Autocracy Under Siege: Security Police And Opposition In Russia, 1866-1905 0875802435, 9780875802435

Citation preview

A U T O C R A C Y

U N D E R

SI EGE

Jonathan W. Daly

S E C U R I T Y AND IN

P O L I C E

O P P O S I T I O N RUS S I A

1 8 6 6 - 19 0 5

m i

NORTHERN I LLI NOI S U N I V E R S I T Y PRESS

De Kal b

1998

© 1998 by Northern Dlinois University Press Published by the Northern Illinois University Press, DeKalb, Dlinois 60115 Manufactured in the United States using acid-free paper All Rights Reserved Design by Julia Fauci

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publicadon Data Daly, Jonathan W. Autocracy under siege : security police and opposition in Russia, 1866-1905 / Jonathan Daly, p.

cm.

Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index. ISBN 0-87580-243-5 (alk. paper) 1. Secret service—Russia. 2. Police—Russia. 3. Internal security—Russia. I. Title. HV8224.D29 1998 363.2” 3*094709034— dc21

98-25021 CIP

To C arol

Contents

Preface

ix

Introduction

3

1

The Origins of a Modem Security Police in Russia

2

The Security Police System: Personnel and LocalTnstitutions

3

New Security Policing Methods

4

Combating Conspiratorial and Broad-Based Opposition, 1891-1902

5

Zubatov’s Unfinished Reforms, 1902-1904

6

Police and Administration in the Revolution of 1905

Conclusion Notes

181

187

Selected Bibliography Index

249

233

12

49

72

124

154

98

Preface

The Imperial Russian security police played a central role under the last three emperors in the titanic struggle between the regime and those dedicated to the overthrow of monarchical absolutism. From the first terrorist attempt on the life of a Russian emperor in 1866 through the seismic social upheaval of 1905, the steady growth of antigovemment activism and sentiment threatened the continued survival of the regime and compelled it to expand, to improve, and to refine its security police institutions. How the Russian security police developed in response to social and polit­ ical challenges between the era of the Great Reforms and the Revolution of 1905 is the central theme of this book, which not only addresses questions such as the identity, the functions, and the effectiveness of the security police but also is concerned with the nature of the late Imperial Russian government itself. One student of policing has argued convincingly that “the police are to government as the edge is to the knife. The character of government and po­ lice action are virtually indistinguishable. A government is recognized as be­ ing authoritarian if its police are repressive, democratic if its police are re­ strained.”1 In this spirit, I have kept two questions in mind: Did the security police strengthen the Imperial regime and prolong its life by uncovering and thwarting plots and by averting unrest and rebellion through the arrest of radi­ cal instigators? Or did the police weaken it by alienating peaceable subjects of the monarch, driving them into the opposition by an injudicious applica­ tion of repressive force, and thus accelerating its collapse? A third question, posed for reflection but not for resolution, concerns how the conspiratorial nature and arbitrary actions of the Imperial Russian security police may have contributed to the rise to power of similarly inclined revolutionary activists in October 1917. With one exception, scholars did not begin to study the late Imperial Russian security police until the 1980s.2 This neglect is not entirely surpris­ ing. Only in 1989 did the Soviet government declassify 6,900 of the most politically sensitive archival units related to the use of secret informants, the

x

Preface

interception of mail, and other covert activities by the Imperial security po­ lice institutions.3 Understanding the inner workings of those institutions in all their complexity suddenly became possible. Among recent works on the Imperial security police, only the study by Charles A. Ruud and Sergei Stepanov makes use of these and other materials in the Imperial Russian po­ lice archives in Moscow.4 Valuable as it thus is, their book is more narrowly focused than mine, which draws upon a much larger fund of materials and provides a far more comprehensive study of late Imperial Russian security police institutions and operations from 1866 to 1905. In a future volume I hope to continue this study, covering the time from the dawn of Russia’s first constitutional period in 1906 to the collapse of the Imperial government it­ self along with its security police institutions in 1917.

It is a profound pleasure for me to thank the many people whose help and encouragement made possible the completion of this study. Most important, three admirable mentors guided my scholarly development throughout the preparation of this study. Richard Pipes inspired my conception of the project and strongly influenced its progress in the early stages. His intellectual bril­ liance, erudition, and industriousness have ever served as a model to me. Gre­ gory Freeze generously prepared me for my first encounter with the vast archival repositories in Russia and guided my successive research forays until I could stand on my own two feet. His intimate knowledge of the Russian archives and high standards of archival research are inspirational. No budding scholar could hope for a more learned, urbane, and kind senior colleague than James Cracraft. His continuous guidance and camaraderie for the past six years have been greatly instructive and pleasant. Any progress I have made on the path toward a life of scholarship I owe in large part to these three men. For generously reading and commenting on one or more parts or versions of this study, I am indebted to Vladimir Brovkin, William Fuller, John LeDonne, Scott Lyden, Steven Marks, Christine Ruane, James Sack, Theodore Taranovski, and Leonid Trofimov, as well as to Dominic Lieven and Marc Raeff, the manuscript's “anonymous” reviewers. Their advice, criti­ cism, and encouragement permitted me to avoid a huge number of errors and pitfalls and to improve the book’s factual content, style, and interpretation. I naturally bear sole responsibility for all the remaining mistakes and misinter­ pretations. I also wish to thank several Russian colleagues and archivists, including Iurii Ovchenko, Natalia Shatina, Marina Sidorova, and Liubov Tiutiunnik, for kindly sharing with me knowledge of the archives, references, and their own written work. The warm friendship and clever and astonishingly generous as­ sistance of Aleksandr and Galina Sokolov made my numerous stays in Moscow enormously more pleasant and successful than I could ever have hoped them to be.

Preface

xi

My work was greatly facilitated by enthusiastic and highly competent re­ search assistance from Nicole Butz and by the staffs of the Widener and Langdell libraries at Harvard University, the Hoover Institution Library and Archives at Stanford University, the Yale University Archives, the Library of Congress, the libraries of the University of Chicago and the University of Illi­ nois at Chicago, the Lenin Library and the Historical Library in Moscow, the Public Library in St. Petersburg, the Historical Archive of the City of Moscow, and the State Archive of the Russian Federation (GARF) in Moscow. I am deeply indebted to Zinaida Peregudova of GARF who invited me to work in the inner archival sanctum and who placed at my disposal her vast knowledge of both the archives and the Imperial Russian police. A series of research trips to Moscow were made possible by grants from the International Research and Exchanges Board (IREX), with funds provided by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the United States Infor­ mation Agency. Additional research in Moscow was generously funded by the Campus Research Board of the University of Illinois at Chicago. The Kennan Institute of the Smithsonian Institution kindly supported one month’s work at the Library of Congress. I am especially thankful to the Harry Frank Guggen­ heim Foundation for making it possible for me to devote an entire year to writing this book. None of these organizations is responsible for the views ex­ pressed. For their friendly helpfulness and professionalism I would also like to thank Mary Lincoln and the staff at Northern Illinois University Press. Material from my article “On the Significance of Emergency Legislation in Late Imperial Russia,” first published in volume 54 (Fall 1995) of Slavic Review, has been incorporated in Chapter 1 with the permission of the Ameri­ can Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies. To my mother I am grateful for selfless assistance, both material and moral. My debt to my wife, Carol, cannot be adequately expressed. She took time away from her own career to spend four months with me in Moscow and has endured my long years of scholarly exertion with remarkable forbearance and good humor. My one regret is that my father did not live to see even the beginning of this book. He would have been so proud of its completion.

Unless otherwise indicated, all dates appear in Old Style. The Julian Cal­ endar, in use in Russia until February 1918, lagged behind the Gregorian Cal­ endar by twelve days in the nineteenth century and by thirteen days in the twentieth century. Words and most names have been transliterated according to Library of Congress conventions.

A U T O C R A C Y

U N D E R

SI EGE

Introduction

C

entrai and east European governments beginning in the sev­ enteenth and eighteenth centuries viewed it as their chief function to promote the material and spiritual welfare of the societies under their tutelage by max­ imizing all available resources. The administrative philosophy underlying this policy and outlook was called “Cameralism,” and the government pursuing it, a Polizeistaat. It was understood that the interests of the state, seen as the main engine of progress and of “modernization,” were higher than those of any class, estate, or individual. This is largely why the Polizeistaat built up a surveillance apparatus to keep watch over both society and its own bureau­ cracy. The paragon in this regard was the state of Joseph II and Leopold II, which by the 1790s had created a “police ministry and a Hapsburg police sys­ tem more highly centralized than any other in Europe at the time.”1Yet as so­ ciety grew more vibrant, wealthy, and complex, it began to resist government tutelage and to contest the absolutist power of the state. The central and east European Polizeistaat responded by simultaneously strengthening its police apparatus and making concessions to public demand. Even so, serious con­ flicts between state and society inevitably ensued. Nowhere was this more true than in Imperial Russia. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the autocratic Russian govern­ ment provided much of the initiative for carrying forward Peter the Great’s legacy of Europeanization, since Russia lacked those dynamic intermediary bodies that assisted monarchs to modernize the states of central and western Europe. As a result, the entire process of modernization was more repressive and government-driven in Russia than it was further to the west.2 At the same time, the fragile civil condition of Russian society made it easier for the state to maintain untrammeled political absolutism, a state of affairs that in turn further embittered its opponents. As antigovemment groups and movements arose, the Imperial government established institutions for the protection of the state.

4

Autocracy under Siege

In Russia this process began a few months after the Decembrist Uprising of 1825 with the creation of the Third Section. This institution’s main task, carried out with the help of a uniformed military police, or gendarmerie, was to monitor all social and official affairs. Unlike most of its European counter­ parts, the Third Section was not integrated into a multifaceted police and ad­ ministrative system and subordinated to the Interior Ministry. Instead, it stood above all ministries and state institutions and was beholden solely to the monarch himself. While this arrangement may have increased the Third Sec­ tion’s ability to control the bureaucracy, it fostered rivalry among the various police forces, which made it harder for them to defend the government or in­ deed the monarch from the rash of terrorist attacks in the late 1870s. This was a period of intense terrorist activity worldwide, when even the British, despite their abhorrence of “domiciliary visits, spies and all the rest of Fouché’s contrivances,” set up a police institution to combat political ter­ rorism. By the 1890s, the Special Branch answered directly to the Home Sec­ retary, functioned under a dark cloak of secrecy, cooperated regularly with its counterparts on the Continent and in Russia, and operated throughout Great Britain and Ireland. Focusing its attention on both international and Irish ter­ rorists and conspirators, the Special Branch scarcely concerned itself with British political dissidents, much less with society at large.3 This was in sharp contrast to continental European states, whose police forces kept close watch over their respective populations as a consequence of the subordination of all regular police institutions to the business of protecting the state.4 In 1880, following the continental European pattern, the Third Section in Russia was abolished and all police institutions, both those for maintaining public order and those for protecting the state, were subordinated to the Inte­ rior Ministry. In the wake of this reorganization, there emerged elite police in­ stitutions staffed by a small number of highly trained officers who specialized in guarding the security of the state. The first of these security bureaus had been created in St. Petersburg in 1866 following an unsuccessful attempt to assassinate Alexander Ü; in 1880 a second security bureau was established in Moscow. Beginning in 1881, with the assassination of Alexander II by a revo­ lutionary terrorist, both bureaus rose to prominence in the government’s struggle against its opposition, a trend that was particularly notable toward the end of the 1890s, when conspiratorial revolutionary organizations began to emerge in Russia. The participation of regular police forces in nonregular policing raises the question of nomenclature. The business of nonregular police forces has been exercised under a variety of designations, including “secret,” “higher,” “politi­ cal,” and “security.” The label “secret” police is inapplicable to the Russian case, given the relatively important role played by uniformed policemen, es­ pecially gendarmes, in Russia’s counterrevolutionary struggle and in nonreg­ ular policing generally. Elements of the system operated in secret, but the sys­ tem as a whole did not. “Higher” police implies a hierarchy of police forces that would not accurately reflect, for example, the overriding position of

Introduction

5

provincial governors in Imperial Russia’s police and administrative apparatus. The late Imperial Russian police forces engaged in “political” policing— chiefly the supervision or repression of political life in general—but not to as great an extent as in contemporary Germany or France.5 In Russia, far more important than overt political policing was ensuring the security of an em­ peror and state enjoying a monopoly on political power. Political policing, in other words, was one part of the broader mission of Russia’s nonregular po­ lice institutions. The educated public in the west, following occasional usage by the prerev­ olutionary Russian public, has often associated Russia’s nonregular police in­ stitutions with the name Okhrana. Police officials apparently never used this term in this way, even though it was closely related to several of the functions of the nonregular police system. For example, “okhrana” in Russian could mean “protection,” “security,” or “bodyguard,” and indeed one task of the po­ lice forces in question was to protect the life of the monarch. Thus, the em­ peror’s personal bodyguard, instituted in 1866, was named OkhraniteVnaia komanda. Likewise, the security bureaus were called okhrannye otdeleniia. The specialized officers who staffed them sometimes referred to themselves as okhranniki, that is, security officers, and to their work as okhrannoe delo, the security business. The security law of 14 August 1881, adopted in part to help policemen to preserve the state order and public tranquillity, was short­ ened by security policemen to polozhenie ob okhrane. This law, as well as these institutions and officials, all of which were concerned in large part with ensuring the security of the emperor and his officials, constituted, properly speaking, the security police system of late Imperial Russia. Joseph Fouché, Napoleon’s police minister, argued that every police force must function in part as a “police d’observation,” that it must conduct surveil­ lance over society at large.6 Leaving aside the systematic watchfulness of the Inquisition (the French word for an informant, mouchard, derived from An­ toine de Mouchi, an inquisitor under Francis I), western European govern­ ments already by the early nineteenth century had in place elaborate surveil­ lance schemes. To take the most obvious example, in 1811 Napoleon instituted commissaires spéciaux whose official mission was to “keep a close watch over the public mood [l'esprit public], the actions of [political] parties, the country’s borders, all links with foreign countries, and bookstores.” Napoleon, even while in Moscow in 1812, demanded to receive his daily po­ lice report, and Metternich, during his trips abroad, insisted on being in­ formed of all “higher” police matters by his centralized police apparatus.7 In the words of a prefect of Paris under the early Third Republic, “the police must inform the government about everything.” A minister under the Fourth French Republic called this kind of surveillance “a political meteorology ser­ vice,” the principal purpose of which was to furnish statesmen with important information and to help them make decisions.8 Only as a civil society began to mature in Russia did the government at­ tempt systematically to map public opinion and social trends in the empire.

6

Autocracy under Siege

One of the first directives in this regard, issued in 1875, ordered provincial governors and gendarme officers to monitor the conduct of government offi­ cials, as well as priests, to watch out for “teachings that attack the founda­ tions of state, public, and family life/’ and to maintain surveillance over schools, lectures, libraries, and traveling scholars.9 The ability of security po­ lice institutions to collect information about potential crimes and public opin­ ion was directly dependent on the quality of their agents in the field and their methods of surveillance. The only policemen well equipped for this purpose were the small number of security officers, who, especially beginning with the rise of political terrorism in the late 1870s, devoted most of their time to matching wits with conspirators. While the Third Section in the first half of the nineteenth century pos­ sessed no empirewide centralized registration system and fielded few special­ ized agents, Grigorii Sudeikin at the security bureau in St. Petersburg from 1881 to 1883 deployed two types of specialized police agents. These included plainclothes surveillants, who watched conspirators in public places, and se­ cret informants, who reported to the police from within the revolutionary un­ derground. When Sudeikin developed his system of intelligence-gathering, the number of revolutionary activists was minuscule, and their murder of the emperor in 1881 left them without a shred of public sympathy. A decade and a half later, however, the opposition, both relatively overt and highly conspir­ atorial, was far broader and more numerous. It was imperative that the secu­ rity police expand its surveillance capacity and at the same time develop the ability to distinguish between nonviolent opponents of the regime and gen­ uine revolutionaries. Under the leadership of Sergei Zubatov at the security bureau in Moscow from 1886 to 1902, the Imperial security police made valuable strides in both these directions. Zubatov maintained more than one agent in each target organization, em­ ploying each agent’s reports (as well as information from other sources) to corroborate those of other agents. He also strove to isolate each informant in order to reduce the potential damage caused by defections and to prevent in­ formants from comparing notes. Drawing on regular reports from these agents, whose total number was extremely limited, Zubatov pieced together detailed portraits of political suspects and the web of interconnections among them. Above all, Zubatov, himself a former radical activist, practiced methods of secrecy called konspiratsiia. This meant discussing professional matters with no one outside the service, hiding the identity of informants even from one’s superiors, and avoiding routine public appearances. An unintended consequence of Zubatov’s reforms was the wedge driven between gendarme officers and security officers. Gendarme officers seldom used surveillants or informants, for two reasons. First, they lacked adequate funding to recruit them. Second, to gendarme officers, with their sense of mil­ itary dignity and absolute loyalty to one’s comrades, the very idea of infor­ mants, who were by definition two-faced, was abhorrent. Thus blind to the in­ terior life of revolutionary organizations, few gendarme officers were able to

Introduction

7

collaborate with security officers as equal partners in the battle against sedi­ tion. At the same time, they often resented the leadership role adopted by the lower-ranked security officers. These tensions weakened Russia’s security po­ lice system. Zubatov was one of the rare government officials in Russia who attempted to develop and to promote an idealistic, promonarchist political discourse. His zeal, impressive intellect, and eloquence permitted him to recruit secret informants, to win over collaborators who openly defended his teachings in the revolutionary milieu, and to inspire in his subordinates a devotion to the antirevolutionary cause. He naturally controlled revolutionary activists through repression, but, as a partisan of monarchical paternalism, he sought to mediate between factory workers and their employers. He hoped that if he could convince industrial workers of the benevolence of the monarch, the rev­ olutionaries would be left as an officer corps without an army. Similarly, when student disorders broke out in 1899 and 1901, he proposed to single out and to punish the most radical student organizers, while granting greater lib­ erty to the apolitical majority. More than perhaps any other security police­ man, Zubatov advocated making careful distinctions among the diverse oppo­ nents of absolutism, for he recognized that the Imperial government was engaged not only in a struggle against sedition but also in a battle for the hearts and minds of the Russian population. Yet Zubatov was an anomaly in the Imperial security service. His early dabbling in radical activism, his intellectual cast of mind, his immense pow­ ers of persuasion—these were extremely rare qualities in a security officer. The fact that the service was not professionalized, at least until after 1905, helps to explain both how a man like Zubatov could be promoted to his rela­ tively high station and why it was unlikely that it could happen twice.10 It seems that most people rose to senior positions in the security service thanks less to talent than to ambition and a lucky confluence of circumstances, con­ nections, and patronage. In general, the process was unpredictable, and most security policemen in late Imperial Russia were undistinguished figures. This was one of the security service’s greatest flaws. There were three attempts to improve the training of security police per­ sonnel from 1866 to 1905. First, in 1867, gendarme outposts were instituted in every province, and the following year a modest training program for gen­ darme surveillance officers was put in place. It seems to have had little im­ pact. Second, in the late 1890s the Moscow Security Bureau under Zubatov developed a training program for security policemen and their agents. This represented a major turning point in the development of Russia’s security po­ lice system. Third, in 1902 the Moscow bureau, along with its methods and tactics, served as the model for a network of security bureaus throughout the Russian Empire. Yet there were too few skilled security officers to train and to supervise junior officers, who were often left to their own devices. As throughout much of the bureaucracy, the talent and energy of individual offi­ cials often determined the efficacy of institutions.

