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Police and revolutionaries

jonathan w. daly

Soon after officers of leading noble families rebelled in December 1825, Nicholas I created the Third Section of His Imperial Majesty’s Own Chancellery and a uniformed gendarmerie to conduct censorship, oversee the bureaucracy, keep track of the public mood and preserve state security. During the first two decades of its existence, Nicholas’s security police were not unpopular. At the end of Nikolai Gogol’s Inspector General (Revizor, 1836), for example, the gendarme who announces the arrival of the true inspector appears as a symbol of justice. At any given moment during the second quarter of the century, one or two dozen people – mostly officials, society women, writers, journalists and well-connected nobles – provided sporadic, often gossipy information to the Third Section, sometimes quite openly.1

Aside from the Polish rebellion of 1830–1, the period from 1826 to 1840 witnessed almost no incidents of political opposition. The intelligentsia was largely preoccupied with literary and philosophical issues. The execution of five Decembrists and the exile to Siberia of over one hundred more in 1826 had surely diverted many from the path of active opposition. As the close association between government and educated public began to break down, in the 1840s, thanks to the expansion of education, increased European influences and the wave of European revolutions in 1848, the police sought to maintain the status quo, driving into internal or external exile prominent intellectuals like Alexander Herzen and Fedor Dostoevsky. The Third Section was beginning to inspire dread but still was not an efficient security police institution. It was generally well informed about the private social gatherings of social elites. It could also make incisive assessments of the public mood, as when in early

1See Sidney Monas, The Third Section: Police and Society under Nicholas I (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1961); P. S. Squire, The Third Department: The Establishment and Practice of the Political Police in the Russia of Nicholas I (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968).

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1855 it warned of war-weariness within the population and urged bringing the Crimean War to a close.2

In 1866 in the midst of the Great Reforms, which created an independent judiciary and institutions of local self-government, a terrorist attempt against Alexander II led to minor police reforms: the creation of a forty-man security force (okhrannaia strazha) to protect the emperor and of special bureaus for security policing (Okhrannoe otdelenie) and regular criminal investigation (Sysknoe otdelenie). Although the government appears to have intended earnestly to combat both grave regular and political crime, the robust development of political crime over the next several decades caused the lion’s share of resources available for policing to flow to the security bureau. Within a decade and a half, it became the cornerstone of the security police system. Later in the year, the Gendarme Corps was reorganised, its staff increased. Finally, in 1868 a network of twenty-eight ‘observation posts’ (nabliudatel’nye punkty) was created in fourteen provinces.3

In 1869, before the onset of anything like systematic government repression, Mikhail Bakunin and S. G. Nechaev, in their ‘Revolutionary Catechism’, urged gathering rebels and brigands into a violent revolutionary force. Nechaev’s People’s Revenge group, which advocated the systematic destruction of the established social and political order and the physical annihilation of government officials, attracted many young people, four of whom he persuaded in 1869 to murder a confederate.4 The Nechaev conspirators were tried and mostly exonerated, prompting the government in 1871 to empower gendarmes to investigate state-crime cases and the justice minister in consultation with the director of the Third Section to propose administrative punishments in these cases. Until 1904, therefore, the majority of state-crime cases were handled administratively.

The next opposition movement was non-violent. In spring and summer 1874, thousands of young idealists, dressed as peasants and some trained in rustic craft and skills, set out to the countryside to bring light to, and learn from, the peasantry. Russian educated youths had ‘gone to the people’. Hundreds

2This chapter draws on my Autocracy under Siege: Security Police and Opposition in Russia,

1 866–1 905 (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1998) and The Watchful State: Security Police and Opposition in Russia, 1 906–1 91 7 (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press,

2004).

3See I. V. Orzhekhovskii, Samoderzhavie protiv revoliutsionnoi Rossii (1 826–1 880) (Moscow: Mysl’, 1982); P. A. Zaionchkovskii, Krizis samoderzhaviia na rubezhe 1 87 0–1 880-kh godov

(Moscow: Izd. MGU, 1964).

4On all the radical movements of this era, see Franco Venturi, Roots of Revolution: A History of the Populist and Socialist Movements in Nineteenth-Century Russia, trans. Francis Haskell (New York: Knopf, 1960).

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were arrested and eventually tried, but the defendants won public sympathy. Those who remained committed to political opposition either fled abroad or went ‘underground’. Among the latter, some remained covertly in villages; others embraced political terrorism. The first of these terrorist-conspirators, calling themselves Land and Freedom, began in 1877 to carry out acts of violence against senior officials. When a jury acquitted Vera Zasulich, who freely confessed to attempting to murder a prominent official in 1878, the government deprived people accused of committing attacks on government officials of the right to a jury trial. The terrorists countered with more attacks and the government with more emergency measures.5

Yet the security police, using primitive methods of surveillance, were no match for the terrorists: only in the 1870s did the police begin to build up a registry of political suspects (the police in Vienna for a half-century had been registering the entire population of the Austrian Empire). Moreover, the terrorists formed a tightly organised, highly disciplined, though small, band of almost religiously devoted crusaders who launched attack after attack. In desperation the police arrested thousands of (mostly non-violent) young radicals, thus alienating the educated public who therefore occasionally abetted the terrorists. After several attempts, their organisation – now called People’s Will – assassinated Tsar Alexander II in March 1881.

