Russia under the Old regime

TOWARDS THE POLICE STATE

they are certain to be used by any government, which - on whatever grounds - regards itself as entitled to a monopoly in politics.

Just as the tactics of massive breakthrough by mechanized armour, inaugurated but not exploited in the First World War by the British at Gambrai were perfected by their enemies, the Germans, in the Second World War, so the techniques of police rule, introduced piecemeal by the Russian imperial regime, were first utilized to their fullest potential by their one-time victims, the revolutionaries. The people who came to power in Russia in October 1917 had grown up under the regime of 'Extraordinary' and 'Temporary' Laws: this was the only Russian constitution that they had ever known. All of them had been shadowed, searched, arrested, kept in jail, and sentenced to exile by the political police of the imperial government. They had battled with the censorship. They had had to contend with agents provocateurs planted in their midst. They knew the system intimately, from the inside, which meant that they also knew its shortcomings and loopholes. Their vision of a proper government was a mirror image of the imperial regime's to the extent that what the latter called 'subversion' (kramola) they labelled 'counter-revolution'. Long before they came to power, Social Democrats like Plekhanov and Lenin made no secret of the fact that they thought it proper to kill their ideological opponents.36

So it was not in the least surprising that almost the instant they took power, the Bolsheviks began to put together the pieces of the imperial proto-police apparatus which the short-lived and democratic Provisional Government had dismantled. A political police, Cheka, was formally founded in December 1917, but its functions had been informally exercised from the day of the coup by the Military-Revolutionary Committee. The Cheka enjoyed much vaster powers than the old Department of Police, Okhrana, or Corps of Gendarmes, being given complete licence to deal with whomever it chose to define as 'counterrevolutionaries'. In September 1918, with the proclamation of Red Terror, it executed in one day over five hundred 'enemies of the state', some of them hostages, others persons often guilty of nothing more criminal than having been born in the wrong social class. Within seven months of the Bolshevik seizure of power, the opposition press was silenced and orders were issued for the apprehension of leading political opponents. There was already then talk of concentration camps for 'subversives' and soon forced labour was reintroduced. The Criminal Code of 1927, as has been noted (p. 294) contained provisions against anti-state crimes which neither in the breadth of definition nor in the severity of punishments differed substantially from those instituted by the imperial regime. All this was done shortly after power had been seized. Then with each