8

Autocracy under Siege

The difficulties faced by the security police were compounded by the breadth and diversity of social and political opposition at the time. Conspira­ tors exerted an influence disproportionate to their modest numbers. Some practiced political terrorism, first in the late 1870s, then again after 1900. Others sought to organize the masses for rebellion against the existing politi­ cal order. Seeing themselves as crusaders for right and justice, many revolu­ tionary leaders professed to be ready to endure torment and affliction in the name of their cause. A large number were indeed subject to arrest and exile, although the harshest punishments—including imprisonment, exile for more than five years, hard labor, and capital punishment—remained the prerogative of the courts, which tried only a small proportion of political cases from the 1880s to 1905. Even so, the prominent constitutionalist F. I. Rodichev argued eloquently that the Russian government had created a “sort of revolutionary order . . . with its own saints, martyrs, and legends” by repeatedly punishing political activists.11 If conspirators had been the only enemies of the regime, its survival would not have been in doubt. The modernization process in Russia, however, con­ tinuously expanded the number and variety of the regime’s opponents and their sympathizers, gradually making the job of the security police more diffi­ cult. Extremely important in this regard were the constitutionalists. Russia’s rulers thejnselves, especially beginning in the era of the Great Re­ forms in the 1860s, contributed mightily to the development of constitutional­ ism. They encouraged this both by rejecting even the most moderate desires for political participation at the Imperial level and by creating and maintain­ ing institutions through which such desires could become more articulate and insistent, namely, the institutions of local self-government (zemstvos and town dumas) and the independent judiciary. The intransigence of the govern­ ment and its refusal to draw nonrevolutionary oppositional elites into the po­ litical process made them more susceptible to revolutionary rhetoric. “In this context,” according to Laura Engelstein, “radical ideology provided symbolic cohesion where social reality was fragmented and diverse. It served as the lin­ gua franca of the revolution.”12 The security service, which by the late 1890s had learned to hem in the conspirators, was hard put to hinder the activities of left-liberals- and other constitutionalists. The privileged social status and public prominence of these activists often afforded them a kind of immunity from persecution. As A. S. Shapovalov, a worker-tumed-revolutionary, remarked, “[I]n front of welldressed gentlemen, police officials walked on hind legs, offered them a chair, and said Vy’ [the polite form of address].”13 Though administrative officials harassed the liberal activists, notably by prohibiting them from convening meetings, they often failed to enforce the prohibitions. In 1896, for example, Interior Minister I. L. Goremykin forbade zemstvo activists from different provinces to meet together even for purely charitable enterprises. In practice, however, the government turned a blind eye to such meetings on the condi­ tion that they take place in private apartments and that no mention be made of

Introduction

9

them in the press. The semilegal status of the meetings discouraged the more conservative members, leaving only radicals. Thus Goremykin not only failed to prevent the coalescing of zemstvo activists but also radicalized them through his official prohibition.14 The arbitrariness with which officials exercised their authority greatly vexed constitutionalists and other nonrevolutionary opponents of the Imperial Russian regime. Even loyal monarchists such as A. A. Kireev and B. N. Chicherin expressed abhorrence at the individual’s lack of rights before gov­ ernment officials.15 It is not surprising that the security police appeared to many critics of the government as the most egregious offenders in this regard, although in fact the arbitrariness of government in Russia stemmed far less from the nature of the security police system than from the nature of the regime itself and indeed of Russian society as a whole. The causes of administrative arbitrariness in Russia, historians agree, were numerous. First, by modem standards Russia’s bureaucratic apparatus was too small in proportion to the empire’s vast size and large population. For ex­ ample, in 1897 there were just over 100,000 policemen of all kinds and at all levels in Russia as compared to 142,000 policemen in France, a country with three times fewer people and forty times less territory.16 At the same time, Russia’s central administrative authorities failed to control their provincial subordinates with the same rigor as the prefect of police in Paris could con­ trol his agents throughout France.17 The typical Russian practice was rather to devolve power to the local level and to emphasize individuals instead of insti­ tutions. “You do not form a useful ministry by composing an instruction,” wrote Karamzin to Alexander I, “but by preparing good ministers.” To use concepts articulated by Tocqueville, government in Russia was extremely centralized, because legislative power was concentrated in the center. The laws emanating thence provided, however, enormous autonomy for local ad­ ministration. 18 One result of this phenomenon was Imperial Russia’s “emer­ gency” legislation, including a series of decrees in the 1870s and especially the security law of 14 August 1881. Although first adopted to help provincial administrative officials combat terrorist sedition, the legislation was gradually applied to preserve both the existing state order and public tranquillity. Grad­ ually, administrative officials came to see the arbitrary powers thus granted them as essential to maintaining order in their jurisdictions. In sum, adminis­ trative weaknesses helped make the Imperial government more arbitrary. The level of governmental arbitrariness in Russia stemmed also from the nature of late Imperial Russian society. The latter was composed of two worlds—one urban, comprising 10 to 15 percent of the population and gov­ erned by a modem system of laws; the other rural, where peasants, who pos­ sessed a weakly developed sense of individual identity, were subject to tradi­ tional law and other highly stringent patterns of social control.19 Petr Kropotkin lamented that an “everyday [bytovoi] despotism” reigned through­ out Europe in the early nineteenth century but that nowhere “did it blossom so fully as in Russia.” He had in mind the routine despotism of authority figures

10

Autocracy under Siege

and the craven submissiveness of their subordinates in all aspects of social and political life. Against these social traits, he wrote, the law was impotent.20 The confrontation between the urban and rural worlds, especially the per­ ceived necessity to “modernize” the latter, helped to reinforce the despotic tendencies that Kropotkin deplored.21 Indeed, what perhaps distinguished Russia, at least in cultural terms, from the countries of western Europe was the immense gulf that separated the elites from the huge bulk of the popula­ tion. Simply to cite comparative statistical data on levels of literacy may suf­ fice to prove this point. In 1897, 72 percent of the Russian population age ten or older was illiterate, as compared to 48 percent in Italy (1901), 19 percent in Belgium (1900), 17 percent in France (1901), and 12 percent in Prussia ( 1871).22

Finally, government in Russia before 1905 was arbitrary because it was subject to few mechanisms of public control. Public opinion, expressed through the zemstvos and town dumas, a vibrant press, institutions of higher learning, and a variety of voluntary associations, exerted some pressure on government officials, as did the independent judiciary. Yet without an em­ pirewide representative political institution it was impossible for the expand­ ing ranks of the educated to hold the government directly accountable for its actions. If the state’s monopoly on political power in pre-1905 Russia made officialdom more arbitrary, it also delegitimized the government in the eyes of the educated elites afid drove them toward the opposition, both revolutionary and constitutionalist. Even so, the Russian government in this period was not a well-oiled ma­ chine for oppressing political opposition movements but rather a traditional absolutist monarchy with many layers of institutions and authority, which regularly offset and voided one another. The State Council, the Senate, and the independent courts imposed modest limits on the power of the emperor and administrative officialdom. Emperors divided the ministers against each other. Staunch partisans of the Polizeistaat and Rechtstaat models of gover­ nance vied against each other in the bureaucracy. Presumably on such grounds I. G. Shcheglovitov, then an employee of the Justice Ministry, told I. V. Gessen that Interior Minister D. S. Sipiagin, who was assassinated in 1902, “had got what he deserved.”23 As already noted, gendarme officers, and secu­ rity officers often viewed each other as rivals; other police institutions occa­ sionally failed to cooperate as well. Finally, the courts were often unwilling to find guilt in state-crime cases—or at least administrative officialdom assumed that this would be so. Such intrabureaucratic conflict remained a key feature of the late Imperial government. Overall, in the assessment of one historian, the Russian absolutist monarchy was slowly being weakened by “ideological and political conflicts which raged within its chief mainstay, the Imperial civil service.”24 If the administrative weaknesses of the Imperial government undermined it from within while promoting antigovemment sentiment from without, they also made it relatively easy for committed revolutionaries to operate. Because

Introduction

11

individual officials enjoyed wide latitude for decision making, and because they often differed greatly in outlook, political convictions, and degree of ad­ vocacy of the rule of law, the government continuously vacillated between severity and leniency. For the most part, one is struck rather by the porous­ ness of the system of repression and the leeway enjoyed by opponents of the government than by the harshness of repression meted out to them. Moreover, before 1905 most administrative officials apparently felt no more personal or class animosity toward the revolutionaries, in the words of the Menshevik V. K. Ikov, “than did tax collectors.”25 Finally, as the Imperial Russian security police grew in professional sophistication they devoted more energy to obser­ vation than to repression. And even as the police watched over them, radicals and revolutionaries often remained at liberty for long periods of time. The security police were even more impotent in the face of mass popular movements and unrest. Eruptions of popular discontent were difficult to an­ ticipate and suppressing them often required military intervention. Nor could the service readily hinder the multitude of young people who agitated among the peasantry and industrial workers, distributing inexpensive, legal publica­ tions. Little could be done, beyond warning local officials to watch out for seditious literature, to staunch that rising tide. From the point of view of the relatively small number of revolutionary activists, of course, the state and its security police system seemed a truly formidable adversary. It is therefore not surprising that they sought to goad the bulk of the population to join them in opposing the regime, or at least hoped to use any elemental bursts of popular fury to that end. The relatively small Imperial Russian security police might have seemed no match for the constitutionalist, revolutionary, and broad-based opposition movements that arose and expanded throughout the second half of the nine­ teenth century. Even so, while it could not reasonably be expected to fend off social upheavals, as the threats to the established order multiplied in the final quarter of the century, the security service grew in professional sophistication and managed to hold the most vehement members of the opposition largely at bay.

C H A P T E R

O N E

The Origins of a Modern Security Police in Russia

The Security Police u n d er Nicholas 1 r n 3 July 1826 Nicholas I created the Third Section of His Im­ perial Majesty’s Own Chancellery, perhaps under the influence of a plan for a system of “higher police” drafted by P. I. Pestel’, a leader of the Decembrist conspiracy. The Third Section was a far more modest institution than Pestel’ had proposed to create. While Pestel’ had proposed a fifty-thousand-man gendarme corps, the Third Section made do with sixteen officials, and the Continental-style gendarmerie, instituted on 28 April 1827 as its eyes and ears, employed only four thousand military personnel. The Third Section’s work included overseeing the use of administrative exile, keeping watch over people on police probation (nadzor), preventing the forgery of Russian cur­ rency, and conducting investigations into the activities of religious sects. The institution’s most important task was a broad one: the preservation of state security. The major activities in this connection included censorship, sound­ ing out the public mood, and thwarting crimes against the state.1 Since such crimes were quite rare until the 1860s, the Third Section in its early years de­ voted little effort to combating them. In this respect it differed markedly from the security police of either Napoleonic or Restoration France. Napoleon es­ tablished at least six politically oriented police forces (the Préfecture of Paris being the most important) and encouraged them to watch each other— because he trusted none of them—while under the early Restoration at least nine networks of spies, employed by members of the royal family and other court intriguers, reported on the officer corps, high society, and each other. An equal number of such forces and networks operated in Paris under the Second Empire.2 Nicholas I, who faced little genuine opposition, could make do with one, relatively small security service. During the first two decades of its existence, Nicholas’s security police

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were not unpopular. Gendarme officers clad in easily recognizable, elegant aquamarine uniforms with white straps and gloves often displayed great cour­ tesy and earnestly attempted to “right wrongs” throughout the empire. This was as Nicholas I, who personally oversaw their work, had intended them to operate. In a widely reported, though probably apocryphal, story, Count A. Kh. Benckendorff, the first director of the Third Section, asked the emperor to define the tasks of his institution. Nicholas allegedly replied by giving him a handkerchief. “With this,” he said, “you will wipe away the tears of the sor­ rowful.” Without a doubt, Benckendorff and other senior officials of the Third Section viewed their job in this paternalistic light.3 The Third Section and the Gendarme Corps enjoyed wide powers to inter­ fere in the affairs of all government institutions and conducted surprise in­ spections across the empire. In this important sphere of their activity, they re­ sembled less security police institutions than an elite superbureaucracy (reminiscent of the procuracy under Catherine II), which, in the absence of a free press and democratic accountability, checked and controlled government institutions, including Russia’s embassies and legations in foreign countries. The Third Section’s report on the state of the bureaucracy for 1829, for exam­ ple, included some scathing criticism of ministries and even ministers. Little wonder, then, that each year several thousand subjects of the crown petitioned the Third Section to exercise on their behalf its special authority to cut through bureaucratic red tape.4 The petitioners were exploiting the police in­ stitution to advance their personal causes, thus further averting it from its function of bureaucratic oversight, which already had little to do with state security. It is not really surprising, therefore, that the image of the Third Sec­ tion’s agents in the field, the gendarmes, was quite positive. At the end of the Inspector General (1836) by N. V. Gogol’, for example, the gendarme who announces the arrival of the true inspector appears as a symbol of justice. Nicholas’s police also gathered information on high society, the educated, and cultural life in general using covert methods. In this capacity of informa­ tion-gathering, special postal clerks intercepted personal correspondence (it was a practice common to many European governments). Until the 1870s, however, the Third Section did not even employ permanent secret informants, that is, agents who penetrated target organizations in order to report on them. Although their number grew over time, at any given moment during the sec­ ond quarter of the century only one or two dozen people reported on an irreg­ ular basis to the Third Section as informants. Some were officials, others were society women, writers, journalists, and well-connected nobles. Much of the information they furnished was hearsay and gossip. Some agents did not hide the fact that they reported to the police. By contrast, fifty to sixty full-time, well-paid informants worked for the Paris Prefecture in the 1820s. Also important, the Russian gendarmes, although closely tied to the Third Section, exercised mostly regular-police functions; the French gendarmerie, while technically nonpolitical, was in fact “deeply involved” with security policing both before and after the Second Empire.5

14

Autocracy under Siege

The Third Section failed for decades to develop a network of informants in part because the institution’s highest officials were well-bred scions of noble families whose upbringing caused most of them to rebel against the very idea of covert methods. The institution itself was scarcely cloaked in secrecy. The director of the Third Section customarily greeted Russian people of note ar­ riving in St. Petersburg, who were expected to present themselves to him (much as travelers today are urged to check in with their embassy while abroad).6 Moreover, several significant literary figures, including S. N. Glinka, F. V. Bulgarin, and F. I. Tiutchev, helped to monitor the printed word as official censors. The Third Section, for its part, treated Russia’s literati with care, so as to preserve their trust.7 Nicholas’s security service employed a system of internal passports (as did the police in France or the Austrian Empire, the most centralized in Europe). First instituted by Peter I, the system fixed all Russians to their place of resi­ dence and forbade any movement from it without a passport. Both while trav­ eling and upon arrival in a new locality for either business or pleasure, one presented the passport to police authorities. The Statute on Passports and Fugitives (Ustav o pasportakh i beglykh) of 1845 systematized but did not significantly alter the system, which was softened only in the 1890s. The lack of photographs in the passports, however, diminished their value as a tool of police detection.8 As mentioned above, defending the regime against seditious activity was relatively easy during the first half of Nicholas’s reign. Aside from the Polish rebellion of 1830-1831, the period from 1826 to 1840 witnessed almost no incidents of opposition to Imperial rule. Most important, many of the intelli­ gentsia were preoccupied with literary and philosophical issues, and few en­ gaged in open challenges to the regime, which appeared altogether unassail­ able. The execution of five Decembrists and the exile to Siberia of over one hundred more in 1826 likely diverted many from the path of active opposi­ tion. In this context, the gendarmes largely acted as local civil police, while the Third Section’s small staff devoted most of their attention to censorship and to reporting on broad social and even diplomatic issues. Its yearly reports in the 1830s and 1840s made foreign and domestic policy assessments and recommendations, including the advocacy of greater religious, toleration (1837), of railroad construction (1838), of the abolition of serfdom (1839), and of the promotion of public health (1841).9 In the 1840s, however, the close association between the government and the educated public in Russia began to break down, at least in the Imperial cap­ itals. During Nicholas I’s reign, higher education expanded apace, and the pe­ riod from 1838 to 1855 witnessed a “virtual journalistic explosion.” Educated Russians were also more exposed to European influences than ever before, at a time when Europeans’ assessments of Imperial Russia in general and of Nicholas’s government in particular had reached their nadir. In the face of these changes, Nicholas’s government attempted to maintain its traditional control