But the tide was already turning. In August 1880 a centralised police institution subordinated to the Ministry of the Interior, with authority over both political and regular police forces, the Police Department, had replaced the Third Section. Henceforth the security service was just another wheel in the state machine. (The Gendarme Corps remained affiliated with the War Ministry, however.) In October a second security bureau was established in Moscow. Grigorii Sudeikin, chief of the security bureau in St Petersburg and one of a rare breed of professionally sophisticated gendarme officers, penetrated the People’s Will with informants and arrested several of its members by early 1881. While he failed to prevent the regicide, over the next two years Sudeikin, his assistant, Petr Rachkovskii, and their key informant, Sergei Degaev, demolished People’s Will, which, although using Degaev to help murder Sudeikin, never fully recovered.

Several informants whose identities were discovered by revolutionaries went on to occupy key positions in the police apparatus. In contrast to gendarme officers, men with military training and an abiding sense of hierarchy and authority, erstwhile informants knew the revolutionaries’ mentality

5See Jonathan W. Daly, ‘On the Significance of Emergency Legislation in Late Imperial Russia’, SR 54 (1995): 602–29.

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intimately, making them their most dangerous adversaries. Rachkovskii had worked briefly as an informant in 1879, then virtually created a security bureau in Paris, which he headed from 1884 to 1902. Sergei Zubatov, an informant for the Moscow security bureau in 1886–7, rose to head that bureau and transformed it into the heart and soul of the empire’s security system. Zubatov, Rachkovskii and several others introduced into the system an inventiveness, a vitality, an enthusiasm, and a spirit of adventure and iconoclasm previously absent from Russia’s security service.

The government’s apparent inability to deal with the terrible famine of 1890–1 gave rise to underground organisations in the People’s Will tradition and broad-based oppositional movements. Radical activists travelled to the faminestricken areas, where they educated, healed and fed people and agitated for a revolutionary uprising. The peasants largely shunned them, however, driving some in summer 1893 to found the People’s Justice party aimed at overthrowing the monarchy. Co-ordinated arrests crushed the organisation.

The number of gendarme inquests into political crimes rose from 56 cases involving 559 people in 1894 to 1,522 cases involving 6,405 people in 1903, an increase of 1,259% and 608%, respectively.6 Still, until the turn of the century, the security police had revolutionary conspirators well under control. Rachkovskii in Paris with a dozen informants kept abreast of developments among the radical emigr´es´ and occasionally arranged their arrest in collaboration with European police forces. The Police Department co-ordinated the information sent in from provincial gendarme stations, mail interception offices and the security bureaus in the imperial capitals and in Paris. It also recruited informants on an irregular basis. Often this was done without much genuine effort on the police’s part. For example, in 1893 Evno Azef, a brilliant informant among leading Socialist-Revolutionaries, voluntarily offered his services.

The Social Democrats enjoyed more success in the late 1890s because the security service focused more on repressing Populists and neo-People’s Will groups (though it also harassed the Marxists, especially in Moscow, prompting them to adopt strict methods of secrecy), and thanks to a shift in tactics towards agitation among artisans and workers, articulating their everyday concerns and frustrations in order to incite their anger and channel it towards revolt. This approach formed the core idea of the Union of Struggle for the Liberation of the Working Class, created in St Petersburg in autumn 1895 to unite the

6A. F. Vovchik, Politika tsarizma po rabochemu voprosu v predrevoliutsionnyi period (1 895 –1 904)

(Lvov: Izd. L’vovskogo universiteta, 1964), p. 262.

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disparate Social Democrat circles.7 Despite continuous repression, which landed many experienced revolutionaries in exile, the movement helped provoke and organise massive strikes in St Petersburg in 1896 and 1897, leading many manufacturers unilaterally to shorten the regular work day in their factories to eleven and a-half hours. The government extended this concession to the whole country in a law of 2 June 1897. Henceforth, however, the government would deal with strike instigators largely by administrative means, not in the regular courts. The Police Department would also pay far more attention to the labour movement.

Meanwhile, Zubatov was reforming the methods of security policing. Professing a ‘profound love for and faith in his cause’, he imparted to several of his proteg´es´ in the security bureau an ardent commitment rarely encountered in gendarme officers. Zubatov’s closest assistant, Evstratii Mednikov, a clever Old Believer of peasant stock, refined the use of plain clothes police agents, called surveillants (filery). Before the early 1880s, the gendarmes, despite their easily recognisable blue uniform, were rarely allowed to undertake plain clothes operations. At the Moscow security bureau, surveillants memorised the city’s physical layout, including restaurants, bars, factories, taxi stations and tramway routes, as well as streets, alleys and courtyards, to enable them to manoeuvre freely around suspects. During training, experienced agents accompanied fresh recruits and taught them to recognise and commit to memory facial features through systematic study of physiognomy and by poring over photographs of revolutionaries. Finally, the novices learned to employ makeup and disguises. Surveillants jotted down their observations in diaries, tens of thousands of which are preserved in the police archives. They are generally little more than a dull catalogue of pedestrian occurrences in the life of persons under surveillance, yet security bureau clerks used them to prepare a welter of ‘finding aids’, including weighty name and place registers and complex diagrams of relations among opponents of the government. The number of such trained surveillants in Moscow rose from seventeen in 1881 to fifty in 1902, after which the number fluctuated between fifty and one hundred. (After the turn of the century, the St Petersburg bureau employed slightly more.)

