Russia under the Old regime

3""7

status of a second-rate citizen, and sometimes virtually forced him to join the revolutionaries. Furthermore, a vast range of activities was impossible without prior permission of the police. As listed in 1888-9 by a knowledgeable American observer, George Kennan (the great uncle of his namesake, die later Ambassador to Moscow), a Russian citizen of the late 1880s was subject to the following police restrictions:

If you are a Russian, and wish to establish a newspaper, you must ask the permission of the Minister of the Interior. If you wish to open a Sunday-school, or any other sort of school, whether in a neglected slum of St Petersburg or in a native village in Kamchatka, you must ask the permission of the Minister of Public Instruction. If you wish to give a concert or to get up tableaux for the benefit of an orphan asylum, you must ask permission of the nearest representative of the Minister of the Interior, then submit your programme of exercises to a censor for approval or revision, and finally hand over the proceeds of the entertainment to the police, to be embezzled or given to the orphan asylum, as it may happen. If you wish to sell newspapers on the street, you must get permission, be registered in the books of the police, and wear a numbered brass plate as big as a saucer around your neck. If you wish to open a drug-store, a printing-office, a photograph-gallery, or a book-store, you must get permission. If you are photographer and desire to change the location of your place of business, you must get permission. If you are a student and go to a public library to consult Lyell's Principles of Geology or Spencer's Social Statics, you will find that you cannot even look at such dangerous and incendiary volumes without special permission. If you are a physician, you must get permission before you can practice, and then, if you do not wish to respond to calls in the night, you must have permission to refuse to go; furthermore, if you wish to prescribe what are known in Russia as 'powerfully acting' medicines, you must have special permission, or the druggists will not dare to fill your prescriptions. If you are a peasant and wish to build a bath-house on your premises, you must get permission. If you wish to thresh out your grain in the evening by candle-light, you must get permission or bribe the police. If you wish to go more than fifteen miles away from your home, you must get permission. If you are a foreign traveler, you must get permission to come into the Empire, permission to go out of it, permission to stay in it longer than six months, and must notify the police every time you change your boarding-place. In short, you cannot live, move, or have your being in the Russian Empire without permission. The police, with the Minister of the Interior at their head, control, by means of passports, the movements of all the inhabitants of the Empire; they keep thousands of suspects constantly under surveillance; they ascertain and certify to the courts the liabilities of bankrupts; they conduct pawnbrokers' sales of unredeemed pledges; they give certificates of identity to pensioners and all other persons who need them; they superintend repairs of roads and bridges; they exercise supervision over all theatrical performances, concerts, tableaux, theater programmes, posters, and street advertisements; they collect statistics, enforce sanitary regulations, make searches and seizures in private houses, read the correspondence of suspects, take charge of the bodies of persons found dead, 'admonish' church members who neglect too long to partake of the Holy Communion, and enforce obedience to thousands of multifarious orders and regulations intended to promote the welfare of the people or to insure the safety of the state. The legislation relating to the police fills more than five thousand sections in the Svod Zakonov, or collection of Russian laws, and it is hardly an exaggeration to say that in the peasant villages, away from the centers of education and enlightenment, the police are the omnipresent and omnipotent regulators of all human conduct -a sort of incompetent bureaucratic substitute for divine Providence.29

Another important source of police power was the right granted it by a decree of 12 March 1882 to declare any citizen subject to overt surveillance. An individual in this category, known as pod.nadz.omyi, had to surrender his personal documents in exchange for special police papers. He was not allowed to move without police authorization and his quarters were liable to be searched at any time of day or night. He could not hold any government job or any public post, belong to private associations, or teach, deliver lectures, operate typographies, photographic laboratories or libraries, or deal in spirits; he could practise medicine, midwifery and pharmacology only under licence from the Ministry of the Interior. The same ministry decided whether or not he was to receive mail and telegrams.2 7 Russians under overt surveillance constituted a special category of sub-citizens excluded from the operations of law and the regular administration and living under direct police rule.

The security measures outlined above were reinforced by criminal laws which tended to weigh Russian jurisprudence overwhelmingly in favour of the state. Kennan made the following observations, all of them readily verifiable, concerning the Criminal Code of 1885:

In order to appreciate the extraordinary severity of [the] laws for the protection of the Sacred Person, the Dignity, and the Supreme Authority of the Tsar it is only necessary to compare them with the laws contained in Title X. for the protection of the personal rights and honor of private citizens. From such a comparison it appears that to injure a portrait, statue, bust, or other representation of the Tsar set up in a public place is a more grievous crime than to so assault and injure a private citizen as to deprive him of eyes, tongue, an arm, a leg, or the sense of hearing. [Compare Section 246 with Section 1477.] To organise or take part in a society which has for its object the overthrow of the Government or a change in the form of the Government, even although such society does not contemplate a resort to violence nor immediate action, is a crime of greater gravity than to so beat, maltreat, or torture a human being as partly to deprive him of his mental faculties. [Compare Section 250 with Section 1490.] The making of a speech or the writing of a book which disputes or throws doubt upon the inviolability of the rights or privileges of the Supreme Authority is as serious an offense as the