Russia under the Old regime

TOWARDS THE POLICE STATE

Upon the completion of their work, these specialized commissions were to constitute a general commission to advise the government. This proposal, often incorrectly called the 'Loris-Melikov constitution' (the term was coined by Alexander 111 to discredit it) was modest enough, yet its implications were weighty. Russia was entering on unchartered waters, and no one could predict where the journey would lead. Even Alexander, while approving the proposal, muttered about Russian 'Estates General'. He was to have signed the decree calling for the convocation of Loris-Melikov's committees on 1 March 1881, but on that day he was killed by a terrorist bomb. The murder of Alexander 11 saved the bureaucracy from that which it had dreaded the most: the participation of society in political decisionmaking. After momentary hesitation, Alexander in decided that order would be best restored not by further concessions but by more stringent measures of repression. Reform projects ceased; N.P.Ignatev, the new Minister of the Interior, who had the bad judgement to propose to Alexander in the convocation of estates on the model of Muscovite Land Assemblies was promptly dismissed from his post. The patrimonial principle, held in disfavour since the middle of the eighteenth century, surfaced once again. The 'state', as henceforth understood, meant the tsar and his officialdom; internal politics meant protecting both from the encroachments of society. A quick succession of emergency measures completed the subjection of society to the arbitrary power of the bureaucracy and police.

On 14 August 1881, Alexander in signed into law the most important piece of legislation in the history of imperial Russia between the abolition of serfdom in 1861 and the October Manifesto of 1905, and more durable than either. This document, which codified and systematized the repressive legislation issued in the preceding years, has been the real constitution under which - brief interludes apart - Russia has been ruled ever since. In a manner characteristic of Russian legislative practices, in the official Collection of Statutes and Ordinances this momentous piece of legislation is casually sandwiched between a directive approving minor alterations in the charter of the Russian Fire Insurance Company and one concerning the administration of a technical institute in the provincial town of Cherepovtsy.20 Its full title reads 'Regulation concerning measures for the protection of the [established] system of government and of public tranquillity, and the placement of certain of the Empire's localities under a state of Reinforced Safeguard'. In its opening paragraphs, the decree asserted that ordinary laws had proved insufficient to preserve order in the empire so that it had become necessary to introduce certain 'extraordinary' procedures. In its operative