To pursue radical activists out into the provinces, where the majority of provincial gendarme authorities were ineffective, in 1894 a mobile surveillance brigade (Letuchii otriad filerov) was created at the Moscow security bureau. As a sort of moveable security bureau, it was designed to uncover distribution

7See J. L. H. Keep, The Rise of Social Democracy in Russia (Oxford: Oxford University Press,

1963).

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networks of revolutionary literature, illegal printing presses and propaganda rings. It permitted Zubatov to co-ordinate major operations across the empire

– from surveillance to mass arrests. The key to its success was its mobility: those under surveillance were less likely to recognise a surveillant constantly on the move than one permanently stationed in one place. The brigade achieved its success with a staff of only thirty surveillants in 1894 and fifty in January 1901.

More important than surveillants were informants. Zubatov was a master at recruiting and guiding them, winning their confidence and maximising their usefulness. Sometimes he used chance meetings with industrial workers or personnel of important public organisations as opportunities to recruit them as agents. A certain number of informants simply proposed their services. The majority of agents began to work for the police after arrest – and under interrogation. Zubatov questioned political suspects as though leading a radical discussion circle, showering them with attention, offering them food and drink, and arguing passionately that the people never profit from revolutionary violence, that only the emperor was capable of implementing needed reforms in Russia. His enthusiasm and energy were extremely attractive to revolutionaries lacking deep convictions and permitted him to turn some of them away from the paths of political opposition.

Zubatov emphasised that case officers must win their agents’ trust, protect them from discovery, assist them in adversity and increase their faith in the Russian monarchy. He urged his officers, according to one of them, to treat their informants as ‘a beloved woman with whom you have entered into illicit relations. Look after her like the apple of your eye. One careless move and you will dishonour her . . . Take this to heart: treat these people as I am advising, and they will understand your needs, will trust you, and will work with you honestly and selflessly.’8

The number of informants was never great, and before Zubatov they were few indeed. Nikolai Kletochnikov, a revolutionary infiltrator who had access to the security police’s most sensitive files in 1879–80, found a record of only 115 permanent informants in the whole empire – at the height of terrorist attacks against the emperor and his officials.9 Later, part-time police informants worked within nearly every major social group and profession, although even the security bureau in St Petersburg never employed more than 94 informants. The most important ones were students in the 1880s and 1890s and members of the two principal revolutionary parties (the Socialist-Revolutionaries and

8 A. Spiridovich, Zapiski zhandarma (Moscow: Izd. ‘Proletarii’, 1930), p. 50. 9 See Orzhekhovskii, Samoderzhavie, p. 122.

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Social Democrats) after the turn of the century. People became informants for a variety of reasons. Some agreed to inform in order to take revenge upon their erstwhile comrades (Zubatov claimed this of himself ), some sought adventure or took a liking to their case officers, probably all feared punishment and desired material benefits. A few earnestly wished to serve their government in its struggle against the onslaught of revolutionary sedition.10 Wages ranged from 5–10 roubles to 100–200 roubles (or up to 1,000 for a few ‘stars’) monthly. (By contrast, surveillants and skilled metalworkers earned 50 roubles per month.) Valuable, long-time informants could hope to receive a solid annual pension (from 1,000 to 3,000 roubles) or a one-time lump-sum subsidy (as much as 5,000 roubles).

Zubatov’s development of new police methods, especially the systematic and extensive employment of informants, was undoubtedly the most significant advance in Russian political policing since the creation of the Third Section. It also set him at odds with the majority of Russian security policemen, the gendarmes. Such policemen, even when lacking precise information about criminal activity, sometimes arrested dozens of people in order to discover a few political criminals: that is, not on the basis of evidence of political wrongdoing, but in order to obtain evidence. Zubatov argued, by contrast, that suspects should be arrested or exiled administratively only upon discovery of strong evidence of their involvement in political crime, to avoid creating innocent victims and alienating the population from the government. Zubatov preferred to wait patiently for an underground group to come into possession of incriminating evidence (illegal literature, forged passports, explosives or weapons) or for the arrival of a major revolutionary leader from abroad, before arresting its members. The point was to let the group reveal its purposes in order both to learn more about the broader movement of which it was a part and to catch it in flagrante delicto.

If Zubatov’s methods were more effective and fruitful in the long run, they were also more dangerous. By allowing the revolutionaries room to manoeuvre, the police risked letting them perpetrate crimes. Likewise, informants were obliged to participate more fully in the work of the illegal organisations, laying them open to charges of provocation. Given the difficulties and dangers inherent in the new approach, it is hardly surprising that many gendarmes continued to prefer the older, more heavy-handed methods. Yet Zubatov was surely right that by the mid-1890s the security police had to ascend to a higher

10The best place to start exploring the lives of informants is Leonid Men’shchikov, Okhrana i revoliutsiia. K istorii tainykh politicheskikh organizatsii v Rossii, 3 vols. (Moscow: Izd. politkatorzhan, 1925–8).