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over society, which, because it was growing more self-assertive, began to con­ sider the traditional controls oppressive. Since the politically concerned public was still comparatively small and the number of people actively opposed to the regime was minuscule, such a policy of social control remained feasible.10 It is well known that a few intellectuals were punished in Nicholaevan Russia for expressing views critical of the regime. Alexander Herzen, for ex­ ample, spent the years from 1835 to 1839 and from 1841 to 1842 in internal exile for having committed what amounted to minor political indiscretions. During these years he was employed as a civil servant, for the most part in the towns of Viatka, Vladimir, and Novgorod. These localities were not St. Petersburg, of course, but they were not Siberia either. Appointed head of a department of the Novgorod town administration in 1841, he was responsi­ ble for verifying the quarterly reports on all persons under police supervi­ sion, including himself. The authority that he enjoyed as an exile prompted an unspecified German to argue in print that Herzen could not have actually been in exile. Herzen himself accounted for the anomaly by pointing to Im­ perial Russia’s “two or three mutually hostile police [institutions].” He un­ doubtedly had in mind the Third Section, the Interior Ministry, and the provincial and city governors. One must agree with Herzen that a lack of co­ ordination among the police, administrative, and judicial authorities of Rus­ sia diminished the repressiveness of the government and thus gave political dissidents greater latitude for action. There was also nothing brutal about the gendarmes’ treatment of dissidents such as Herzen. Many of them found gendarme officers to be “gentlemen.” 11 Political dissidents could be punished either administratively, as in the case of Herzen, or by court sentence. Judicial punishments were somewhat softened by the penal code of 1845, whose drafters had drawn inspiration from the host of such codes adopted in the 1830s in various European coun­ tries. The Russian code introduced a prohibition on membership in certain kinds of secret societies and expanded the range of crimes against the sover­ eign and the state. Among the latter were six capital offenses, the only ones extant in Russia. Most western European penal codes at this time included a much broader range of capital crimes; many also prescribed the death penalty for grave political offenses. The Russian code prescribed not death, as was the case for most of western Europe, but penal exile and hard labor (katorga) for murder and other grave crimes, including many crimes against the state. It is in this sense that the English diplomat and writer A. F. Heard deemed the Russian penal code “one of the mildest in Europe.” From 1845 through 1875, Imperial Russia’s regular courts issued fifty death sentences, only fifteen of which were carried out. Many of those condemned to death had taken part in armed uprisings; twenty-one had been members of the Petrashevskii Circle.12 The harsh treatment of the Petrashevtsy, some of whose members advo­ cated conspiracy and revolution but none of whom had actually engaged in revolutionary violence, may have been a consequence of the February 1848

16

Autocracy under Siege

revolution in Paris. Terribly frightened by the overthrow of a monarchy, whose repetition in other countries he was right to fear, Nicholas I ordered the Third Section to tighten censorship and surveillance over the population and to seal off the country against foreign influences. The increased vigilance led to the arrest of several members of the Petrashevskii Circle on the night of 21 April 1848. Fedor Dostoevsky and fifteen others were condemned to death, reprieved before the firing squad, and exiled to Siberia. According to the writer and censor A. V. Nikitenko, “dread seized every thinking and writ­ ing person.” In his diary entry of 25 April 1848 he wrote, “Secret denuncia­ tions and spying further complicated the matter. People began to fear for each day of their existence, thinking that it might be their last among their loved ones and friends.”13 The Third Section was beginning to inspire dread, but it still was not an ef­ ficient security police institution. It had little experience in combating politi­ cal crime, which remained a rare phenomenon before the 1860s. Justice Min­ ister D. M. Zamiatnin, for example, began only in 1861 to keep a separate list of state crimes.14 One might also cite the case of Nikolai Chernyshevskii, the radical publicist. He spent the years between 1851 and 1853 in Saratov teach­ ing at a high school that, because of his radical attitudes and teaching style, was placed under close surveillance as an “unreliable educational establish­ ment.” Chemyshevskii went on to become the most important radical publi­ cist and thinker in St. Petersburg. The police finally arrested him in June 1862, and even then only on the basis of fabricated evidence. While in prison, Chemyshevskii composed and arranged to publish What Is to Be Done (1863).15 That novel subsequently exerted a greater influence on one or two generations of revolutionaries than any other single book in the second half of the nineteenth century. Such unevenness of repression was typical of the gov­ ernment: though it incarcerated a man who advocated violent revolution, it permitted him a forum from which to broadcast his call to revolt. This system of security policing was inefficient, to say the least. To strengthen that system, on 18 May 1862 a special investigating com­ mission was created. The commission stood above the ministries and the Third Section at one remove from the emperor. Its task, broadened in Septem­ ber 1862 and continuing until its dissolution in 1871, was to “take the harsh­ est and most decisive measures to avert and frustrate harmful and dangerous intentions and actions of [political] criminals.” It became, in other words, the head of the security police system.16 Yet the heart of the system, the Third Section, remained amateurish. It was generally well informed about the pri­ vate social gatherings of the social elites, thanks to the informal reports of participants. It could also make incisive assessments of the public mood, as when in early 1855 it warned of war weariness within the population and urged bringing the war to a close. Yet as a security service it exuded a “provincial-gossipy quality,” in the uncharitable but essentially accurate words of a Soviet literary critic.17 So it remained until the 1880s, when the se­ curity police began to undergo important changes in connection with the era

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of “counterreform.” In the meantime, however, Nicholas I’s successor took significant steps toward making Imperial Russia a semiconstitutional polity, while some educated elites began to demand greater political changes from the emperor than he was willing to permit.

Great Reforms and Political Opposition When Alexander II instituted an independent judiciary on 20 November 1864, he essentially posed a mighty impediment to his own absolutist govern­ ment. The judicial reform restricted arbitrary arrest, established strict criminal procedure, and placed the investigation of all crimes firmly under the supervi­ sion of prosecutors, agents of the Justice Ministry. State crimes were handled in much the same manner as regular crimes, but in the regional judicial tri­ bunals (sudebnye palaty) instead of the circuit courts (okruzhnye sudy) and without juries. This was a far cry from the old system, where the police car­ ried out all investigations, the results of which the courts rarely contested. The new system also ended the Third Section’s role as a judicial arbiter, which, given its arbitrary nature, must have pleased partisans of the rule of law.18 One may argue that Alexander’s reform placed Russia firmly on the road toward the rule of law—meaning, among other things, “the absolute su­ premacy or predominance of regular law as opposed to the influence of arbi­ trary power, . . . or even of wide discretionary authority on the part of the government.”19 Indeed, although the fundamental laws of the Russian Empire specified that all law must emanate from the sovereign, the independent judi­ ciary in fact exercised the power to interpret the laws of Russia. The result, according to Marc Szeftel, was a system that followed the “best norms of western European jurisprudence and court practice.” A similar separation of administrative and police authority from judicial authority was adopted in Prussia only much later. In the words of Richard Wortman, “For the Russian autocracy to accept an independent judiciary required that it betray its essence and cease to be the Russian autocracy.” And as the celebrated trial lawyer N. P. Karabchevskii admitted, “[A] free, self-administered bar under an autocrato-bureaucratic order . . . is a great anomaly.”20 After 20 November 1864 Russia ceased to be an autocracy, that is, an absolutist monarchy, in the full sense of the word. The emperor expected this sacrifice of a part of his sovereign authority, coupled with the other Great Reforms, to carry Russia further along the path toward Europeanization and to win him popularity among the educated pub­ lic. Instead, it provided the latter with a further means to question the right of the autocrat to rule autocratically. According to Wortman, the judicial reform essentially “split the Russian polity into mutually antagonistic and uncompro­ mising parts,” namely, the administration and the judiciary. The head of the Third Section’s political section (Sekretnaia ekspeditsiia), K. F. Filippeus, called the judicial statutes of 1864 “not reforms but revolutionary acts.” The major problem, according to V. I. Gurko, stemmed from the tendency of

18

Autocracy under Siege

jurists to view themselves not as government officials but as spokesmen of the “public conscience.”21 This may have been inevitable so long as the public conscience lacked another official mouthpiece, such as a representative as­ sembly. In any event, administrative Russia coexisted uneasily with an independent judiciary, an autonomous bar, and powerfiil public prosecutors. The authority of the governors was severely weakened by the judicial reform. The simulta­ neous rise of revolutionary terrorism, the acquittal by juries of defendants clearly guilty of criminal attacks against government officials (primarily in the 1870s), and the impossibility of removing liberal judges provided the jus­ tification for selectively abrogating the rights of Russian subjects and re­ asserting the powers of officialdom.22 Frustrated with the difficulties of func­ tioning within the boundaries of the new system, the government adopted a series of emergency laws that reconferred on administrative officials many of the arbitrary powers they had traditionally wielded and diminished the civil guarantees established by the 1864 judicial reform.23 In adopting such emergency legislation, the Imperial government appears to have been treading the path laid out by its western European counterparts. Historically, absolutist governments did not adopt comprehensive emergency legislation, since their “normal” laws were already sufficiently arbitrary and severe.24 But as the power of European monarchs began to be limited, whether voluntarily or under duress, constitutional restraints instituted for the protection of citizens occasionally made it harder for governments to defend themselves against forces threatening their very existence. Prudence then oc­ casionally dictated the temporary suspension of constitutional restraints. Such suspensions were a hallmark of transitions from absolutist to constitutional rule—from the early modem Polizeistaat, or rationalized absolutism, to the rule of law. Effecting this transition was rarely a smooth process, and progress was often accompanied by political and constitutional backsliding, but had there been no judicial reform, then the need for partially—and temporarily—rolling back that reform would not have been perceived. In this sense it may be said that the Imperial Russian government’s enactment of emergency legislation in the 1860s and especially in the 1870s bore witness to Russia’s great strides toward the rale of law. The terrorist conspiracies in the 1860s and 1870s in large measure prompted the Imperial government to reinvest in administrative officials some of the power stripped from them by the judicial reform. An attempt on 4 April 1866 on the life of the emperor by D. V. Karakozov, who acted alone but be­ longed to a small underground revolutionary group called “Hell,” brought the European phenomenon of political terrorism to Russia. Nine days later, an at­ tempt was made on Bismarck’s life by a terrorist with alleged Russian ties. The invention of dynamite in 1867 overnight provided every violent radical with the means to terrorize any society. Across Europe and the Americas, the press cre­ ated alarming images of imminent catastrophe: a volcano of discontent boiling beneath the city streets, a fuse and a lighted match, a spark and a tinderbox.25

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Karakozov's pistol shot catapulted conservatives, including Dmitrii Tol­ stoi, into senior positions in government, raised the level of police repression, and prompted the government to strengthen its institutions of criminal detec­ tion. On 10 April 1866 the vigorous Count P. A. Shuvalov, a descendant of an ancient noble clan who had spent his youth in the Winter Palace, was named director of the Third Section and of die Gendarme Corps. A de facto prime minister (the poet F. I. Tiutchev dubbed him “Peter IV”), Shuvalov moved to reassert the authority of administrative officials and to revamp the police sys­ tem. As if the assassination attempt were not sufficiently menacing, however, in June a cholera epidemic broke out in St. Petersburg, accompanied by a rash of fires there and in other cities. Since the last such epidemic, in 1848, had been attended by serious popular unrest, Shuvalov had reason for concern. Still worse, the city had seen an explosion of regular crime in the previous few years.26 To confront these problems, a number of concrete steps were taken. First, in mid-April F. F. Trepov was appointed St. Petersburg city governor. He quickly instituted three police forces under the city governor's auspices. In late April he created a forty-man security force (okhranitel’naia komanda) to protect the emperor during state visits. This force grew in size and subsisted until the fall of the monarchy. Then, beginning in early May he set up special bureaus for security policing (Okhrannoe otdelenie) and regular criminal in­ vestigation (Sysknoe otdelenie). The creation of these institutions indicated that Russia's rulers wished to develop sophisticated methods of crime detec­ tion, which were still in their infancy in western Europe. Although at the time the government appears to have intended earnestly to combat both grave reg­ ular and political crime, the robust development of political crime over the next several decades caused the lion’s share of the 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. On 22 July 1866 governors were empowered to close any public meeting, club, or cooperative association (artel’) that they deemed a threat to state order or public security and moral­ ity. Governors were at the same time given the authority to approve all candi­ dates for employment throughout the provincial bureaucracy, including the zemstvos (but not officials elected to the zemstvos). The decree of 22 July constituted the first major infringement of the rights enshrined in the Great Reforms. Next, the range of activity defined as a crime against the state was expanded by a law of 27 March 1867. The penal code of 1845, as noted above, had criminalized membership in some secret societies. Since it had of­ ten been procedurally difficult to enforce the ban, especially after the promul­ gation of the judicial statutes of 1864, the new law defined membership in any secret society as a criminal act.27 Shuvalov furthermore reorganized the Gendarme Corps. A statute of 9 September 1867 replaced the dozen regional gendarme jurisdictions with sixty provincial gendarme stations (zhandarmskie upravleniia), attaching to each one special surveillance personnel (dopolniteVnyi shtat)—one officer

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Autocracy under Siege

per province and two noncommissioned officers per district. The statute also increased the staff of the Gendarme Corps’s command center, the Gendarme Directorate, to twelve gendarme officers and twenty-three clerks. Although the gendarmes’ chief tasks were defined in the statute as sounding out the popular mood and interdicting the propagation of subversive ideas, as before they did not act primarily as security policemen. They in fact remained mili­ tary policemen with their cumbersome swords. The Gendarme Corps itself as newly constituted was not, strictly speaking, a security police institution. Of the directorate’s six departments, only the fifth was directly involved with se­ curity policing. The vast majority of gendarmes simply maintained order along the railroads, in ports and fortresses, in a few major cities, and in the countryside. One year later, in September 1868, a network of twenty-eight “observation posts” (nabliudateVnye punkty) was created in fourteen provinces. Gendarmes operating out of them were expected to attend and to report on sessions of the rural courts and assemblies.28 The extension of police powers, which was meant to strengthen the gov­ ernment, undermined its prestige in the eyes even of some monarchists. In May 1866, one month after Karakozov’s failed attempt at regicide, K. D. Kavelin, the well-known liberal monarchist, submitted a critique of govern­ ment repression to the emperor by the intermediary of War Minister D. A. Miliutin. He described nihilism—the revolutionary materialism of D. I. Pis­ arev, Chemyshevskii, and others—as an alien phenomenon in Russia but ar­ gued that government policies had favored its development. Among the poli­ cies that he cited were restrictive university admissions, overly strict police measures leading to the formation of a large community of disaffected young people living abroad, and censorship laws that prevented the open discussion of religious, philosophical, and political issues. The restriction of university admissions resulted, according to Kavelin, in an artificially high number of young people applying to study medicine where they imbibed an ideology of materialism. Kavelin asserted that nihilism had been weakened by the Great Reforms of Alexander H, including the emancipation of the serfs, the loosen­ ing of censorship laws, and the creation of the zemstvos. He admitted that po­ lice measures would have to be used against conspiracies and other concrete illegal activities but not against ideas. On the contrary, an open discussion of radical ideas could not fail to weaken their grip on people’s minds. In a simi­ lar vein, Nikitenko asserted in a diary entry for 12 June 1867, “[OJur most dangerous internal enemies are not the Poles and not the Nihilists, but those statesmen who create Nihilists by provoking indignation and aversion to the regime, those who close zemstvos and undermine the courts.”29 Although no government officials were yet closing zemstvos or undermining the courts in any systematic way in 1867, the point made by Kavelin and Nikitenko was essentially that administrative repression and arbitrariness were promoting the development of the seditious ideas and activities that the security service was constituted to combat. One may legitimately ask which side overreacted more. In 1869, before

