Russia under the Old regime

TOWARDS THE POLICE STATE

incapable of applying violence regardless of its consequences. There exists a touchingly prim note from Nicholas 11, a kind of epitaph of his reign, which he sent late in 1916 to relatives who had interceded on behalf of a Grand Duke implicated in the assassination of Rasputin: 'No one has the right to engage in murder.'33 Such an ethic simply did not go with police rule.

The result of the conflict between the old patrimonial psychology and modern western influences, was to yield a police force that was ubiquitous, meddlesome, and often brutal, but on the whole inefficient. The powers given to the political police were entirely out of proportion to the results achieved. We have seen some statistics bearing on political offences: the small number of people under surveillance or in exile, and the insignificant proportion of books intercepted by censorship. Between 1866 and 1895, there were only forty-four persons executed for political crimes, all of them perpetrators of assassination or assassination attempts. During the reign of Alexander ill - a period of severe repression - a total of four thousand persons were detained and interrogated in connection with political offences. These are very insignificant figures when one considers Russia's size and the massiveness of the machinery set up to deal with subversion.

The principal if unintended accomplishment of the proto-police regime was to radicalize Russian society. Its definition of political crimes was so comprehensive that the far-flung nets of security precautions caught and united people who had next to nothing in common with one another. From the legal point of view, hardly any distinction was drawn between conservative, nationalist, liberal, democratic, socialist and anarchist forms of discontent. A monarchist landlord outraged by the incompetence or corruption of the bureaucracy in his district became in the eyes of the law and the gendarmerie an ally of the anarchist assembling bombs to blow up the imperial palace. With its proscriptions, the government actually pushed its citizens into opposition ranks, where they became receptive to extremist appeals. For example, the laws in force in the 1880s forbade university students to form corporate organizations of any kind. Given the loneliness, poverty and natural social inclinations of young men it was inevitable that they would seek each other out and, in contravention of the law, form associations; these by their very existence acquired clandestine status and as such were easily infiltrated and taken over by radicals. It was the same with labour legislation. Stringent prohibitions against the formation of worker associations transformed even the most harmless labour activities into anti-state crimes. Workers whose sole interest might have lain in self-education or economic betterment were driven into the arms of radical students whom they actually mistrusted and disliked. Thus it