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level of professional sophistication. Whereas the opposition ‘movement’ had comprised a few dozen members under Nicholas I and only a few thousand under Alexanders II and III, it fell to Nicholas II’s lot to rule an empire plagued by mass social discontent. The security system was no longer equipped to punish or otherwise neutralise all such ‘suspicious’ people in Russia. Furthermore, as a former radical himself, Zubatov was convinced that much popular discontent was justified.

The massive strikes of 1896–7 underscored these points. Moreover, the Social Democrats were enjoying considerable success in spreading their revolutionary theories and agitation among the ranks of the industrial workers. In this context, Zubatov conceived of an astonishing programme: to organise industrial workers on behalf of the government and to strive to improve the material conditions of their life in order to win them away from the revolutionary opposition. He argued that only the absolutist monarchy, an institution above classes and estates, could advance the industrial workers’ interests. The revolutionaries, he asserted, wished to use them only to further their own political goals. The patronage of Moscow’s powerful governor-general, the emperor’s uncle, Grand Duke Serge Aleksandrovich, permitted him to implement this bold policy.11

Apparently in response to a coalescing of revolutionary organisations in the late 1890s, in January 1898 the Police Department created a Special Section for co-ordinating security policing operations throughout the empire. The Special Section’s staff of five assistants, seven clerks and three typists (1900) were nearly all civilians until 1905, when a few gendarme officers took important positions. The institution was cloaked in secrecy, its offices hidden, and its chief and his assistants, a few of them erstwhile informants, claiming to be professors, writers or merchants. While the actual fighting against the revolutionary opposition was left to Zubatov in Moscow, the Special Section in St Petersburg analysed, classified and interpreted data furnished by police institutions, informants and perlustration; surveyed the various opposition groups and movements and prepared assessments of their strength and significance; compiled, organised and indexed information on social disorders, students, workers and the general mood of the Russian population; and co-ordinated the search for political criminals.

The Social Democrats held their first congress in Minsk on 1–2 March 1898, but the police immediately arrested every delegate – save three whom Zubatov

11 On Zubatov’s approach to workers, see Jeremiah Schneiderman, Sergei Zubatov and Revolutionary Marxism: The Struggle for the Working Class in Tsarist Russia (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1976).

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deliberately left at liberty, in the hope that they would lead him to their colleagues in revolution. Both police repression (Vladimir Lenin, Julius Martov and Aleksandr Potresov were exiled to Siberia) and philosophical and programmatic differences among Social Democrats delayed the convocation of a second party congress until 1903. In the meantime, there erupted in February 1899 student disorders that marked the beginning of Russia’s revolutionary era. They radicalised the bar by expanding the number of radical law students, stimulated the publication of the Social Democrat newspaper Iskra and promoted the formation of the Socialist-Revolutionary party and of the Liberation Movement by awakening Marxists, neo-Populists and left-wing liberals to the immense power available to opponents of the imperial government if only they roused the population against it. The government first overreacted to the student unrest, then relented: it conscripted into the army and expelled hundreds of students from the universities, only to readmit them in the fall.12 The message was clear: the government was arbitrary and repressive, but not overly to be feared by committed radicals.

The Socialist-Revolutionary party grew up around the newspaper Revoliutsionnaia Rossiia, which began publication in late 1900 in Moscow and in early 1901 in Finland. The party evolved from two currents, the People’s Will’s tradition of political terrorism and a peasant-centred programme of revolutionary propaganda.13 The party’s programme of terrorism received its motor impulse from the assassination in February 1901 of the education minister, Nikolai Bogolepov, whom critics of his handling of the student disorders called ‘Mr Absurd’ (Nelepov). That summer, Zubatov admitted that despite a whole series of successful arrests the revolutionary movement was growing and consolidating itself. Russia’s revolutionaries viewed themselves as a kind of holy brotherhood of men and women dedicated to bringing down the imperial government and to putting a more just order in its place. In their quest for right they expected to fall prey to snares and to suffer pain and privations, including arrest, imprisonment and exile. One counted devotion to the cause in terms of jails visited and places of exile known. The Bolshevik Viktor Nogin’s tally, for example, reached fifty.14

By late 1901 and early 1902, industrial workers and university students joined forces in major demonstrations. In St Petersburg, radical intellectuals also

12On the student unrest see Samuel D. Kassow, Students, Professors, and the State in Tsarist Russia (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1989).

13See Manfred Hildermeier, The Russian Socialist-Revolutionary Party Before the First World War, English edn (New York: St Martin Press, 2000).

14‘Nogin, Viktor Pavlovich’, in Politicheskie deiateli Rossii. 1 91 7 (Moscow: Bol’shaia Rossiiskaia entsiklopediia, 1993), p. 237.