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the onset of anything like systematic antirevolutionary repression, Mikhail Bakunin and Sergei Nechaev wrote and published their “Revolutionary Cate­ chism.” This was an apocalyptic handbook for revolutionary conspiratordesperados. It proclaimed, “All our organization, all our conspiracy, all our purpose consists in this: to regroup this world of brigands into an invincible and omnidestructive force.” By “brigands” was meant “typically” Russian malcontents who had led rebellions since the time of Stepan Razin and Emelian Pugachev. Consumed with delusions of staging a vast international conspiracy, Nechaev produced only a farce with a tragic denouement. His People’s Revenge group, which advocated the thorough destruction of the es­ tablished social and political order and the physical annihilation of govern­ ment officials (security policemen, he wrote, should be killed in the “most ag­ onizing way”), attracted a number of young people, four of whom he persuaded in November 1869 to murder a fifth as an alleged traitor to the or­ ganization (an event that inspired Dostoevsky’s Possessed).30 The police arrested 152 Nechaev “conspirators.” The St. Petersburg Judi­ cial Tribunal, applying the new judicial statutes for the first time to a political case, tried 87 of them in 1871. By transforming themselves into accusers of the government, however, the defendants won the sympathy of the jury, the judge, and the broader public. Most of the defendants avoided conviction, but they subsequently were administratively exiled.31 The Nechaev case, which included both political and regular criminal ele­ ments, highlighted tensions between police and judicial authorities. The judi­ cial reform had given prosecutors the exclusive right to investigate crimes, but the above-mentioned special investigating commission had continued to investigate state crimes, as had the Third Section. To address this problem, at the instigation of Count Shuvalov, a law of 19 May 1871 abolished the inves­ tigating commission and made gendarmes the primary investigators of statecrime cases. This addition to the gendarmes’ responsibilities constituted an encroachment on the judicial sphere. Yet gendarme investigations were al­ ways conducted under the direction of prosecutors, who, being better trained and more procedurally minded than the gendarmes, tended to dominate them. The result was a definite compromise between the Third Section and the Jus­ tice Ministry.32 A second element of this compromise was a mechanism for bypassing the courts in state-crime cases. Henceforth, the justice minister analyzed the re­ sults of each gendarme investigation and, in consultation with the director of the Third Section, either sent the case to a court investigator or, with the em­ peror’s permission, dropped it. The law authorized the justice minister to pro­ pose to the emperor, again in consultation with the director of the Third Sec­ tion, to apply exile, probation, and fines by administrative fiat to state-crime suspects, the investigation of whose cases was thus halted. As one historian has written, this provision of the law of 19 May 1871 permitted the Russian government to deal administratively with the majority of state-crime cases until the law was rescinded in 1904. From 1872 to 1877, for example, while

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Autocracy under Siege

the courts tried 140 state-crime cases and convicted only 100 people, 5,129 such cases were handled administratively.33 The exoneration of many Nechaev conspirators led to the adoption on 7 June 1872 of a law requiring the Senate in St. Petersburg to try all but the least important state-crime cases and to try them behind closed doors. A flood of such cases soon required the conveyance of hundreds of young radicals to St. Petersburg for the trials of the century. (This policy proved too costly and was rescinded on 9 May 1878.) Shuvalov, who between 1870 and 1874 at­ tempted to create a system of political representation, was unprepared for this next wave of radicalism. Unlike the organizations of Karakozov and Nechaev, the new radical movement was predominantly nonviolent.34 In spring and summer 1874, thousands of very young idealists, dressed as peasants and some even trained in rustic craft and skills, set out to the coun­ tryside to bring light to, and to learn from, the peasantry. They fanned out across thirty-seven provinces, but most concentrated in the southern regions where Razin and Pugachev had once led their storied rebellions. Some pro­ vided services in the villages as agronomists, teachers, and medical person­ nel, but most worked as common laborers. Russian educated youths had “gone to the people.” The police arrested several hundred of them by late June and roughly 1600 by the end of 1874—mostly on charges of member­ ship in a secret society. A young gendarme officer, V. D. Novitskii, personally interrogated every prisoner and wrote a justification for detaining each one. This task required him to work through two railroad cars full of documents, most of which were poorly drafted by provincial gendarme officers. Overall, 265 suspects were detained for three years, in extremely harsh conditions, pending trial (the famous trial of the “ 193” from October 1877 to January 1879).35 Public sympathy went out to them. Even the Moscow Gendarme Sta­ tion chief expressed indignation at their treatment, which was not surprising, since, according to Vera Figner, most policemen at that time remained very paternalistic.36 Far from blackening the reputation of the Populists, the trials ennobled them in the public eye. Those who remained committed to political opposition went either “underground” or into emigration. The emperor had come to dislike the powerful Shuvalov and his proconsti­ tutionalist inclinations. Shuvalov’s failure to stop the “going to the people” movement gave Alexander a pretext to dismiss him as director of the Third Section and the Gendarme Corps. (The emperor appointed him ambassador to Great Britain, saying, “You prefer it in London, don’t you?”) His successor, A. L. Potapov, broadened the scope of security police activity. First, a law of 4 July 1874 authorized gendarmes and police to imprison people suspected of membership in secret societies; the law specified no maximum period of de­ tention. Second, a directive of 14 February 1875 redefined for contemporary conditions the gendarmes’ traditional duty to conduct “thorough surveil­ lance.” The gravest danger, according to the directive, lay in teachings that weakened the foundations of state, public, and family life. To prevent their propagation, gendarmes were to watch schools, public lectures, and popular

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readings; the book trade and book repositories; and people traveling on schol­ arly business. The gendarmes were also ordered to continue to seek to under­ stand the reasons for public discontent with the government. Phenomena li­ able to disturb public tranquillity, such as natural disasters and official malfeasance (even by clergymen), should be reported immediately to the proper authorities. Although Alexander II in 1876 considered abolishing the Third Section, which he deemed inefficient, the government did not endeavor to reform it at this time.37 The experience of “going to the people” divided the radical youth. Most of those who chose to work in villages for extended periods learned to act in­ conspicuously in order to avoid attracting the attention of the rural police. (Most gendarmes eschewed the remoter parts of their jurisdictions.) Such dis­ cretion often ensured the rural propagandists’ safety, and gradually some of the Populists won the peasants’ trust. Others grew weary of the toil—and, ac­ cording to Lev Deich, the “ugly women”—in the backwaters of Russia. They resolved to devote themselves to political terrorism in the hope of igniting a social conflagration.38 The first of these terrorist-conspirators, calling themselves Land and Free­ dom, began in 1877 to carry out acts of violence against senior officials, in the context of the trials mentioned above. Their terrorist program received its strongest impulse from Vera Zasulich’s attempt on the life of St. Petersburg city governor F. F. Trepov on 24 January 1878—an act apparently motivated by personal considerations. Simultaneously, revolutionary activists grew more violent, as when, six days later, a group led by I. M. Koval’skii fiercely re­ sisted arrest, leaving several gendarmes and policemen wounded. Zasulich was tried by a jury as a regular criminal and, although she had openly con­ fessed to the crime, was acquitted on 31 March. This verdict convinced the emperor and his advisors that the courts were operating not merely indepen­ dently of the executive branch of government but also in a hostile manner to­ ward it. The government, therefore, adopted a law on 9 May 1878 depriving people accused of committing attacks on government officials of the right to a jury trial.39 Political cases were also tried more and more often by military courts. Ko­ val’skii, for example, was sentenced to death by a military court—the first death sentence pronounced in Russia since Karakozov’s in 1866—and was executed on 2 August 1878. Two days later S. M. Kravchinskii murdered the director of the Third Section and the Gendarme Corps, N. V. Mezentsev. The government appealed to the public for support in combating the terrorist men­ ace on 20 August, but first, and most important, it undertook retaliatory mea­ sures. On 8 August it recommended that most administrative political exiles be sent to eastern Siberia, and on 9 August it endorsed the systematic transfer of cases involving violent attacks on government officials to military courts, which, although governed by strict legal procedure, were more expeditious than the regular courts. The liberal publicist N. I. Faleev called the decree of 9 August the “cornerstone of future security measures.”40

24

Autocracy under Siege

There were three such cornerstones. The other two were the abovementioned law of 29 May 1871 and an unpublished Imperial act of 1 Septem­ ber 1878. This latter document authorized gendarmes, or police officials in their absence, to verify the “political reliability” (politicheskaia blagonadezhnost*) of any person and to propose the administrative exile of the “unreli­ able.” The decision rested with the director of the Third Section in consulta­ tion with the interior minister. The decree also provided for the detention of anyone suspected of having committed a political crime or having partici­ pated in a political demonstration or disorder. No period of exile or detention was unspecified. A further directive, issued on 25 September, urged gendarme officers to use this new authority with great care, so as to avoid “turning pub­ lic opinion against the government.”41 The security service at this time was no match for the terrorists. Lev Tikhomirov, in the late 1870s one of the revolutionaries but later a monar­ chist, wrote in 1898 that the “Third Section was in a weak and disorganized state and it would be hard to imagine a more worthless security police.” Two factors help to explain the institution’s frailty. First, the Third Section had not evolved greatly since its creation. Most important, it had failed to develop or to refine its methods of surveillance. Only in the 1870s did it begin, rather slowly, to build a registry of people who were entering its field of vision. By contrast, for at least half a century the police in Vienna had been registering the entire population'of the Austrian Empire. Second, the Third Section’s ob­ jects of surveillance were no longer the contemplatives of the 1830s, the gre­ garious critics of the 1840s, or even the disparate nihilists of the 1850s and 1860s. A portion of the regime’s current enemies was a tightly organized, highly disciplined band of almost religiously devoted crusaders.42 The murder of officials did not seem to turn the public against the terrorists, whereas each new repressive measure eroded public sympathy for the government. The government should have begun to develop a professionally sophisticated se­ curity service capable of distinguishing between terrorist and nonterrorist op­ position movements. It is important to place these developments in a broader context. First, the terrorist violence was almost continuous. Tikhomirov later admitted that his not very numerous comrades had launched their attacks “as if they had in re­ serve an entire army.” An ethic of perpetual vigilance permitted them to orga­ nize a plethora of escapes from prison and exile in 1878, thus reinforcing their numbers. Also, a campaign of political terrorism began almost simultaneously in Germany in April and May 1878 (o.s.). Two would-be assassins fired shots at the kaiser, precipitating mass repression (521 people were arrested within a few weeks) and providing the justification for the Reichstag’s adoption in Oc­ tober of the Antisocialist Law, which remained in force until 1890 and re­ sulted in the thorough disorganization of the German Social Democratic Party. While perhaps less harsh than the Russian emergency legislation promulgated at this time, the Antisocialist Law invested administrative officials with signif­ icant powers, such as the right to expel from major cities people considered

Origins of a Modern Security Police

25

“dangerous to public security and order.”43 Second, the Russo-Turkish War ended in March 1878, resulting in the creation of a parliament in Bulgaria. Russian constitutionalists took heart: Why not in Russia next? This triumph was followed in June by a diplomatic humiliation for Russia at the Congress of Berlin, which made the government quite unpopular at home. In summer 1878, the Russian government moved to strengthen its police institutions, but hesitantly and with moderation. A decree of 7 June 1878 es­ tablished the office of rural police sergeant (uriadnik); one was to be ap­ pointed in every district of the empire. This belated response to the new situa­ tion in the countryside created by the emancipation of the serfs was doubtless informed in part by the “going to the people” movement. The exile system also became less porous, due to a law of 8 August 1878. Thereafter, fugitives from the exile system were sent to complete their terms in the inhospitable Yakutsk region. At the same time, however, the increasing dangers of the job and insufficient funding for salaries were hindering efforts to strengthen the police ranks. Senior officials of the Third Section and the Gendarme Corps addressed this issue in mid and late summer by making three hundred thou­ sand rubles available for the security service; a portion of the funds were di­ verted to gendarme salaries. It seems unlikely that this increased funding sig­ nificantly improved the ability of the Third Section, which still employed only fifty-two people, to protect the emperor and his officials against terrorist attacks. Given the dangers confronting the regime, it might have been sensi­ ble to reform the security police institutions. The Committee of Ministers in November 1878 considered, then unaccountably rejected, a proposal to cen­ tralize Russia’s police institutions by creating a police ministry.44 Instead of renovating the security police system, the government contin­ ued to resort to emergency measures. Tikhomirov argued rightly that the gov­ ernment’s failure to capture a small band of terrorists should not have re­ sulted in its drawing thousands of young radicals into the police dragnet. First, the use of emergency legislation to combat revolutionary terrorism served to advertise the existence of a supposedly vast conspiracy of revolu­ tionary terrorists. Since, as Tikhomirov noted, the use of terrorism was itself essentially a desperate form of propaganda embraced by a minuscule organi­ zation lacking other means to bring attention to their political and social agenda, the government, by resorting to harsh emergency measures, was ef­ fectively furthering the goals of the terrorists and thereby increasing the sense of insecurity among the Russian population. Second, as assistant gendarme chief N. D. Seliverstov admitted in a report of 23 September 1878, general­ ized repression was likely to “alienate those persons [merely] taken with criminal ideas, especially students and others who, it is hoped, will come to reason in the future.” It does not seem that an official such as Mezentsev had been responsible for such terrible repression as to merit being assassinated. It is clear, though, that the rather indiscriminate use of administrative punish­ ments by the institutions for which he bore responsibility served to alienate such radical zemstvo activists as Ivan Petrunkevich. He and his colleagues,

26

Autocracy under Siege

believing that the government was getting essentially what it deserved, abet­ ted the terrorists by offering shelter to “illegals” without asking if they were terrorists.45 The only sure method of struggle against the revolutionary terror­ ists was to turn against them a sophisticated, powerful security service. The development of such an institution requires time, however, more time than the regime had at its disposal. It is not surprising that the next crisis prompted the government to adopt yet another administrative emergency measure. Three days after A. K. Solov’ev attempted to murder Alexander II near the Palace Square on 2 April 1879, an Imperial ukase empowered governors gen­ eral to transfer to military courts persons deemed potentially harmful to public order and tranquillity, to arrest or banish any person, to close any periodical publication, and, as if that were insufficient, “to take any measures . . . deemed necessary for the preservation of tranquillity.” This was the broadest discretionary power provided to local officials by any of the emergency legis­ lation of late Imperial Russia. Three temporary governors general (in St. Pe­ tersburg, Khar’kov, and Odessa) were added to the existing three (in Moscow, Kiev, and Warsaw), and a law of 23 April permitted each one to subject to his authority the three to five provinces constituting a local military district that, taken together, comprehended twenty-one of the fifty provinces of European Russia, plus the ten of the Polish Kingdom. The measure resulted in a major decentralization of the empire’s administrative system and led over the next several months to what V. G. Korolenko and P. A. Zaionchkovskii, respec­ tively, called an “orgy of denunciations, arrests, searches, and exiles” and “the apogee of administrative-police arbitrariness.” During this period of repres­ sion, sixteen people were executed by military courts.46 Partly in response to this bout of repression, in June and July 1879 the most radical members of Land and Freedom created a new terrorist organiza­ tion, People’s Will. In late August they announced their goal to “undermine the tsar’s authority, to shake people’s faith in the power of the government” by assassinating Alexander II. Their organization would be highly central­ ized, disciplined, and secretive. They planned nine attempts; five did not take place. The most sensational failed attempt was the immense explosion in the Winter Palace detonated by S. N. Khalturin on 5 February 1880. The blast killed eleven soldiers but harmed no members of the government or Imperial family. For one year the security police had been almost entirely in the dark about the activities of People’s Will, and they got their first break only on 10 March 1880, when G. Gol’denberg made a full confession to St, Petersburg prosecutor A. F. Dobrzhinskii.47 The security police were also manifestly un­ able to cope with the broader revolutionary movements, which boasted in the 1870s some five to six thousand active participants. Consequently, on 12 Feb­ ruary 1880 Alexander II created the Supreme Executive Commission for the Preservation of the State Order and Public Tranquillity and appointed as its director Count Mikhail Loris-Melikov, whose judicious blending of repres­ sion and conciliation as governor general in Khar’kov had won him a broad following among both liberals and conservatives.48 In the very short term, the

Origins of a Modern Security Police

27

powers recently devolved to governors general returned to the center, and Loris-Melikov was authorized to take any measures he deemed necessary for the preservation of order throughout the entire empire. This was the first and only time in the Imperial period that a Russian monarch ceded nearly dictato­ rial powers to one official.49

New Police Institutions This change in administrative leadership, which contemporaries called the “dictatorship of the heart,” marked the beginning of a concerted effort to de­ velop methods and institutions specially conceived to match wits with violent conspirators. Although officials of the executive branch retained the power to punish individuals administratively, reforms of the next few years greatly im­ proved the security service’s ability to discriminate between revolutionary conspirators and more passive opponents of the regime. Progress in the de­ ployment of specialized agents, in the interception of mail, and in keeping track of political criminals soon went a long way toward turning the tide in the struggle between the regime and its opponents. Key steps in that direction were the replacement of the Third Section with a new central police institu­ tion, the Police Department, and the creation of a security bureau in Moscow. (A security bureau and the tsar’s security force remained attached to the St. Petersburg city governor’s office.) Loris-Melikov, as a partisan of the rule of law, subordinated the security police apparatus to the Police Department, whose directors were all jurists. The most autonomous components of that apparatus were the security bureaus, and they gradually developed into the heart of the security policing system. A member of the Supreme Executive Commission, Senator 1.1. Shamshin, inspected the Third Section and found it disorganized and inefficient. Since Loris-Melikov disliked being simply a favorite, on 6 August 1880 the com­ mission was abolished along with the Third Section. Both were replaced by a new institution, the Department of State Police, which was subordinated to the Interior Ministry. Loris-Melikov was appointed interior minister.50 From the point of view of policing the empire, this reorganization marked a positive departure from the mere enhancement of administrative power. In September 1880 Loris traveled to Moscow, where he found “strictly speaking, no one in charge of security policing.” To ensure the emperor’s security during an im­ pending state visit to the ancient capital, in October 1880 Loris created a se­ curity bureau in Moscow and subordinated it directly to the Department of State Police.51 It was at this bureau and its counterpart in St. Petersburg that middle-level officials such as Grigorii Sudeikin and Sergei Zubatov intro­ duced into the security system an inventiveness, a vitality, a sense of enthusi­ asm, and a spirit of adventure and iconoclasm that permitted the government to score coup after coup against the revolutionary opposition. The structure and functions of the reorganized police system differed in two respects from the previous one. First, regular and security police institutions

