratic, in-house kind. Its members had the right to search, imprison and exile citizens on their own authority, without consulting the Public Prosecutor. In the 1880s, the whole broad range of crimes defined as political had become a matter largely disposed of administratively by security organs. These two features make the police institutions of late imperial Russia the forerunner, and, through the intermediacy of corresponding communist institutions, the prototype of all political police organs of the twentieth century. The government of Alexander 11 did not confine its response to terror to repression. In its administration served several high functionaries perceptive enough to realize that unless accompanied by some constructive measures repression would be futile and possibly even harmful. At various times in Alexander's reign, serious thought was given to projects of political reform submitted either by government officials or influential public figures which in varying degrees and by different means sought to involve in the making of policy what were then known as 'trustworthy' elements of society. Some urged that the State Council be enlarged by the addition of elected representatives; others proposed to convoke consultative bodies resembling the Muscovite Land Assemblies; others yet called for reforms of local administration which would expand the competence of zemstva and provide additional outlets for public service to the landowning gentry. The hope was that by means such as these it would be possible to isolate the tiny band of terrorists, and gain sympathy for the government's predicament among educated society where so far it tended to encounter indifference spiked with malice. Among officials favouring such measures were P. A. Valuev, the Minister of the Interior, D. A. Miliutin, the Minister ofWar, and Loris-Melikov, an army general who in the last year of the reign of Alexander 11 was given virtually dictatorial powers. The Emperor himself was not unattracted to these proposals but he was slow to act on them because he faced the solid opposition of the rank and file of the bureaucracy as well as that of his son and heir apparent, the future Alexander in. The radicals unwittingly assisted this conservative party; every time they made an attempt on the life of the tsar or assassinated some high official, opponents of political reform could press for yet more stringent police measures and further postponement of basic reforms. The terrorists could not have been more effective in scuttling political reform had they been on the police payroll.

In resisting political reform the bureaucracy was fighting for its very life. From its vantage point, zemstva were bad enough, disturbing as they did the smooth flow of administrative directives from St Petersburg to the most remote province. Had representatives of society been invited to participate in legislation, even if only in a consultative capacity, the bureaucracy would have found itself for the first time subject to some form of public control; this certainly would have cramped its style and could have ended up by undermining its power. Even the assurance that only the most 'trustworthy' elements were to have been involved did not calm its apprehensions. Russian monarchists of that time, while anti-constitutionally disposed, by no means favoured the bureaucracy. Most of them were influenced by Slavophile ideals and regarded the bureaucracy as an alien body which had improperly insinuated itself between the tsar and his people.

Thanks to the archival researches of P.A.Zaionchkovskii, we are now reasonably well informed about the deliberations of the government during this critical period.16 The arguments of the opponents of political reform boiled themselves down to the following principal contentions:

1. The introduction of public representatives into government, whether in the centre or the provinces, whether in a legislative or merely a consultative capacity, would establish conflicting lines of responsibility and disorganize the administration. In fact, to improve administrative efficiency, zemstva should be abolished.

2. Because of its geographic and social characteristics, Russia requires a system of administration subject to the least possible restraints and controls. Russian functionaries should enjoy wide discretionary powers, and police 'justice' should be separated from ordinary courts. This latter point was expressed by the archetypal conservative bureaucrat, the Minister of the Interior from 1882 to 1889, Dmitry A. Tolstoy:

The sparse population of Russia, distributed over an immense territory, the unavoidable remoteness from courts which results from this, the low economic level of the people and the patriarchal customs of our agrarian