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took part. This seems to have been another important step along the road towards the 1905 Revolution, when students, industrial labourers and liberal and radical intellectuals banded together to launch a united attack on the imperial government. To make matters worse, in spring 1902 massive peasant disorders shook Poltava and Kharkov provinces. It was precisely at this moment that Lenin argued that the revolutionary movement would triumph only if a ‘few professionals, as highly trained and experienced as the imperial security police, were allowed to organise it’.15 It seems, however, that the greatest threat to the government was less the revolutionary conspirators, whom the Russian security police generally managed to control, but mass opposition movements.

Neither the provincial gendarme stations, nor the security bureaus, nor even Zubatov’s mobile brigade could cope with the growing and diversifying opposition. Few provincial gendarmes were prepared to match wits with anti-government activists, and the mobile brigade was now stretched to the limit of its resources. Thus, in mid-1902 Zubatov persuaded the interior minister, Viacheslav Plehve (his predecessor, Dmitrii Sipiagin, was assassinated in April 1902), to authorise the creation of a network of provincial security bureaus staffed by dynamic gendarme officers and surveillants transferred from the mobile brigade. Zubatov was named Special Section chief in August and twenty bureaus were created. The new institutions occupied an ambiguous position within the imperial bureaucracy. In matters affecting ‘state security’ they were independent and authoritative – being empowered, ‘in extreme circumstances’, to launch searches or arrests outside their provinces without contacting either local authorities or the Police Department – but in all other affairs they were partially subordinated to the provincial gendarme station chiefs. This was a prescription for disastrous intra-bureaucratic relations, and many gendarme chiefs were justifiably furious. Even so, the new bureaus, especially in Kiev, Odessa, Kharkov and Ekaterinoslav, seemed to deliver impressive results.

Yet within months Russia began its slide towards revolution. In July 1903 massive strikes swept the Black Sea littoral and the Caucasus: a foretaste of the October 1905 general strike.16 Zubatov urged moderation in dealing with the unrest, the more so as his labour experiment was well entrenched in Odessa. Yet on Plehve’s orders, the general strike in that city was brutally crushed in mid-July. Zubatov rebelled. Plehve dismissed and banished him from the

15V. I. Lenin, Chto delat’?, in Polnoe Sobranie Sochineniia, vol. 6, pp. 126–7. Italics supplied.

16See ‘K istorii vseobshchei stachki na iuge Rossii v 1903 g.’, KA 88 (1938): 76–122.

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major cities of Russia, depriving the security system of its most talented director. A year later Plehve himself fell before an assassin’s bomb. By November Mednikov lamented that the entire security system was crumbling before his eyes.17 The conciliatory attitude of Plehve’s successor, Petr Sviatopolk-Mirskii, merely encouraged oppositional sentiment, which had been building despite government repression, to burst forth into a fever of social militancy exacerbated by Russia’s sagging fortunes in its war with Japan. Bloody Sunday (9 January 1905) ignited massive popular unrest and throughout the year the opposition movements grew into a mighty phalanx of anti-government forces – agrarian and urban, educated and illiterate, left-liberal and revolutionary. Officials were continuously threatened by terrorist attacks. From February 1905 to May 1906, 1,075 of them were killed or wounded.18 Since the security police, by their very nature, were powerless to forestall spontaneous, disorganised outbursts of mass popular discontent, the government would have been less endangered had the regular police apparatus held firm. Yet it did not: under Alexander Bulygin, the entire Interior Ministry was in complete disorganisation by late summer.

The crisis peaked in October 1905 with a general strike that immobilised much of urban Russia and prompted the emperor to issue his October Manifesto, diminishing the power of officialdom and reinforcing the rights of his subjects.19 Many police officials had no idea how to act or react: in early November the Police Department denied rumours that the security police would be abolished. To make matters worse, terrible agrarian violence broke out in nearly every province of European Russia from late October through December and an armed uprising erupted in Moscow in mid-December. The entire imperial order might have collapsed had not the hardline Petr Nikolaevich Durnovo been appointed interior minister in late October over the indignant protests of nearly all the public figures in Russia. The new interior minister and other proponents of law and order drew three conclusions from the anarchy of late 1905. First, signs of weakness and concessions to the opposition tended to undermine the government. Second, only decisive leadership and timely repression had a prayer of holding the system together. Third, the peasantry and petty urban dwellers could not be relied upon to oppose the radicals. In a word, only a harshly authoritarian state could survive in Russia given the

17Mednikov to Spiridovich, 7 November 1904, in ‘Pis’ma Mednikova Spiridovichu’, KA 17

(1926), 211.

18A. M. Zaionchkovskii, ‘V gody reaktsii’, KA 8 (1925): 242.

19The standard work is Abraham Ascher, The Revolution of 1 905 , 2 vols. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988–92).

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strength of the opposition and the complexity of the social and economic problems facing the country. By January 1906, this view held sway within a large portion of officialdom.

The confrontation between government and revolutionaries remained bloody for another two years. The regular and especially military courts heard thousands of state-crime cases beginning in 1906. Whereas 308 alleged political criminals had passed before military judges in 1905, 4,698 did so in 1906.20 ‘Punitive expeditions’ restored order along the Trans-Siberian railway, in Ukraine, in the Caucasus and, most notoriously, in the Baltic region. In all perhaps 6,000 people were executed from 1905 to 1907, some 4,600 by court sentence and perhaps 1,400 without trial.21 Even so, the revolutionary terror did not abate. As many as 1,126 government officials were also killed, and another 1,506 wounded, in 1906. These figures more than doubled the following year; non-official casualties were just as gruesome.22 Russia was embroiled in a quasi civil war.