28

Autocracy under Siege

and functions were subordinated to one authority, the Department of State Po­ lice. The Third Section had been a semiautonomous security police institution, albeit with some regular-police and general-administrative functions, whose director enjoyed direct access to the emperor. Under the new arrangement, the security service became just another wheel in the state machine. Second, the important office of gendarme chief was abolished, its duties and title vested in the interior minister. The government failed, however, to establish this line of subordination in law. Most important, the Gendarme Corps retained full au­ thority in personnel decisions. When Loris-Melikov attempted in November 1880 to place gendarme officers in the provinces under the authority of his provincial governors, the corps marshaled sufficient resistance to force a recision of the order in June 1881.52 The Interior Ministry, which had existed since 1801 and to which the De­ partment of State Police was subordinated, encompassed a vast organization that oversaw or regulated the postal and telegraph system, censorship, pris­ ons, the empirewide collection of statistics, non-Orthodox religious organiza­ tions, and veterinary and human medicine. It also bore responsibility for reg­ ular police functions, which it carried out both by means of the empire’s seventy-eight governors and dozens of city police chiefs and through the De­ partments of Executive and State Police. These last two institutions merged in November 1880 and were renamed the Police Department in February 1883. Because of its broad functions, the Interior Ministry was the key min­ istry within the Imperial Russian government, even a “surrogate for the state itself.”53 The Police Department also oversaw a broad array of operations ranging from state security and regular crime-fighting to purely administrative mat­ ters (including fire prevention, the passport system, the trade in explosives, liquor establishments, and inspection of the empire’s borders). Security policing constituted an important but small part of the totality of functions entrusted to the department. Two assistant directors— one for general admin­ istration, the second for policing as such— conducted day-to-day operations. The complexity of the department’s internal structure increased continuously as it acquired new duties, competencies, and subdivisions. The historian who ventures to analyze the institution is bewildered by the frequent reshuffling of offices and redistribution of tasks.54 Senior police officials, never fully sat­ isfied with the organizational instruments at their disposal, persistently sought to improve them. This was probably a defense mechanism on the part of an institution that bore partial responsibility for mediating between state and society while lacking the authority to influence the government’s broad political course. The perception of the police’s inability to resolve social crises led to a frequent replacement of senior police officials. In thirty-six years, the Police Department had sixteen directors; the Interior Ministry had eighteen. Petrunkevich, remarking on the period between 1894 and 1917, wrote that this phenomenon was “a form of latent revolution” for an absolutist monar-

Origins of a Modern Security Police

29

chy. The worst periods to be an interior minister were from 1878 to 1882 (three ministers), 1902 to 1906 (four ministers), and especially 1915 to 1917 (five ministers). These were also periods of social and political instability, which are perhaps universally liable to engender instability in the leadership of police institutions (the turnover of French prefects of police in 1830, 1831, 1848, 1870, and 1871, for example, was equally striking). In Russia, the longest-serving interior minsters were Dmitrii Tolstoi (1882-1889), I. N. Dumovo (1889-1895), I. L. Goremykin (1895-1899), and Petr Stolypin (1906-1911). One Police Department director served nine years (P. N. Durnovo, 1884-1893); another served five years (Sergei Zvolianskii, 1897-1902); four served three years (V. K. Plehve, 1881-1884; Aleksei Lopukhin, 1902-1905; M. I. Trusevich, 1906-1909; and N. P. Zuev, 1909-1912); eight served one year or less.55 The two mutually connected and interdependent institutions both had stable leadership from 1882 to 1899. During this period, the domestic scene was largely placid. Not surprisingly, the two years between 1880 and 1882 and the prerevolutionary period from 1899 to 1905 witnessed a high turnover rate for these important officials. Simultaneous institutional reorganization adds further to the historian’s befuddlement. Fortunately, Soviet and Russian scholars have surveyed this ter­ rain, and their (largely unpublished) studies help to orient the reader therein.56 After a major reorganization in 1883, the key divisions (deloproizvodstva) for security policing were the fourth, which supervised gendarme investigations into state crimes; the fifth, which coordinated the application of administra­ tive punishments, including probation and exile; and especially the third, or secret division, which oversaw security police work in general. With the rise of the Russian labor movement, a sixth division was created in 1894 to pre­ pare and to oversee the implementation of factory legislation. While the other divisions handled a wide array of functions, only the third division special­ ized in one sphere of activity: security policing. Unlike the gendarme officers, who were military men, or the security offi­ cers, most of whom were either gendarme officers or former undercover po­ lice agents, senior Police Department officials were usually trained in law. Following continental European practice, Loris-Melikov established this stan­ dard at the outset, and, although Alexander in soon returned to a more tradi­ tional style of governance, the standard remained. Even the widely loathed V. K. Plehve had received solid legal training. By 1895 nearly all forty-four Po­ lice Department officials had graduated from university, generally in law. Af­ ter graduation, most worked as public prosecutors and in this capacity often acted as patrons to ambitious young security officers.57 Senior police officials were generally poor nobles or of non-noble background; a few were not eth­ nic Russians. For example, S. E. Vissarionov was half Jewish (but a devout convert to Orthodox Christianity), and A. F. Dobrzhinskii and M. I. Trusevich were Polish by birth. The relative diversity encountered at the summit of the police hierarchy extended to the Police Departments entire permanent staff of forty-four in 1894 and seventy-two in 1899. Most were Russian Orthodox,

30

Autocracy under Siege

but one also finds several Baltic German Lutherans and a couple of Roman Catholics.58 In policing the empire, the Police Department relied upon a host of subor­ dinate institutions—urban, rural, and gendarme. One police official com­ plained that these diverse police forces often hindered each other’s work, sometimes even frustrated it. The problem as he saw it was the lack of a force or agent empowered to unify them. The late Imperial bureaucracy was di­ vided against itself, in part because the emperors worked assiduously to pre­ vent the formation of a united government that might weaken their own au­ thority. This tendency toward internal conflict at the highest levels of government appears to have permeated the entire bureaucracy, perhaps most insistently in the institutions of state security. The power exercised by secu­ rity police institutions operating largely in secret poses special dangers under any government, and it is natural for rulers to diffuse these tasks among a number of agencies.59 Despite the reorganization of the empire’s police institutions, the efforts to penetrate People’s Will lacked vigor and met with little success throughout 1880. According to Vera Figner, the security police were not on their toes in St. Petersburg. Indeed, they were rendered all but blind by the clandestine presence of Nikolai Kletochnikov within the security system. A member of Land and Freedom, he was recruited by the Third Section as a police infor­ mant on 25 January 1879. In March he was transferred to a desk job. Figner called him “utterly invaluable” to People’s Will, which he joined after its founding, and his supervisor at the Third Section described him as “totally dedicated, utterly reliable and absolutely uncurious,” the sort of person who seemed “entirely cut out to preserve secrets.” Surveillance of his private life revealed it to be exemplary as well, and he was promoted to the Third Sec­ tion’s secret department (Sekretnaia chast*) in May 1880, where he enjoyed access to the institution’s most sensitive documents. Unlike most of the Third Section’s staff, as a model clerk he was permitted to join the newly created Department of State Police in August. Over time, Kletochnikov leaked vital information to his comrades, including the names of 385 police informants, some of whom the revolutionaries murdered. Information provided to the po­ lice in December by I. F. Okladskii led to the arrest of two of Kletochnikov’s confederates, which precipitated his own arrest in January 1881. He died in prison two years later.60 Okladskii, an assistant to People’s Will leader A. I. Zheliabov, had been ar­ rested in July 1880 and had greeted with defiance the death sentence meted out to him on 30 October 1880 by a military court. Then, alone in prison with the prospect of death before him, he made a full confession of his involve­ ment with People’s Will. Partly as a result of his testimony, on the eve of 1 March 1881 nearly all of the major activists of People’s Will had fallen into the hands of the security service. P. E. Shchegolev, who testified at the trial of Okladskii in 1924, called him, as an informant, a “star of the first magnitude.”

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(He received a ten-year prison sentence.)61 The stories of Kletochnikov and Okladskii demonstrate the immense power of even one well-informed indi­ vidual to weaken formidable, secretive organizations.

The Assassination of Alexander II In addition to its efforts, beginning in summer 1880, to improve the secu­ rity police system, Loris-Melikov’s government appealed to the Russian pub­ lic for support. Simultaneously, numerous senior officials, arguing that police repression by itself would not suffice to return Russia to normality, urged the emperor to undertake a new round of political reforms. Loris-Melikov him­ self sought to reduce the indiscriminate use of administrative measures, point­ ing to the negative effect they had on public opinion. He also elaborated a re­ form program that, coincidentally, grew more liberal as 1 March 1881 approached. A few hours before his assassination, Alexander II endorsed Loris-Melikov’s plan to create a partially elective, consultative assembly.62 Even such a modest reform would almost surely have laid the basis for fur­ ther constitutional developments. Loris-Melikov seemed more concerned with the success of his reforms than with the safety of the emperor. His police forces had been terribly remiss during the previous several months. Five more regicide attempts had escaped detection since spring 1880. The police knew that members of People’s Will were still at large but, unaccountably, made no concerted effort to round them up. A member of People’s Will, lu. N. Bogdanovich, managed to lease a cheese shop on Malaia Sadovaia Street (across Nevskii Prospect from the monument to Catherine II) in January 1881, to complete a tunnel underneath the street in February, and to plant a bomb in it. This street lay on the path that Alexander II usually took when he returned from the Manège to the Win­ ter Palace. Rumors and denunciations about Bogdanovich and the cheese shop reached the police, who sent three officials to inspect it on 28 February. They found nothing amiss. The day before, Zheliabov had been arrested and had boasted to the police that a further assassination attempt was under way. Loris-Melikov suggested to the emperor, but without insisting, that it might be more prudent not to review the troops on 1 March. When Alexander de­ cided to go anyway, much of his path to the Manège, which avoided Malaia Sadovaia, was left unguarded.63 On the east side of the Catherine Canal, N. I. Rysakov hurled one bomb, then 1.1. Grinevitskii hurled another one. Both ex­ ploded; the second one killed the emperor. The least that can be said is that the security service, which had at its disposal vast resources, was decidedly less efficient and sophisticated in this period than the revolutionary adver­ saries of the regime. Loris-Melikov was not the only official lulled into a false sense of security. During the preceding several months an atmosphere of calm had descended upon Russia and few people expected a renewal of political terror. People’s

32

Autocracy under Siege

Will had carried out no terrorist acts after February 1880, and the peasantry and industrial workers, lately restive, had grown calmer by early 1881. Nu­ merous People’s Will leaders had been arrested, although Okladskii’s confes­ sions were more responsible for the arrests than were the renovated police in­ stitutions. P. A. Zaionchkovskii attributed Loris-Melikov’s support for political concessions to continued tension and fear reigning in the country, yet the Imperial government had been more likely to meet unrest with in­ creased discretionary powers than with reforms, as was shown by the govern­ ment’s responses to the Polish rebellion in 1863 and the assassination at­ tempts of the late 1870s. The conservative Slavophile journalist and courtier A. A. Kireev, for example, credited Solov’ev’s attempted regicide of 2 April 1879 with “suppressing the pernicious co nstitutional velleities [popolznoveniia] .’,64 Indeed, a crushing military debacle coupled with an em­ pirewide popular rebellion were required to elicit the next round of political concessions from the Imperial government in 1905. It seems, then, that Alexander II was prepared on the day of his assassination to grant an impor­ tant concession to educated public opinion primarily because he felt himself and his government to be less threatened by terrorists than he had one year before. The leaders of People’s Will may have sincerely expected the assassination to cause the fall of the regime and a thorough reshaping of the social and po­ litical landscape, but it produced a contrary effect. Popular and elite opinion fell generally solidly behind the monarchy. The artist A. N. Benua, then ten years old, later wrote that he had “encountered only one attitude—outrage in the face of what had occurred, and absolute condemnation of the criminal ter­ rorists [prestupnikov-terroristov], whereas until then the ‘Nihilists’ had been ‘practically in vogue.’” 65 This sense of revulsion presumably led to what reform-minded statesman A. V. Golovnin called a “mania for denunciations” that, in early January 1882, he saw spreading across all layers of society. It also prompted several wellconnected noblemen to form the so-called Holy Brotherhood (Sviashchennaia druzhina) to fight subversion. Sergei Witte on 3 March 1881 advocated creat­ ing an organization of men totally loyal to the sovereign, whose members would “be ready to respond to terror with terror.” Police Department historian N. I. Shebeko called the organization “a secret crusade against the enemies of order,” whose goal “was to slaughter [vyrezat’] the anarchists.” In practice, the Brotherhood eschewed violence and sought instead to penetrate revolutionary organizations with informants and to undertake publishing ventures aimed at discrediting the revolutionary movement as a whole.66 The Holy Brotherhood attracted 729 members, including a large number of Russia’s most wealthy, powerful, and well-connected statesmen, courtiers, and guards officers. By September it had branches in both capitals, agents throughout the empire, and a 14,672-man volunteer security guard (Dobrovol’naia okhrana) for the physical protection of the emperor. The Brother­ hood in turn enjoyed strong support from the emperor. In late 1881, he ap-

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33

proved the plan of two prominent members—I. I. Vorontsov-Dashkov, the minister of the Imperial court, and P. A. Cherevin, the head of Alexander Ill’s personal bodyguard—to place the Police Department and the Gendarme Corps under the direct control of Cherevin. This plan would have meant sub­ ordinating the country’s entire police system to the interest of protecting the Imperial family. In any event, the interior minister persuaded Alexander to keep those important police institutions under his purview. Grigorii Sudeikin was outraged at the extent of the organization’s influence. He scornfully re­ marked, “[T]he revolutionaries are people, they have ideals, but this crowd . . . it is a mob!” His reaction is not surprising. Sudeikin was a professional, while the members of the Brotherhood were amateurs. The Brotherhood was banned in November 1882, in part because by that time Sudeikin had devas­ tated People’s Will.67 Meanwhile, in late April 1881 K. P. Pobedonostsev persuaded Alexander HI to defend absolutism. To A. A. Abaza, who argued, “[T]he throne cannot rest exclusively on a million bayonets and an army of officials,” Pobedonost­ sev replied that Russia’s strength lay in a powerful union between tsar and people. Unwilling to follow Pobedonostsev’s lead entirely at this point, on 4 May Alexander selected as interior minister the moderate N. P. Ignat’ev and tentatively approved his plans for the convocation of an assembly of the land (zemskii sobor) and other reforms under the aegis of the liberal Kakhanov Commission.68 Naturally, Ignat’ev also paid considerable attention to matters of state security, and his administration is perhaps best known today for the decree on state security adopted that summer. A detailed discussion of the de­ cree is necessary here because it governed much of the work of the security police and, in some cases, even of the regular police.

