Russia under the Old regime

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for revolutionary activity, continued until her death to draw the government pension due to her as a civil servant's widow. The existence of private capital and private enterprise nullified the many police measures intended to cut off 'untrustworthy' elements from their means of livelihood. Political unreliables could almost always find employment with some private firm whose management was either unsympathetic to the government or politically neutral. Some of Russia's most radical journalists were subsidized by wealthy eccentrics. Zemstva openly engaged radical intellectuals as statisticians or teachers. The Union of Liberation, a clandestine society which' played a critical role in sparking off the 1905 Revolution, was likewise supported from private resources. Private property created all over the empire enclaves which the police was powerless to trespass in so far as the existing laws, cavalier as they were with personal rights, strictly protected the rights of property. In the end, Zubatov's attempt at 'police socialism' could never have succeeded in imperial Russia because sooner or later it had to run afoul of private business interests.

Another loophole was foreign travel. Granted to dvoriane in 1785 it was gradually extended to the other estates. It survived even during the darkest periods of repression. Nicholas I tried to limit it by threatening to deprive dvoriane, who between the ages often and eighteen studied abroad, of the right to enter state service. In 1834 he required dvoriane to confine their foreign residence to five years, and in 1851 he reduced it further to two years. In the Criminal Code there were provisions requiring Russian citizens to return home from abroad when so ordered by the government. But none of these measures made much difference.Russians travelled in western Europe frequently and stayed there for long periods of time; in 1900, for instance, 200,000 Russian citizens spent abroad an average of 80 days. In Wilhelmian Germany, they constituted the largest contingent of foreign students. To obtain a passport valid for travel abroad one merely had to send an application with a small fee to the local governor. Passports were readily granted even to individuals with known subversive records, evidently on the assumption that they would cause less trouble abroad than at home. It is not in the least remarkable that the revolutionary party which in October 1917 took control of Russia had had its leader and operational headquarters for many years in western Europe.

Thirdly, there were powerful factors of a cultural nature inhibiting the full use of the existing machinery of repression. The elite ruling imperial Russia was brought up in the western spirit, and it dreaded disgrace. It hesitated to act too harshly for fear of being ridiculed by the civilized world. It was embarrassed to appear even in its own eyes as behaving in an 'Asiatic' manner. The imperial elite certainly was psychologically