At the same time, state and opposition confronted one another uneasily in the State Duma, the new parliament of the Russian Empire. On 26 April, the less despised Petr Arkadievich Stolypin replaced Durnovo as interior minister and was appointed premier on 8 July, the day before the Duma’s sudden dissolution. During the inter-parliamentary period that followed, which witnessed massive agrarian unrest and mutinies in key naval bases, Stolypin intended to implement a whole raft of reforms, but his notorious first major act (one week after a terrorist attempt on his life which left twenty-seven people dead) was to institute military field courts for trying persons alleged to have committed violent attacks on state officials or institutions. The field courts, which were obliged to pass judgement in no more than two days and to carry out the sentence (usually death) within one day, operated until April 1907, and executed as many as 1,000 alleged terrorists.23

Stolypin is perhaps best known for this official campaign of counter-terror and for his land reforms or ‘wager on the strong’ peasants, but his administration also reformed the security police system. From December 1906 to

20 N. N. Polianskii, Tsarskie voennye sudy v bor’be s revoliutsiei, 1 905 –1 907 gg. (Moscow: Izd. MGU, 1958), p. 33. See also W. C. Fuller, Civil–Military Conflict in Imperial Russia

(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985).

21Saul Usherovich, Smertnye kazni v tsarskoi Rossii: K istorii kaznei po politicheskim protsessam s 1 824 po 1 91 7 god, 2nd edn, intro. M. N. Gernet (Kharkov Izd. politkatorzhan, 1933), pp.

493–4.

22Anna Geifman, Thou Shalt Kill: Revolutionary Terrorism in Russia, 1 894–1 91 7 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), p. 21.

23N. I. Faleev, ‘Shest’ mesiatsev voenno-polevoi iustitsii’, Byloe 2 (February 1907): 43–81.

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January 1907, Stolypin’s proteg´e´ and director of the Police Department, Maksimilian Trusevich, created eight regional security bureaus, each comprising six to twelve provinces and corresponding roughly to the spheres of activity of the Socialist-Revolutionary party. Their directors were the security bureau chiefs in St Petersburg, Moscow, Kharkov, Kiev, Odessa, Vilno, Riga, and the gendarme station chief in Samara. The directors were supposed to co-ordinate and improve the operations and information-gathering of the several gendarme stations and security bureaus within their jurisdictions but also had the right to order arrest and search operations. This angered gendarme station chiefs who were nearly all of higher rank. To alleviate these tensions and improve operations, Trusevich issued numerous directives and manuals on security police methods and organised periodic summit meetings.

The acrimony between government and public was even more bitter in the second Duma than in the first, and on 3 June 1907 the emperor again peremptorily dissolved the assembly. Expecting massive popular disorders, Stolypin ordered administrative and police authorities to preserve public order at any cost.

Overall, however, a spirit of moderation prevailed among senior police officials. A series of directives rebuked lower administrative and police authorities for taking indiscriminate recourse to administrative exile and for insufficiently strict observance of legal procedure. These strictures were directed primarily at provincial gendarme and security chiefs who often found it difficult to penetrate the revolutionaries’ conspiratorial defences. The major security bureaus, by contrast, disposed of well-placed informants permitting them to focus their attention on genuine subversion. This was an extremely important distinction. The police system was able to function within the framework of a legal, constitutional order only in so far as its security police apparatus possessed a reasonably effective intelligence-gathering capability. The efficiency of the security bureaus in the imperial capitals and a few provincial cities permitted them to undermine revolutionary organisations without harassing large numbers of innocent people. Only a really sophisticated police system can distinguish among mere malcontents and genuine subversives.

But perhaps Russia’s security men were too sophisticated. The Social Democrat Osip Ermanskii thought so. In his experience, the security men who employed Zubatov’s tactic often gave wider latitude than did ordinary gendarme officers to revolutionary activists in the hope that they would incriminate themselves further. Yet, asked Ermanskii, ‘who gained more from this policy, the government or the revolutionaries? . . . While the Police Department carefully gathered material and then subjected it to scientific analysis,

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we were permitted to place a mine beneath the very edifice of absolutism and capitalism whose safeguard and perpetuation that clever [police] system had been designed to ensure.’24

Of course, Ermanskii was viewing the system from the point of view of the collapse of the monarchy, an event far from inevitable. Beginning in late 1907 and early 1908, the government gained the upper hand in its struggle against the revolutionaries. One senior official reported in early 1908 that ‘Everywhere revolutionary newspapers bitterly complain about the intensification of the “reaction” and about the indifference of the population to the activity of revolutionaries, and this is a good sign of the return to tranquillity of the country.’25 Indeed, the first issue of a new Socialist-Revolutionary party journal declared in April that ‘The autocracy has re-established itself.’26 Many radical activists remained, but they were driven largely underground, and senior police officials felt sufficiently tranquil over the next two years to return most of the empire to normal law, to issue relatively few death sentences and to seek to prevent excessive use of administrative punishments. The government seemed very much in control, the revolutionaries had been routed and constitutionalism and the rule of law were not entirely jettisoned to accomplish this.