The Security Law of 1881 On 14 August 1881 Alexander III confirmed an edict of the Committee of Ministers, the “Ordinance on Measures for the Preservation of the State Order and Public Tranquillity” (Polozhenie o merakh k okhraneniiu gosudarstvennogo poriadka i obshchestvennogo spokoistviia).69 Abbreviated by administrative officials as polozhenie ob okhrane and conceived as a weapon for combating opposition to the regime and as a tool of the security police, the law was gradually applied to preserve both the existing state order and public tranquillity, as the full title would suggest. Published as “temporary” by the Senate on 9 September 1881, the security law rescinded all of the previous emergency legislation and established three sets of rules governing administrative power. The sets of rules were called “reinforced security” (usilennaia okhrana), “extraordinary security” (chrezvychainaia okhrana), and “rules for places not declared to be in a state of emer­ gency.”70 The third set of rules established what became in late Imperial Rus­ sia “normal” administrative prerogative. Under these rules, the police and gendarmes could search, arrest, and detain for up to seven days any persons

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suspected of involvement in the planning or perpetration of state crimes, or of belonging to illegal organizations.71 The security law, therefore, extended to the regular police a power conferred on gendarmes by the unpublished decree of 1 September 1878 and, unlike that earlier decree, limited the period of de­ tention.72 The security law, like the law of 9 August 1878, also authorized the Interior Ministry, with the consent of the Justice Ministry, to transfer to mili­ tary courts state-crime cases and cases involving the use of violence against administrative officials. Finally, the security law preserved the right of admin­ istrative officials to recommend people for extrajudicial exile, as had the de­ cree of 1 September 1878, but limited the term of exile to five years and left the selection of candidates for exile to the discretion of the officials. As a re­ sult, over one-third of all such exiles were “public nuisances.” In regions in a state of reinforced security, governors general (or governors in provinces without them), while retaining the powers enumerated above, had the right to issue binding orders enforceable with penalties of up to three months’ imprisonment or a five-hundred-ruble fine. They could likewise for­ bid gatherings (even private ones), shut down commercial enterprises (a power scarcely ever exercised),73 and prohibit the residence of individuals in their jurisdictions. Governors general and the interior minister were autho­ rized to transfer any case to military courts in the interest of preserving order. Police and gendarme authorities were permitted to detain any person for up to two weeks (one month with permission from the governor) or to search any premises on pure suspicion of a person’s involvement in the commission of state crime. Finally, provincial and city governors could order the dismissal of all nonelective local officials deemed politically unreliable, a provision that merely replaced a similar one in the temporary law of 19 August 1879. As imposing as these powers appear, they fell far short of those conferred by the 5 April 1879 law on governors general. Under a state of extraordinary security, governors general or specially ap­ pointed military commanders were furthermore authorized to create special military police units with broad powers for the restoration of order. For the sake of preserving order they could sequester any private property or source of income “harmful to state or public security,” impose fines of up to three thousand rubles for failure to comply with their binding rules, remove from office any civil servant (even locally elected officials) up to and including rank 4, prohibit zemstvo and other public-institution meetings, suspend publi­ cations, and close educational institutions for up to one month. In other words, a state of extraordinary security invested governors general with virtu­ ally dictatorial power. Unlike the 5 April 1879 law on governors general, however, this law contained no carte blanche provision (“any measures deemed necessary for the preservation of tranquillity”). The provisions of ex­ traordinary security were not invoked until December 1905 amid the near col­ lapse of the regime. Administrative officials viewed the powers conferred on them by the secu­ rity law as indispensable to fulfilling their responsibilities in the broadest

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sense. Among the most useful powers in this regard was administrative exile (vysylka). How did this method, as opposed to that applied by the justice min­ ister, work? An administrative official proposed a candidate for exile to the provincial or city governor, who, if he saw fit, petitioned the minister of inte­ rior. The latter then submitted the petition to an ad hoc committee on admin­ istrative punishment (Osoboe Soveshchanie) composed of two representatives from the Justice Ministry and three from the Interior Ministry, with the deputy interior minister as chairman. The prosecutors in these cases were of­ ficials in the Police Department’s fourth division; officials in the fifth division oversaw the implementation of each sentence. Between 1881 and 1904, the committee, justly characterized by Richard Pipes as “a bureaucratic body functioning in a judiciary capacity,” met 153 times and considered 7,159 cases. As a result it subjected 11,879 people to administrative exile. Of these, 37 percent (4,424) were exiled for reprehensible (porochnoe) behavior; 20 percent were exiled for social disobedience, including involvement in factory disturbances (1,891), and agrarian disorders (733); and 33 percent (4,077) were punished for their “political unreliability.”74 The fact that a large per­ centage of people were exiled for antisocial behavior suggests that the provi­ sions of the security law were often used for ordinary governance. Although city and provincial governors and gendarmes were enjoined to provide solid corroborative evidence of potential exiles’ harmfulness to soci­ ety, the committee on administrative punishment was apparently given to con­ ducting its business summarily. For example, in one day (27 January 1897) it heard, discussed, and decided to uphold the recommendation to exile 173 members of the Marxist Union of Struggle for the Liberation of the Working Class. Of course, in this, as in all cases, the committee had to base its deliber­ ations upon evidence gathered by administrative officials who frequently re­ fused to divulge their sources. Moreover, administrative officials often ex­ erted pressure on the committee, arguing that failure to approve proposed punishments would deprive the said officials of the ability to maintain order in their provinces. Empowered to demand supplemental information or even interviews with the accused, the committee appears nevertheless to have exer­ cised little more than rubber-stamp control over the administrative exile sys­ tem, except sometimes to substitute administrative probation or other lesser punishments for exile.75 It bears noting that the justice minister continued during these years, in consultation with the interior minister and the emperor, to decide the fate of a large number of alleged political criminals. On his recommendation, 5,482 were administratively exiled from 1881 to 1894, and another 2,691 from 1894 to 1903, for a total of 8,173. A further 8,240 people received lesser ad­ ministrative punishments in this manner from 1894 to 1903.76 Therefore, the number of alleged political criminals administratively punished by Imperial order exceeded the number punished on the authority of the security law. Still, the people condemned to exile by both administrative procedures made up only a tiny fraction of all Siberian exiles. In 1897, for example, nearly

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300,000 exiles resided in Siberia. Half of the total (150,159) had been sen­ tenced by a variety of courts; the other half (146,658) had been exiled by peasant and urban (meshchanskie) communities. In all, alleged political crim­ inals constituted less than 1 percent of all exiles in Siberia at the end of the century.77 A more widely employed but less onerous punishment was “administrative banishment” (vopreshchat* prebyvanie), which governors in areas under a state of reinforced or extraordinary security were empowered to impose. This prerogative was tailor-made for the governors of Moscow, St. Petersburg, and other important urban centers. They applied it widely to expel undesirables of every sort and only secondarily used it to fight sedition. Thus, 43,849 people were banished from St. Petersburg city and province between 1884 and 1895 for nonpolitical reasons, that is, roughly four thousand yearly. Naturally, the number of political banishments must have been greatly inferior.78 Further evidence that the security law often served as a handy tool for the regular police and administration was the use of binding administrative orders by local officials in places under reinforced security to regulate matters only tenuously linked to the preservation of state security. In 1902, the St. Peters­ burg city governor used this prerogative to fine 35,784 residents for traffic vi­ olations.79 This manner of governance was far from unique to Russia. It seems that administrative officials in most continental European countries considered a wide variety of extrajudicial punishments essential for the main­ tenance of “good order.” 80 The harshest punishments—including imprisonment, exile for more than five years, hard labor, and capital punishment—remained the prerogative of the courts, both civil and military. But the civilian courts tried only 369 statecrime cases from 1881 to 1894, and they heard not a single such case from 1894 to 1901. Likewise, administrative authorities transferred fewer than eleven nonespionage state-crime cases to military courts between 1885 and 1903.81 Indeed, from 1894 to 1903, scarcely any political criminals received a punishment harsher than administrative exile, another compromise between reformists and conservatives within the Imperial bureaucracy. A Police De­ partment report to the emperor of 12 May 1887 went so far as to argue that, since many political activists were very young and were likely to change their beliefs, it was best not to subject them to the rigors of judicial exile with the requisite deprivation of civil and social rights. This point surely had its effect on revolutionaries. A radical activist named K. Ia. Zagorskii urged a comrade not to cooperate with the police, saying, “The worst that [they] can do is ship you off to five year’s exile in eastern Siberia. That’s not so bad; many handle it just fine.” In fact, although the term occasionally rose to ten years begin­ ning in the later 1880s, only a very small proportion of all administrative ex­ iles were sent to eastern Siberia, and most of them were supervised less strictly and traveled in better style to their destinations than judicial exiles. Members of the privileged classes (and most political administrative exiles belonged to them) received stipends from the state guaranteeing a relatively

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37

decent standard of living. By the 1890s, the trip east was described by some administrative exiles as a vacation.82 In sum, the security law of 1881 placed the system of extrajudicial arrest and punishment under the supervision of the interior minister but granted him far fewer prerogatives than the director of the Supreme Executive Commis­ sion of 1880. It also extended the right to arbitrary arrest to the regular police but strictly defined the period of detention. Finally, it empowered governors and governors general to transfer political suspects to military courts and to subject them to administrative exile, though less extensively so, and with shorter terms of exile, than under the 5 April 1879 law on governors general. Thus, although the security law permitted police and administrative officials to circumvent the legal guarantees established by the judicial reform of 1864 and in some respects slightly extended administrative reach, it also system­ atized the existing emergency legislation and curtailed administrative power. Historians have suggested a number of reasons for the adoption of the 1881 law. Soviet historian P. A. Zaionchkovskii shows that Alexander III and his closest advisors were in an acute state of alarm in the immediate aftermath of the regicide. On 27 March 1881, for example, the emperor fled the capital to Gatchina. Zaionchkovskii further argues that fear of potential social disorder prompted the government to adopt the security law of 14 August.83 This argument appears specious primarily because Russia’s rulers soon re­ gained much of their composure. On 9 April 1881 Loris-Melikov informed War Minister D. A. Miliutin that police investigations, facilitated by a full confession of the regicide N. I. Rysakov, had revealed the terrorist party to be small in number and poorly financed and laid it open to further repression. By 29 April Alexander HI felt sufficiently in control to reaffirm his absolutist pre­ rogatives publicly. On 16 July 1881 he undertook a state visit to Moscow— surely not the act of a man trembling for his safety. Indeed, Grand Duke Mikhail Nikolaevich, appointed State Council chairman on the eve of the em­ peror’s departure, remarked to State Secretary E. A. Peretts on 23 July that, since the empire was essentially tranquil, his biggest worry was the court in­ trigue surrounding the emperor.84 Fear of social unrest may have delayed, but almost certainly did not cause, the adoption of the security law. After all, as noted above, the law actually diminished administrative power. I. Michael Aronson has argued recently that the government adopted the security law in large part as a weapon with which to combat anti-Jewish vio­ lence. Senior officials were indeed extremely troubled by the pogroms that broke out in Ukraine immediately following the regicide, the more so as they initially seemed to have been fomented by revolutionaries. But while nearly all the provinces in which the security law was first declared had indeed suf­ fered pogroms (Poland was the single exception), after 10 May 1881 antiJewish violence broke out only in Poltava and Chernigov Provinces (from July to early August). Moreover, these regions were among the most unruly in the Russian Empire and, as such, had already been subject to the more strin­ gent 5 April 1879 law on governors general. Finally, although at least fifty of

38

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sixty-six state-crime cases transferred to military courts in 1881 involved pogromists, previous legislation had permitted such transfers.85 It seems necessary, therefore, to disagree with both Zaionchkovskii and Aronson. Two important reformists, Miliutin and Peretts, do not mention the law in their detailed diaries covering the period from the formation of a committee to draft the law in May 1881 until its adoption 14 August 1881, which suggests that neither considered it a pivotal legislative act. The mod­ erately conservative P. A. Valuev, then still president of the Committee of Ministers, referred to the law in his diary only once, in the entry of 4 Au­ gust, the day on which the committee discussed the draft proposal. His brief, cryptic remark implies that he considered the proposed law to be of little importance.86 According to N. I. Faleev, a severe critic of the Imperial regime, the broader educated public was almost universally horrified by the regicide and was willing, therefore, to grant the government something approaching carte blanche in dealing with its perpetrators. Yet Interior Minister Ignat’ev ap­ pointed the reformist official M. S. Kakhanov to lead the commission created on 20 May 1881 to draft the bill. Upon approving the bill on 4 August 1881, the Committee of Ministers opined that in three years the law should require reaffirmation.87 Although most legislation was submitted to the State Council for approval, “politically sensitive” acts were sometimes promulgated by the Committee of Ministers. Obviously Ignat’ev feared that the State Council would reject the bill in its final form. It was presumably for this reason that the Committee of Ministers agreed to approve the law with the understanding that it would be tested, then revised and improved, and finally submitted to the State Council for approval.88 It must have seemed necessary to most of the members of the Committee of Ministers to preserve, in more limited and systematized form, the emergency legislation adopted over the previous sev­ eral years. Yet apparently few of them wished to deviate radically from the path toward the rule of law first embarked upon in 1864. Indeed, Alexander HI, upon signing the bill into law, emphasized that it was temporary and was meant to place limits on administrative discretion; he also professed that the “firm foundation of regular laws . . . [is] the most solid assurance of the pros­ perity and success of our dear Fatherland.” 89 After the turn of the century, numerous opponents of the regime de­ nounced the security law as a hallmark of despotism.90 It is true that the secu­ rity law authorized the police in Russia to arrest people merely suspected of promoting oppositional sentiment and, under certain circumstances, to jail and exile them for up to five years—all without a trial. It seems that in prac­ tice, however, few political dissidents were exiled who had not sought ac­ tively to change the form of government in Russia, which was a criminal of­ fense according to the penal code of 1845. As the security service grew more professionally sophisticated and efficient, especially after the turn of the cen­ tury, one was less and less likely to be arrested on mere suspicion of opposi­ tional activity. Even so, the arbitrariness of Russia’s government authority

Origins of a Modern Security Police

39

justifiably remained a sore point among the educated elites, and even a small number of arbitrary acts of punishment and repression were enough to help keep the flame of opposition alive. Although the government’s critics at times seem to have imagined that it was uniquely arbitrary and repressive, as noted above, administrative punish­ ments were far from unique to Russia. Prussia’s state of siege (Be­ lagerungszustand) of 4 June 1851, which was in force in Alsace from 1871 to 1873, was in some respects harsher than Russia’s state of reinforced security, partly because it transferred civil power to military authorities. Germany’s Antisocialist Law of 21 October 1878 allowed for administrative punishments running to six-month prison sentences and fines of one thousand marks (roughly five hundred rubles) for, among other things, the distribution of pro­ hibited publications. Moreover, a provision of the law, which was declared regularly in Berlin, Leipzig, Hamburg, Altona, and other cities, endowed civilian authorities with powers similar to those conferred on Russian provin­ cial officials by the security law of 1881. (Note, however, that they could not impose exile or transfer suspected criminals to military courts). Vienna fell under a similar state of emergency in 1883. Farther to the west, under a state of siege declared in France from December 1851 to May 1852, forty thou­ sand insurgents were expelled, imprisoned, or exiled to the colonies. A simi­ lar state of siege was maintained in France from 1871 to 1873 (and in a few other places until 1876). By 1873 fifty-nine newspapers had been closed tem­ porarily or banned and military courts continued to hear cases involving civil­ ian insurrectionists.91 The Russian government differed from its western Eu­ ropean counterparts most notably in its suspension of the normal guarantees of due process over the course of four complete decades. Of course, govern­ ing a huge and greatly diverse contiguous empire presented special problems from which the western European powers were exempt.92 To summarize, Russia’s security law of 1881 was promulgated by officials who knew the immediate revolutionary threat to state security to be modest and expected the law to fall into disuse, or to be modified, within three years. The law caused no furor at the time of enactment, and few people expected it to endure for decades. The law’s provisions did not return Russia to the ad­ ministrative despotism of the prereform era. They diminished the scope of the judicial reform, but in many ways to a lesser extent than the emergency legislation of the late 1870s, and therefore curbed administrative power. The adoption of the security law of 1881 was conceived as an exceptional and temporary measure to combat opposition to the regime, but it did not consti­ tute a turning point on the path toward a modem “police state.” Rather, it was a by-product of the country’s uneasy transition from an absolutist to a consti­ tutional order.93 Almost immediately, however, governors, the police, and gendarmes interpreted threats to state order and public tranquillity most lib­ erally, and the security law became a tool of regular administration. At the same time, the law systematized but did not unify the government’s struggle against its opponents, except insofar as it extended certain extrajudicial

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repressive authority, supervised nominally by the Interior Ministry, to all lo­ cal police officials. The ambiguity of simultaneous repression and moderation, on the one hand, and of simultaneous centralization (prerogatives granted to the Interior Ministry) and decentralization (powers acquired by local officials), on the other hand, paralleled the dual nature of the Imperial Russian government. Peter I and his successors had pursued policies of selective Europeanization, initially underpinned by the principles of cameralism, but they had been con­ tinuously forced to come to grips with the reality of governing a very diverse population that was unused to Western ways. Beset by a dissatisfied, Euro­ peanized elite on the one hand and obliged to govern a vast, non-Europeanized peasantry and a weakly developed urban sector on the other, the rul­ ing elite, itself at least partially dedicated to the principle of the rule of law, felt obliged in 1881 to compromise and to reaffirm the power of local officials to deal extralegally with perceived threats to the social and political order. The law’s moderation would provide it with staying power: it was harsh enough to please many hard-liners but weak enough to prevent liberal offi­ cials from assiduously campaigning against it. As a result, the security law of 1881 was renewed regularly until 1917 but was never made permanent. This fact suggests that officialdom under the final two Russian emperors was dom­ inated neither by partisans of the rule of law nor by advocates of unbridled administrative discretion (although the bureaucratic conservatives won more battles).94 A pragmatic “muddling through” became the order of the day. On 4 September 1881 Alexander III declared a state of reinforced security: in the provinces of St. Petersburg, Moscow, Khar’kov, Poltava, Chernigov, Kiev, Volynia, Podol’sk, Kherson, and Bessarabia; in the districts (uezdy) of Simferopol’, Evpatoriia, Yalta, Feodosiia, and Perekop; in the cities of Berdiansk, Voronezh (with its district), Rostov-na-Donu, and Mariupol’; and in the city governorships (gradonachaVstva) of Odessa, Taganrog, and Kerch’-Enikal’sk.95 Beyond Moscow and St. Petersburg, therefore, reinforced security was instituted primarily in central, southwestern, and southern Ukraine, plus the Crimean Peninsula. Most of these areas remained under these provisions until 1917. (Note that this declaration affected only ten full and three partial provinces, significantly fewer than the twenty-one—plus Poland—affected by the 5 April 1879 law.)

