Russia under the Old regime

308

outraging of a woman. [Compare Section 252 with Section 1525.] The mere concealment of a person who has formed an evil design affecting the life, welfare, or honor of the Tsar, or the affording of refuge to a person who intends to bring about a restriction of the rights or privileges of the Supreme Authority, is a more serious matter than the premeditated murder of one's own mother. [Compare Section 243 with Section 1449.] Finally, in the estimation of the penal code, the private citizen who makes or circulates a caricature of the Sacred Person of the Tsar, for the purpose of creating disrespect for his personal characteristics or for his management of the empire, commits a more heinous crime than the jailer who outrages in a cell until she dies an imprisoned, helpless, and defenseless girl fifteen years of age. [Compare Section 245 with Sections 1525, 1526, and 1527.]28

The system of political repression included exile. This could be imposed either by a court sentence or by administrative decision, and could take one of several forms ranging widely in severity. The mildest form was to be sent out of the country or into the provinces for a specified length of time to live under overt police surveillance. More severe was a sentence of exile for settlement to Siberia (western Siberia was considered a much milder place of punishment than eastern). Such 'settled exiles' (ssylnoposelentsy) were essentially free men allowed to work gainfully and have their families with them. If they had money to supplement the small government allowance, they could live in considerable comfort. The harshest form of exile was hard labour {katorga, from the Greek katergon, meaning galley). This type of penal servitude had been introduced by Peter the Great who used criminals to build ships, work mines, help construct St Petersburg and furnish free labour wherever else it was necessary. Hard labour convicts lived in prison barracks and performed menial work under guard. Dostoevsky, who spent time doing katorga, left an unforgettable picture of it in his Notes from the House of the Dead. After 1886, the exploitation of forced labour (including prison labour) was governed by special regulations designed to assure that the government made money on it. In 1887, for instance, it brought the Ministry of the Interior a gross income of 538,820 rubles out of which, after expenses, there remained a net profit of 166,440 rubles 82 kopeks.28

Because so many different officials had the power to impose sentences of exile, statistics on this type of punishment are hard to come by. According to the best available official statistics, there were in 1898 in all Siberia nearly 300,000 exiles of all sorts, as well as 10,688 prisoners serving sentences of hard labour.'"However, as had been the case in the first half of the century (p. 295), only a small fraction of these exiles were committed for political crimes. Zaionchkovskii, who had access to the pertinent archives, cites official reports to the effect that in 1880 there were in the whole Russian empire only about 1,200 people under sentences of exile for political crimes; of these, 230 resided in Siberia and the rest in European Russia; a mere 60 served terms of hard labour. (These figures do not include over 4,000 Poles exiled for participation in the 1863 uprising.) In 1901, the total number of political exiles of all sorts, both those sentenced by courts and administrative procedures, increased to 4,113, of which 3,838 were under overt police surveillance, and 180 on hard labour.31

To complete the picture of restrictive measures imposed by the government of Alexander 111, mention must be made of policies subsumed under the term 'counter-reforms', whose avowed aim it was to emasculate the Great Reforms of Alexander 11. Among them were limitations on the competence of zemstva, abolition of the office of justice of the peace, and introduction of'Land Commandants', local officials with much discretionary authority over the peasants (p. 166). The Jews who were considered particularly prone to subversion were subjected in the reign of Alexander III to the full force of disabling laws which, though long on the statute books, had not been strictly applied.

Thus, in the early 1880s, all the elements of the police state were present in imperial Russia. These may be summarized as follows:

1. Politics was declared the exclusive preserve of the government and its high functionaries; any meddling in them on the part of unauthorized personnel, which included all private citizens, was a crime punishable bylaw;

2. The enforcement of this principle was entrusted to a Department of Police and a Corps of Gendarmes whose exclusive concern was with crimes against the state; 3. These organs of state security had the power a. to search, arrest, interrogate, imprison, and exile persons either guilty of political activity or suspected of it; b. to refuse any citizen a certificate of 'trustworthiness', lacking which he was prevented from engaging in a great variety of activities, including attendance at institutions of higher learn ing and employment in public institutions, governmental or other; c. to supervise all kinds of cultural activities of citizens and to certify the statutes of public associations;

4. In the fulfilment of its duties, the Department of the Police and the Corps of Gendarmes were not subject to supervision by the organs of the judiciary; they were also exempt from the jurisdiction of the regular civil administration on whose territory they operated; 5. By a variety of means at its disposal, such as overt surveillance,