On 7 January 1909, the Socialist-Revolutionary party repudiated one of its most celebrated terrorist leaders, Evno Azef, as a police informant. The perfect ‘double agent’, he had enjoyed the complete trust of both police and party.27 Azef’s exposure discredited both the Socialist-Revolutionary party, which seemed to be swarming with traitors (some two dozen more informants were unmasked over the next four years), and a government that would make use of assassins to fight assassins. Meanwhile, senior police officials, worried that it would become harder to recruit new informants, reassured existing ones that the Police Department had been able to protect Azef for sixteen years but also warned them that all provocation would be punished severely. It seems, in fact, that the recruitment of police informants did not suffer much from the Azef affair: most of the ninety-four informants employed by the St Petersburg security bureau in 1913 – it had never employed a larger number – had been hired during the previous three years.

24O. A. Ermanskii, Iz perezhitogo (1 887 –1 921 ) (Moscow: Gos. izd., 1927), pp. 47–9.

25N. N. Ansimov, ‘Okhrannye otdeleniia i mestnaia vlast’ tsarskoi Rossii v nachale XX v.’,

Sovetskoe gosudarstvo i pravo, 5 (1991): 123.

26Revoliutsionnaia mysl’ 1 (April 1908): 1.

27On the Azef Affair, see Anna Geifman, Entangled in Terror: The Azef Affair and the Russian Revolution (Wilmington, Del.: Scholarly Resources, 2000); L. G. Praisman, Terroristy i revoliutsionery, okhranniki i provokatory (Moscow: Rosspen, 2001).

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The Police Department’s success in devastating the revolutionary organisations did not cause it to become complacent. The Special Section cajoled, provoked, rebuked, encouraged and criticised the directors of both the regional and provincial security bureaus and the gendarme stations with great frequency and vigour. A steady stream of directives urged them to acquire more informants, to study the revolutionary organisations, to train more surveillants, to use conspiratorial methods, to send agents deep into the countryside, to co-operate more effectively, to provide more precise information and to use good judgement before searching suspects. Experienced gendarme officers were sent out to the provinces on inspection tours, a serious training course for gendarme officers was instituted in 1910 and for this purpose Special Section clerks drew up large, multicoloured diagrams of the major revolutionary parties.

The security system was definitely becoming more professional and productive, but its reputation suffered a further blow on 1 September 1911 when an erstwhile police informant, Dmitrii Bogrov, fatally shot Prime Minister Stolypin in Kiev. Public opinion waxed indignant that the security police were still relying on such unsavoury elements as Bogrov, that is, like Azef, a police informant out of control. The reactionary Prince Vladimir Meshcherskii called the security police ‘the most harmful, immoral, and dangerous invention in the Russian bureaucratic system’, a sort of ‘Spanish Inquisition with a slight softening of manners’. Nikolai Gredeskul, a well-known Kadet jurist, admitted that in the face of massive political terror the government had had to adopt secret and underhand methods, but he added that this had led inevitably to the Azef and Bogrov affairs. Since political terrorism had by 1911 come largely to an end, the government, he argued, should put an end to its own covert operations.28 Curiously, the Kadet was more sympathetic to the government’s predicament than was the monarchist. Gredeskul was right: it is essentially impossible to combat a conspiracy without resorting to conspiratorial methods. This was true in the case of both People’s Will and the Socialist-Revolutionary terrorists. But once the latter had been disorganised, was it not possible for the police to renounce such methods as Gredeskul urged? Unfortunately, the Socialist-Revolutionaries never officially repudiated the use of terror, and many Social Democrat leaders continued to lay plans to orchestrate the violent overthrow of the imperial order. Thus, in the interest of state security, the imperial security police continued to deploy secret

28Grazhdanin, 36 (18 September 1911): 15–16; N. A. Gredeskul, Terror i okhrana (St Petersburg: Tip. ‘Obshchestvennaia pol’za’, 1912), pp. 28–9.

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informants among them, and quite successfully: the major revolutionary parties in 1912 were so disorganised that they could not turn much to their benefit the deep popular outrage provoked by the massacre of 172 striking workers in the Lena Goldfields on 4 April 1912.29

Vladimir Fedorovich Dzhunkovskii, appointed deputy interior minister in January 1913, launched a series of reforms of the security police aimed at cutting costs, winning public support for the government and restricting police reliance on informants. In March he prohibited the recruitment of informants in the military, despite a growing perception among senior police officials, expressed at two security conferences in late 1912, that the use of informants should be increased to combat the spread of sedition among enlisted personnel. In May, Dzhunkovskii prohibited deploying informants in secondary schools, which appears to have been an infrequent practice anyway. It might have seemed that he had in mind an all-out assault on the security system, for between May 1913 and February 1914 he abolished most of the provincial and regional security bureaus and transferred their functions to the provincial gendarme chiefs. Although some officials considered the regional bureaus ineffective, senior police officials incessantly criticised most provincial gendarmes, and an authoritative report of December 1912 had attributed the disorganisation of the revolutionary movement to the efficiency of the regional bureaus. In the short term, nevertheless, Dzhunkovskii’s reforms seem not to have gravely weakened the security system, and for two reasons: the security bureaus in the imperial capitals remained strong (although Dzhunkovskii dismissed the very able St Petersburg bureau chief, Mikhail von Koten) and the regional bureaus were not abolished until January 1914 when the revolutionary organisations had already been severely weakened.