Further Security Police Reforms Interior Minister Ignat’ev enacted other measures, besides the security law, to improve the work of the security police. A regulation of 1 March 1882 obliged regular police and gendarmes to maintain covert surveillance (nabliudenie) over suspected political criminals as reported to them by the Police Department. Obviously, the police and gendarmes had previously kept within their gaze persons deemed politically unreliable, but this new regulation sys­ tematized and rendered obligatory the maintenance of secret surveillance over

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certain categories of people. In a similar vein, a law of 12 March 1882 de­ fined the condition— called police supervision (politseiskii nadzor)—under which all administrative exiles, as well as people not exiled but still regarded as politically unreliable, would henceforth live. The new rules of police su­ pervision were restrictive, but at least they were well defined. Moreover, the rules were not always strictly enforced: many exiles managed to work as teachers, lawyers, or even civil servants, and in practice the police, despite their authority to do so, rarely inspected their personal correspondence. The police’s right to search an exile’s domicile at any time was also presumably not widely exercised.96 Once released from this state of open police supervi­ sion, exiles and other politically unreliable people were supposed to be placed under secret surveillance, in accordance with the terms of the regulation of 1 March 1882, for a period of at least one year. In the countryside, gendarme officers bore responsibility for maintaining this form of surveillance; in the towns and cities, the burden fell to the regular police. Secret surveillance dif­ fered from police supervision in that it was supposed to be entirely unobtru­ sive. In practice, however, it seems that this was not always the case, owing to the indiscretion of the police and gendarmes.97 Dmitrii Tolstoi, appointed interior minister on 30 May 1882, P. V. Orzhevskii, his deputy, and V. K. Plehve, the director of the Police Depart­ ment from April 1881 to 1884, also undertook numerous steps to fortify the security system. One of their first acts was to issue a secret directive on 5 June 1882, which regulated and expanded the interception of personal correspon­ dence, or “perlustration.” Although in use in Russia since the late eighteenth century,98 the interception of mail appears to have remained unsystematic un­ til the early 1880s. A law of 30 October 1878 had permitted specified admin­ istrative and police officials to violate the personal correspondence of people under criminal investigation. Such violations probably occurred rarely, since each such case required the approval either of a judge or of the gendarme chief and the interior and justice ministers. The directive of 5 June 1882, mentioned above, authorized specified officials to violate the letters of any person. Government officials must have felt uncomfortable about the policy; they referred to it among themselves only as “the secret matter.”99 The direc­ tive pointed to the tsar’s need to receive a reliable flow of information regard­ ing public opinion and the general course of events but also regarding influen­ tial people. In practice, only the tsar and the minister of interior could be sure that the censors did not open their mail, a fact well-informed people knew or suspected. Rumor had it that the reformist Alexander II reveled in poring over inter­ cepted letters, whereas his “reactionary” son refused to do so. Anatole LeroyBeaulieu noted that many Russians in the late nineteenth century avoided us­ ing the mail service whenever possible. (This had been true in Austria under Metternich.) A senior administrative official, S. E. Kryzhanovskii, wrote that he never sent important personal letters via the regular post. He also alleged that some clever civil servants, aware of the practice, sought to turn it to their

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advantage by composing and sending letters, with either praising or critical contents as the case might require, in the hope that their superiors would in­ tercept them. By 1903, rumors circulated widely that the mail of highly placed officials was systematically violated. The rumors were confirmed for Police Chief Aleksei Lopukhin, when he found some of his own letters among the papers of Plehve after the interior minister’s assassination in 1904. Finally, during the war with Japan, a separate bureau was created to intercept the mail of foreign diplomatic representations.100 The system, which apparently developed gradually from the midcentury on, comprehended seven “black offices” (chemye kabinety). The term itself, along with much of the methodology, resembled that in place in France under the Restoration. The seven black offices operated in Moscow, St. Petersburg, Warsaw, Odessa, Kiev, Khar’kov, and Tiflis at these cities’ main post offices in the Department of Censorship of Foreign Newspapers and Journals. Thus the main targets of the intrusive practice were the Imperial capitals and southern and western border areas. In 1882, the offices employed 20 clerks, had a bud­ get of 92,000 rubles annually, and opened 380,000 letters, from which they made about 3,600 copies. The number of copies rose to 5,481 in 1900, to 8,642 in 1904, and to 10,182 in 1905. A. D. Fomin, for nearly twenty-five years (1891-1915) the senior censor in St. Petersburg, headed the operation in the main post office with a staff of eleven men, all of whom were welleducated polyglots—a few knew from fifteen to twenty foreign languages. A large yellow cabinet in Fomin’s office, located on the third floor, disguised the entrance to the black office. Each year clerks in this inner sanctum prepared and distributed lists of addresses, totaling approximately three hundred in the 1880s and one thousand by 1904, to the seven perlustration offices. Guided by these lists, by lists received from local police officials, and by their own initia­ tive, postal sorters in the capital and at the provincial offices winnowed out letters deemed suspicious. Using sophisticated techniques, the censors opened all these letters and then selectively made copies for the Police Department. Expert cryptographers at the Police Department, such as the brilliant I. A. Zybin, who joined the staff just before the turn of the century, easily deciphered the primitive codes employed by revolutionary activists. After the turn of the century, other specialists, such as the Zubatov protégé V. N. Zverev, master­ fully recreated letters originally written with invisible inks so that they could be forwarded to their addressees.101 Police analysts teased phenomenal amounts of information out of the intercepted letters, sometimes establishing the identity of persons referred to in letters only by their initials. Although the strict procedural rules established by the law of 30 October 1878 precluded the frequent use of intercepted letters as evidence in court or even for gendarme inquests, perlustration became an important auxiliary method of security policing. It rarely led directly to the foiling of revolution­ ary plots (a startling exception was the assassination attempt scheduled for 1 March 1887). Still, the security police often found in intercepted letters clues about the activities, the mutual relations, or the whereabouts of people under

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surveillance. To help interpret and develop thosse clues, they regularly circu­ lated copies of letters among themselves. Perlustration served a higher end as well. Drawing on information thus derived, the senior censor prepared an an­ nual report for the interior minister on the public mood in Russia.102 Those revolutionaries who, rightly fearing police intrusion, avoided using the postal service found this to be a major impediment to communicating among themselves. By contrast, the careless, who sent letters by mail to their comrades, laid themselves open to detection and disorganization by the po­ lice. Even the exceptionally cautious V. I. Lenin did not always evade the postal censors. Forty of his letters repose in archival collections as a result of perlustration. More such letters might have been preserved but for the Police Department’s policy of destroying all intercepted letters after ten years. Be­ cause of this policy, almost no intercepted letters remain from the period cov­ ered by this volume. Had any of those letters been preserved, one might have found such epistolary gems as one of 25 February 1911, which begins, “Dear S. V.: I have used a safe address [in Germany], since you always worry that they open your mail.” In the face of such negligence on the part of revolution­ aries, S. Maiskii, who worked for years in the St. Petersburg black office, later admitted that he had been “continuously astonished by the carelessness or naïveté—not to say more—of experienced revolutionaries who sent letters simultaneously and from the same post office.” He goes on to describe the contents of two such simultaneous letters: “one with extremely sensitive con­ tents, unsigned, to a member of [a revolutionary] party, and a second to [a close relative], signed ‘yours, Volodia.’” 103 Other security police reforms undertaken by Plehve, Orzhevskii, and Tol­ stoi included a law of 25 June 1882, which conferred on one deputy interior minister the title “commander of the Gendarme Corps.” Later, on 16 July 1882 a law made that deputy minister responsible for security police matters. Potentially more significant, a directive of 31 December 1882 authorized the new deputy interior minister to create an entire network of security bureaus. The plan was conceived by the first director of Moscow’s Security Bureau, A. S. Skandrakov. Except for one bureau created in Warsaw in 1900, the plan was implemented only in 1902, when the opposition movements had begun to mature.104 The deputy interior minister for police affairs counted among his powers the right to appoint a “secret police inspector.” This position was created es­ pecially for Grigorii Sudeikin, the director of the St. Petersburg Security Bu­ reau since early 1881. A separate directive of 29 January 1883 gave Sudeikin broad authority over the security police apparatus. This made him the coun­ try’s most powerful security policeman. Previously a gendarme officer at the Kiev Gendarme Station, Sudeikin was highly regarded even by such promi­ nent statesmen as State Secretary A. A. Polovtsev, who wrote that he had worn the gendarme uniform “not out of obligation, but by conviction, enthu­ siastically.” He continues, “The battle with the nihilists was for him not un­ like the hunt, with all of the images that this brings to mind. The struggle as

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an art, cunning, risk, the pleasure derived from success—all this was impor­ tant in Sudeikin’s investigatory endeavors—endeavors crowned recently with great success.”105 Since its inception the Third Section, in its struggle with dissidents and opponents of the regime, had relied primarily on denunciations and interroga­ tions of suspects. The formation and development of the conspiratorial Peo­ ple’s Will posed a new threat to the regime, which the security police were illequipped to address, for no one but actual members of this organization were able to illuminate their activities from within. In order not to peer on blindly from the outside, the police were obliged either to recruit existing members of People’s Will or to insinuate new members into the organization. Both methods were fraught with danger but also promised immense rewards if con­ ducted successfully. After all, Kletochnikov had permitted the leadership of People’s Will to remain a few steps ahead of the police during the critical years of 1879 and 1880. Moreover, Sudeikin raised the recruitment and de­ ployment of informants to the level of an art. A contemporary later recalled that “no group, even one consisting of five or six people, could work in St. Petersburg among students or industrial workers for longer than two or three months without becoming known to Sudeikin.”106 Even if this assessment is an exaggeration, it summarizes the fear that the security service had begun to strike in the hearts of revolutionary organizers. Sudeikin became* adept at weakening the resolve of revolutionaries. First he jailed them under harsh conditions, then he placed them in more comfort­ able surroundings, where he presented his views on how to reform the ab­ solute monarchy. He assured his captives that the government was preparing major reforms, to which revolutionary violence would surely put an end. He also warned them, however, that the government knew well the history of the revolutionary movement, saying, “We know that the revolutionary movement cannot be stamped out; but it can be rendered harmless: you grow up and we cut you down; you grow up and we cut you down.” He illustrated his words by a side-to-side gesture of his hand. Finally, the security chief gave them money and their liberty; invariably some would return and consent to provide information. Sudeikin’s own mastery of the game of political counterintelli­ gence brought him accolades and permitted him to destroy the People’s Will organization. He owed his success to informants such as Stepan Belov, who helped weaken People’s Will in St. Petersburg in late 1881 and in Moscow in early 1882, and especially Sergei Petrovich Degaev.107 Bom in Moscow in 1857, Degaev was the son of a doctor and a grandson of the famous historian N. A. Polevoi. Short in stature, Degaev was broad shouldered and slender; by nature he was lively and excitable. He joined Peo­ ple’s Will in 1880, helped to dig the tunnel under the Malaia Sadovaia, and became an informant sometime in 1882, probably at the time of his arrest in December. Sudeikin arranged Degaev’s escape from jail on 14 January 1883, and beginning in February they worked together to disorganize People’s Will and to prevent it from developing contacts with Marxist leaders. Later in the

Origins of a Modern Security Police

45

year, the p arty ’s leaders in Geneva discovered D egaev’s role as an informant— either by deduction or because he confessed. They demanded that he prove his loyalty to the party by helping them to murder Sudeikin, whose extreme caution placed him beyond the terrorists’ reach. Degaev, whom Sudeikin trusted fully, held the key to their success. As an added in­ centive, the party kept Degaev’s wife hostage in Paris. He accepted their terms. On 16 December 1883 he invited Sudeikin to his apartment in St. Pe­ tersburg, where N. P. Starodvorskii and V. P. Konashevich clubbed Sudeikin and his secretary to death. The Police Department, uncharacteristically, issued a wanted poster offering a ten-thousand ruble reward for Degaev’s capture. People’s Will responded to the offer by promising to kill anyone helping the police to lay hands on him. Degaev, meanwhile, fled abroad with his wife and settled in the United States. As Alexander Pell, he obtained a doctorate in mathematics from Johns Hopkins University in 1897 and taught from that year until 1908 at the University of South Dakota, where he was considered an extraordinarily generous, kind, enthusiastic, and supportive teacher and colleague.108 People’s Will, by contrast, never regained its former strength. To frustrate the conspirators’ efforts to reconstitute their organization in emigration, the Police Department created a security police outpost in Paris. Uniquely situated to keep watch over the roughly two hundred Russian “so­ cialists and anarchists” living in Europe in the 1880s, the Paris branch came to enjoy considerable prominence in the Imperial security police system. Greatly fearing an alliance of Russian and French revolutionaries, Paris Po­ lice Prefect Louis Andrieux was more than happy to collaborate with N. M. Baranov, who had been sent to inspect the French police system in 1880. Two years later, the groundwork for a central security bureau in Paris was laid by a Police Department official named Zhukov. It began operations in June 1883 in the basement of the Russian Embassy, located at 79 rue Grenelle, under the direction of an adventurer named Korvin-Krukovskii. Acting in conceit with Russia’s diplomatic posts throughout Europe as well as with European police authorities, the bureau employed a few local ex-policemen for its operations. These operations included financing pro-Russian journalists in France, main­ taining a Balkan office (closed in 1904) and a Berlin office (1900-1905), en­ suring the emperor’s security during his European trips, and carrying out mil­ itary intelligence. The Paris bureau, which cost fifty-eight thousand rubles in 1884, employed only six informants at any one time in the 1880s but proved a formidable enemy to Russian political exiles.109 The man who directed the Paris Security Bureau from 1885 to 1902, Petr Rachkovskii, cut an impressive figure. Bom in 1853 to a hereditary noble fa­ ther, Rachkovskii received his education at home and had worked briefly as an informant until his exposure by Kletochnikov in 1879. It was essential that the Paris security chief possess sufficient poise, aplomb, and social grace to deal effectively with French police, administrative, and political authorities. A close assistant to Sudeikin, Rachkovskii was dispatched to Paris in January 1884 in pursuit of Degaev. Although he failed in this assignment, Rachkovskii

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remained in Paris, where he married a Frenchwoman and undertook to de­ velop Russian police capacity in the French capital. Thanks to his informant A. M. Gekel’man-Landezen, an intimate confidant of A. N. Bakh, and with the help of Swiss and French police authorities, he repeatedly disorganized revolutionary circles, including People’s Will, in Geneva and Paris. Rachkovskii furthermore worked with conservative French journalists to up­ hold an antirevolutionary, pro-Russian publicity campaign in Le Figaro and Le Petit Parisien and in a series of pamphlets. He developed close ties to nu­ merous important (and by no means only conservative) French statesmen, in­ cluding Jean Constans, Théophile Delcassé, and Emile Loubet, which permit­ ted him to play a significant role in bringing about and cementing Russia’s diplomatic rapprochement with France. The French President Emile Loubet (1899-1906) apparently told Witte that, when he had once traveled to Lyon despite a warning that terrorists planned to murder him there, he had chosen to entrust his security to Rachkovskii rather than to the French Sûreté.110 Back in Russia, Tolstoi sought to heighten surveillance over society. On 4 November 1883 the interior minister directed the governors to submit weekly reports on a welter of topics concerning official and, especially, public life. The gathering and transmission of this information was to be conducted, ac­ cording to the directive, under the strictest secrecy. Presumably senior offi­ cials feared that such a policy would be perceived as overly intrusive by the educated public. In practice, however, the reports proved of little use to the government. The governors were apparently loath to relate any untoward de­ tails about life in their provinces.111 The simultaneous tightening of censor­ ship probably struck a weightier blow against opposition movements, since radical literature was their lifeblood, although the policy undoubtedly alien­ ated public opinion. Police surveillance of libraries and reading rooms was systematized by directives of 10 March 1883 and 5 January 1884, which en­ joined censorship and police authorities to compile lists of forbidden books. Throughout the course of 1884, these authorities removed from the libraries and reading rooms in many cities 133 separate items, including several runs of popular journals.112 Many of these publications had been entirely legal prior to the confiscation and had enjoyed popularity among liberal elites. The life of dedicated revolutionaries grew more and more difficult. In Rus­ sia, tightened security in prisons and more efficient surveillance of exiles nearly put an end to escapes by 1884, and more efficient patrolling of border crossings made it harder for political activists to emigrate or to slip back into the country. Those already abroad found Europe a less safe haven. In spring 1884 Lev Deich was arrested in Freiburg, Germany, and returned to Russia for trial as a regular criminal; the Odessa military court sentenced him to thir­ teen years’ hard labor. In May 1885 Russia and Prussia signed a treaty for the extradition of a variety of criminals, including persons accused merely of in­ sulting their respective emperors. Simultaneously, the Russian administrative exile system grew harsher. On 5 October 1884 the interior minister was em­ powered on his own authority to banish people from the Polish Kingdom. A

Origins of a Modern Security Police

47

directive of 22 May 1886 mandated the administrative exile of Jews belong­ ing to revolutionary organizations exclusively to eastern Siberia and set their term of exile as anything from one to ten years. Finally, a directive of 12 June 1887 made all revolutionary activists liable to a ten-year term of exile to east­ ern Siberia. Perhaps the worst blow to the movement, however, came in Octo­ ber 1884, when G. A. Lopatin was arrested and the addresses of 101 members of People’s Will in his possession fell into the security police’s nets, leading immediately to ninety-seven more arrests. The revolutionaries, especially members of People’s Will, increasingly found themselves hemmed in, and the police found it easier to convince revolutionary activists to inform on their colleagues.113 Due in part to the reform of the security police system. People’s Will con­ tinued its decline even after the assassination of Sudeikin. Gradually the num­ ber of People’s Will groups arrested by the police fell from over thirty per year (1882-1886) to ten per year ( 1888-1890).114 In all, 175 members of the People’s Will organization were brought to trial between 1880 and 1890. About one-half received death sentences, though only 11 percent of those condemned were put to death. During the remainder of the 1880s the People’s Will movement continued to function, though in a disorganized fashion, its members still arguing that terror was necessary to wring concessions from the government and to bring about sweeping social and political transformation. Yet the movement suffered from continuous police repression, and its mem­ bers were often forced to operate outside of St. Petersburg—an unacceptable predicament for an organization sworn to destroy the central government.115 In general, only petty propagandists managed to remain at liberty. The last major effort at political murder by People’s Will, the plot to kill Alexander III on 1 March 1887, failed, as noted above, as a result of perlustration. One member of the conspiracy, P. I. Andreushkin, boasted to a friend in a letter of 20 January 1887 that he was involved in an important affair and had to watch out for the police. Surveillance was established over him, which led to his arrest and that of his coconspirators. Confirming that perlustration played a critical role in this case, it was only after their arrest that the police grasped the scope of the operation.116 Five of the would-be terrorists were hanged on 8 May 1887 and the rest were condemned to hard labor in Siberia. On 23 May the Interior Ministry issued a directive strengthening the security bureau in the capital, demonstrating once again that terrorist attacks on the government tended to provoke the adoption of measures directed against ter­ rorism. In April a secret press operated by People’s Will had been seized by the security service. By the beginning of 1888, People’s Will had fallen into a deep crisis.117 It is not surprising, therefore, that in the face of such persistent police re­ pression some radicals abandoned revolutionary terrorism as pointless or too dangerous. Thus, A. N. Bakh later admitted that by 1887 the movement had become impotent and that it had never enjoyed mass support. An even more devastating critique of People’s Will came from Tikhomirov, one of its most

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talented propagandists. In a diary entry of March 1886 he wrote, “I have fi­ nally become convinced that revolutionary Russia, as a serious, creative force, does not exist. . . . Revolutionaries are active and will remain active, but this is an eddy on the surface of the sea, not a storm___ I have been con­ vinced for over one year that henceforth everything must come from Russia, from the Russian people, and that almost nothing can be expected from the revolutionaries.” On 20 February 1888 he repudiated political murder. Later that year, he and twelve other former revolutionaries appealed to the emperor for a pardon and permission to return to Russia; their request was granted.118 By late 1891, the Police Department reported with satisfaction that no seri­ ous political threats to the government had been uncovered over the course of the year. In 1892, only seventeen people were exiled for political unreliabil­ ity.119 Yet most security police officials—especially the provincial gendarme officers—were ill-suited to grapple with the relatively broad-based opposition movements that developed in reaction to the terrible famine and epidemic of 1891 and 1892 and the strike movements occurring from 1895 to 1897. To understand why this is the case, it is necessary to take a more in-depth look at security police personnel and their methods of operation.