The logical response to harsh police repression for many revolutionaries lay in developing legal methods of protest and agitation. The Social Democrats founded Pravda in April 1912 and Luch in September, Bolshevik and Menshevik newspapers, respectively. The police watched them, naturally, seized individual issues and occasionally closed them down, but they repeatedly reopened under different names, a ruse the police were legally powerless to prevent. Pravda, for example, was closed down eight times during its two-year pre-revolutionary existence. The police’s only recourse was to maintain informants within the editorial board. One informant, Miron Chernomazov, edited Pravda from May

29See Robert B. McKean, St Petersburg between the Revolutions: Workers and Revolutionaries, June 1 907 –February 1 91 7 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1990 ), pp. 88–97.

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1913 to February 1914.30 Similarly, the Bolsheviks participated eagerly in the Fourth Duma, elected in late summer and early autumn 1912. One of the six Bolshevik deputies, Roman Malinovskii, by far the most talented and charismatic, was, in fact, a police informant. In May 1914, however, Dzhunkovskii ordered his dismissal. The rumours attending this event stunned the Bolshevik leadership, as Azef’s exposure had disconcerted Socialist-Revolutionary leaders, to the extent that Lenin, still dumfounded, barely reacted to the major political strikes of industrial workers in Petersburg and Moscow in June

1914.31

Historians disagree on whether the incidence of labour unrest between April 1912 and June 1914, greater than during the previous years, proves that the government was unstable. All agree, however, that the declaration of war against Germany on 17 July 1914 at least temporarily put an end to this and other popular unrest in Russia. The maintenance of public tranquillity was facilitated by the immediate imposition throughout the empire of a state of either extraordinary security or martial law, which permitted the suppression of legal newspapers, trade unions and educational societies linked to revolutionary groups.32 The security police also arrested many remaining underground activists and worked to keep Bolsheviks and Mensheviks from uniting. By early 1916 the prospects for revolution seemed to many revolutionary activists very dim.

Yet the imperial system was on the eve of collapse. In September 1916, Aleksandr Protopopov, a favourite of Rasputin and an erratic administrator, became the fifth interior minister in thirteen months. The economic situation, already dismal, worsened throughout 1916. By late November, a court security police report spoke of a ‘food crisis’, and on 5 February 1917 the Petrograd security bureau warned of coming hunger riots that could lead to ‘the most horrible kind of anarchistic revolution’.33 Large-scale strikes took place on 14 February, but efficient crowd control prevented their getting out of hand. On the night of 25 February the Petrograd Security Bureau arrested a hundred radical activists. The bureau’s last report was prepared on the twenty-seventh

30For a detailed study of government policies toward the radical press in this period, see my ‘Pravitel’stvo, pressa i antigosudarstvennaia deiatel’nost’ v Rossii, 1906–1917 gg.’, VI

10 (2001): 25–45.

31On Malinovskii, see Ralph Carter Elwood, Roman Malinovskii: A Life Without a Cause (Newtonville, Mass.: Oriental Research Partners, 1977).

32Daly, ‘Emergency Legislation’, 626.

33Special Section of Court Commandant report, 26 November 1916, GARF, Fond 97, op. 4, d. 117, ll. 93–5; Petrograd security bureau report, 5 February 1917, ibid., ll. 124–124 ob.

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amid a general strike, massive troop mutinies and the formation of the Duma’s Provisional Committee and the Soviet. That evening crowds sacked and burned the security bureau headquarters in Petrograd.34 Although Moscow and much of the rest of the empire temporarily remained calm, this concatenation of events marked the end of the imperial government.

On 4 and 10 March, the Provisional Government abolished the security bureaus, the Police Department and the Gendarme Corps; transferred gendarme officers and enlisted men to the regular army; and dismissed all governors and vice-governors. On 18 March it created a bureau for counterespionage, but against domestic threats to state security the new government left itself nearly defenceless.35 This was because Russia’s new leaders imagined that the collapse of the monarchy would usher in a new form of politics without internal threats to state security. In fact, the dismantling of the imperial police apparatus, as odious as its institutions may have been to many educated Russians, was an invitation to takeover by political conspirators. The imperial security police could not forestall the February Revolution, because it was driven purely by mass discontent; a reasonably sophisticated security police almost certainly could have saved the Provisional Government from the October Bolshevik overthrow, which lacked the sort of mass participation that brought down the imperial dynasty and government in February.

34The most complete study of the February Revolution is Tsuyoshi Hasegawa, The February Revolution: Petrograd, 1 91 7 (Seattle and London: University of Washington Press, 1981).

35Zhurnal zasedanii Vremennogo pravitel’stva, 4, 10 and 18 March 1917, GARF, Fond 1779, op. 2, d. 3, ll. 2, 3 ob., 25, 70.

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