C H A P T E R

T W O

The Security Police System Personnel and Local Institutions

erhaps no writer more negatively influenced worldwide opinion concerning Imperial Russia’s treatment of political criminals than George Kennan, who inspected the Siberian penal exile system from mid-1885 to summer 1886. Kennan claimed at the outset of the long account of his expe­ riences in Siberia that he had begun his investigation prejudiced against Rus­ sia’s revolutionary activists and favorably disposed toward the Imperial gov­ ernment. His travels among the exiles, however, prompted him to write a scathing indictment of the government and its penal policies. He concluded, “It was not terrorism that necessitated administrative exile in Russia; it was merciless severity and banishment without due process of law that provoked terrorism.”1 Kennan’s criticisms found deep resonance both abroad and in Russia, where his book was banned. It is worth bearing in mind, however, that Rus­ sia’s security police, most of whom were gendarme officers, rarely conducted themselves violently in their fight against sedition. Indeed, Iulii Martov later admitted that he had derived his idea of what awaited him in Siberian exile largely from Kennan’s book. Martov wrote, “I was almost certain that I would be locked up in complete ignorance of my fate until, according to the decision of a mysterious cabal, without knowing where and in any event without know­ ing why, I would be sent to the end of the world. So when I first experienced a gendarme interrogation [in 1891] with all its procedural norms and other ac­ cessories, I was even pleasantly surprised.” Similarly, Ivan Petrunkevich was amused by the gendarmes who formed two rows and stood at attention as he descended from a train en route to exile in Kostroma in 1879. V. G. Korolenko described an even more positive episode in 1880 concerning a party of politi­ cal exiles who cheered when they learned that gendarmes rather than regular

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Autocracy under Siege

policemen would escort them to Siberia.2 These experiences were far from unique. In the abundant memoirs of opponents of the regime one finds few ex­ amples of acts of brutality committed by gendarmes. On the contrary, radical memoirists describe courteous treatment by the gendarmes who searched, ar­ rested, or interrogated them.3 Perhaps most telling is the advice given by the Social Democrat V. Bakharev to his revolutionary comrades in a pamphlet of 1900 on coping with interrogation by gendarmes. Bakharev urged his comrades to keep silent and assured them that this would never result in physical violence against them. He writes, “We must learn from our enemies. Look how restrained, how tact­ ful gendarme colonels are! You may insult him in any way; he will not be in­ furiated. You may speak to him as harshly as you like, the more deferential he will become. You may catch him contradicting himself, in lies and stupidities. He will not defend himself; he will simply stop talking. They are very well trained for this. It would be insanity for us to try to argue with them.” The se­ curity police, according to Bakharev, nearly always adhered to legal proce­ dure because “if the Police Department began to exile us not only without trial but also without interrogation . . . it would be a constant source of social alienation and would be an excellent recruiter of supporters of our ideas. . . . Do not think that our enemies are fools.” He may have been overestimating the gendarmes’ professional sophistication, perhaps even consciously so, in order to place his comrades on their guard. Yet he was right to advise his comrades to stand up to their gendarme interrogators, as a number of revolu­ tionaries discovered. To give just one example, Ts. Zelikson-Bobrovskaia be­ gan a hunger strike upon being arrested in 1900 and soon had two gendarme officers begging her to eat and offering her spoonfuls of broth and milk. This is not to suggest that gendarme officers were paragons of kindness and cour­ tesy. There is some evidence that they treated members of the lower classes harshly—unless they happened to be members of revolutionary parties, as A. S. Shapovalov discovered.4 Even so, Russian society’s unfavorable view of the gendarmes was often somewhat irrational. Grigorii Gershuni admitted that they were generally very courteous but then, quoting Victor Hugo, remarked, “[E]xecutioners are often most courteous when they are conducting business.”5 In fact, though, the Russian gendarmes were scarcely executioners. They could, on their own authority, detain a person for no more than one week (or two weeks in places under reinforced security). The local governor could extend the period of de­ tention to one month. He, and only he, could recommend a person for admin­ istrative exile to the interior minister. Governors, not gendarmes, could order the flogging of rebellious peasants. Finally, the vast majority of gendarmes had very little to do with security policing as such; most of them differed lit­ tle from regular police. Given that gendarmes usually followed legal procedure, treated their pris­ oners courteously, could not on their own authority mete out a harsher pun­ ishment than a two-week detention, and in only a minority of cases acted as

Security Police System

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security police officers, why were they so disliked? Although there were many other high-profile defenders and representatives of the government, in­ cluding governors, police chiefs, Imperial guards, and prosecutors, the gen­ darmes were perceived as specially outfitted to combat the opposition move­ ments, whose activists the broader educated society apparently could not help respecting and even admiring. V. M. Zenzinov recalled how his father used to joke with a government official: “When my son is sent to Siberia for revolu­ tionary activity, please be kind to him.” The official laughed, too, and promised to do what he could. Even A. S. Suvorin and F. M. Dostoevsky ad­ mitted to each other in early 1880 that neither would dare to denounce a ter­ rorist to the police, largely for fear of public disapproval.6 The regime was losing legitimacy in the eyes of many educated Russians, while revolutionary activism and political opposition acquired an aura of sanctity. Combating them, which required the use of secret agents and spies, was naturally considered distasteful. It is ironic, however, that until after 1905 few gendarmes actively fought against political sedition, and that even fewer did so efficiently and successfully.

Gendarmes The government had belatedly met the terrorist challenge of People’s Will with a reorganization of its police institutions at the center. The rise of mass opposition movements in the latter 1890s, however, demanded the improve­ ment of the security police system at the local level. This meant raising the professional sophistication and efficiency of the system’s foot soldiers—the gendarmes. The difficulty of achieving that end is perhaps best illustrated by a brief examination of the gendarme station in Kiev, one of the key centers of radical activism in the empire. G. E. Geiking was assistant station chief for political affairs until May 1878, when a terrorist killed him. He had not been a despot. Lev Deich re­ ported that Geiking often failed to arrest known revolutionaries without ex­ press orders from the Police Department and even took a personal liking to some of them. His successor, Grigorii Sudeikin, was of firmer disposition and a much more devoted and talented combatant in the war on sedition, yet he was promoted to St. Petersburg in early 1880. The station chief, V. D. Novit­ skii, lacked Sudeikin’s mettle and flair for security policing but shared Gei­ king’s affability. Petr Kropotkin, whom Novitskii interrogated in 1874 in St. Petersburg, described him as an “active, clever, and if not for his gendarme activities, even pleasant man.” Novitskii was so “pleasant” that he seems to have been embarrassed to have had to detain the anarchist prince and even evinced sympathy for his vision of a communal utopia. Novitskii’s occasional indulgence toward youthful opponents of the regime was well known, and some clever parents of his prisoners used this knowledge to win special dis­ pensations for them.7 Novitskii’s methods of operation were unsophisticated. In early March

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1898, for example, his intelligence sources indicated that a Social Democrat resided in a house inhabited by V. V. Vodovozov, a well-known radical jour­ nalist, political activist, and former administrative exile. Instead of conduct­ ing a thorough investigation, however, on the night of 12 March 1898 Novit­ skii’s men arrested everyone in the house as part of an empirewide sweep against the Social Democratic movement. Vodovozov found himself in a cell with thirty people, who, as such prisoners usually did, created an ad hoc po­ litical forum. The gendarmes had managed to arrest a number of Social De­ mocratic leaders, including a founding member of the party, B. L. Eidel’man. Yet most of those detained were entirely innocent.8 This was typical of gen­ darme officers of Novitskii’s ilk: they arrested people not on the basis of evi­ dence but in order to obtain evidence.9 Vodovozov was probably right to argue that Novitskii’s crude methods produced side effects detrimental to the Imperial government. “Novitskii doubtless had not the slightest idea,” wrote Vodovozov, “that he had commit­ ted an act of violence against [innocent] people and that this violence could not possibly serve the interests of the government.” This assessment pre­ vailed among radicals in Kiev. In 1902, a few of them printed up a handbill expressing gratitude for his “brutality,” which had won them so many con­ verts.10 Novitskii’s methods may have been reasonably effective in earlier days, when active opponents of the regime numbered only a few thousand, but as opposition movements flourished in the late 1890s, gendarme officers such as Novitskii were hard put to control them. If Novitskii was considered by many senior officials to be one of the best security police officers in the empire, it seems likely that other provincial gendarme officers were even less effective than he. To combat broad-based opposition movements without alienating large numbers of people, one had to learn to target for repression only the movements’ leaders. Few gendarmes were prepared to rise to that challenge. The Gendarme Corps, even after Shuvalov’s reorganization of 1867, an­ swered to both military and civilian authorities in a cumbersome hierarchical arrangement. The interior minister and one of his deputies nominally headed the corps, but neither could issue orders to it directly.11 The War Ministry paid the gendarmes’ salaries. As policemen, however, they were subordinate to the Third Section before 1880 and to the Police Department thereafter. When the gendarmes had taken orders from the Third Section, they had stood only one step removed from the emperor, to whom the head of the Third Section had reported directly. After 1880, they found themselves at two removes from the emperor, which must have diminished their sense of self-worth and honor. Before 1880 the activity of the provincial gendarmes was entirely uncoordi­ nated with that of provincial governors. With the nominal subordination of both gendarmes and governors to the Interior Ministry, coordination of the two main police forces operating in the countryside was at least theoretically achievable. Still, the Gendarme Directorate, which was formally subordinate to the Interior Ministry, largely escaped civilian control in personnel matters.

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Thus, when the Police Department dismissed a gendarme for inefficiency or insubordination, the directorate often merely transferred him to another post. By the same token, the majority of gendarmes resented the demands placed on them by the Police Department, since their promotions depended on the Gendarme Directorate and not on the department. Successful cooperation be­ tween these two institutions depended primarily on the nature of the personal relations between their directors.12 By the end of the century, there were gendarme stations in sixty-seven provinces, in thirty districts in Poland, and in a few cities elsewhere. The number of gendarmes at each station was not large. Around the turn of the century, the Moscow provincial station employed only seventy-nine gen­ darmes, including perhaps ten officers. Those numbers were only one-third to one-half as great at most of the provincial stations. Preferring to live in the provincial capital cities—three of the Moscow station’s six district posts (one gendarme officer for every two districts) were located in Moscow itself—few gendarmes knew local conditions well. Most usually relied on reports from local police for assessments of local situations.13 Three gendarme divisions (divizii), each employing nearly five hundred enlisted men and a few officers, were located in Moscow, St. Petersburg, and Warsaw for crowd control and the maintenance of order in public places. These gendarmes bore no responsi­ bility for security police work: the enlisted men scarcely differed from regular infantry recruits, and the officers led a “carefree, serene lifestyle” as emblems of government authority in important public places. There were also twentynine railroad gendarme administrations (Zhandarmskie politseiskie upravleniia zheleznykh dorog), which covered vast territories (corresponding to major rail routes) and which oversaw a wide network of 272 gendarme posts at railroad stations throughout the empire. Moscow, for example, was the headquarters for five such administrations.14 The total number of gendarmes was 6,708 in 1880,9,243 in 1895, and per­ haps 10,000 in the first years after the turn of the century. (By contrast, France had 18,000 gendarmes in 1848.) Despite the swelling of the opposi­ tion movements, nearly all this growth was due to the expansion of railroad lines. The ranks of the railroad gendarmes grew from 2,558 in 1880, to 4,387 in 1895, to 7,417 (60% of the total of 12,369) in 1907. Railroad gendarmes differed little from regular police officers and rarely combated sedition. As a gendarme officer told A. I. Ivanchin-Pisarev in 1881, one could not “develop a taste for political cases” on the railroads. This was another weakness in the security system, in view of the important role played by railroad workers in the revolutions of 1905 and 1917.15 As were other military personnel, gendarmes were divided into officers and rank and file. About 9 percent were privates, who mostly served in the three gendarme divisions and had nothing to do with security policing, and 7 percent were officers. The rest were noncommissioned officers (NCOs), who were promoted from among ordinary soldiers upon nomination by their local gendarme station after meeting modestly stringent physical, moral, and

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political requirements. Most of them patrolled the railroad lines. The publication in 1903 of a collection of examples of gendarme NCOs displaying great heroism, selflessness, gallantry, courage, disinterestedness, and benevolence in the course of duty indicates that senior gendarme officials viewed them primarily as servants of the people and lighters of wrongs—not as security police officers. Under such rubrics as “Honest and Diligent Ser­ vice Always Receives Due Appreciation and Encouragement” appear stories of real-life gendarmes who placed themselves in the gravest physical danger in the name of duty, which is the “true sign of the veritable Russian soldier.” In 1899, for example, Iakov Semetskii opened his modest apartment and stores of edibles to 235 cold, hungry passengers whose train had exhausted its reserves of food and fuel and was laid up at a remote station. None of the de­ scribed acts went unrewarded. All the gendarme heroes received special mon­ etary compensation, some quite significant. Yet the point was not to lay one’s life on the line with an eye to gain but rather to act out of a selfless devotion to duty. In conferring appreciation and a modest remuneration on one stalwart sergeant in 1899, the chief of the Gendarme Corps took the opportunity to reaffirm that duty obligates officials of the Gendarme Corps always and everywhere to offer rightful protection [pokrovitel ’stvo ] to the oppressed \pritesniaemym] and altru­ istic assistance to the suffering. Religiously fulfilling these obligations, which are of the highest importance, officials of the Gendarmes Corps will merit the sincere praise of their commanders and will enjoy the proper respect of all, which is undoubtedly necessary for the successful fulfillment of their general and official obligations.16 The tenor of these stories underlines the continued relevance to the gendarme leadership of the corps’s supposedly paternalistic role in society. In order to reinforce this idea and as a token of his appreciation to “gendarme heroes,” in 1901 Nicholas II declared that henceforth the corps would celebrate 6 De­ cember as its own holiday. This was a great honor, because that date was the feast day of St. Nicholas the Miracle Worker, one of Russia’s most popular saints.17 The only gendarme NCOs who bore significant security policing responsi­ bilities were the roughly two thousand members of the special surveillance personnel employed throughout the countryside mostly at the district (uezd) level. Each of these gendarme NCOs was expected to know the inhabitants of his district and to earn their trust and favorable disposition. Rather than serve as an authority over them, he was to consider himself their protector from evil-minded people, as well as the “eyes and ears” of the government. In the latter capacity, these gendarme NCOs were instructed to report immediately on cases of peasant and worker unrest, the theft of church or state property, heinous murders, and the activities of “harmful” religious sects.18 This enu­ meration of their most important objects of surveillance suggests that battling sedition was not the first priority of the gendarme NCOs. Moreover, their

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work as the “eyes and ears” of a watchful state depended greatly on the regu­ lar police, especially given the fact that the gendarme stations even in major provinces such as Moscow employed only about a dozen officers and NCOs in the 1890s.*9 The number of gendarme officers was relatively small—only 521 in 1880, 693 in 1895, and 903 in 1907.20 Of these, about half worked on the railroads, in the Gendarme Corps headquarters, in the gendarme divisions, or in ports and fortresses. The other half were based in the provincial and district gen­ darme stations. At the turn of the century, perhaps 200 to 300 of these, includ­ ing roughly 150 special surveillance personnel, directly and regularly acted as security police officers. Socially, most gendarme officers were landless Russian Orthodox noble­ men; that is, they belonged to the bottom layer of the traditionally privileged Russian elite. The fathers of 78 percent of the seventy-two gendarme officers who served at the Moscow Gendarme Station during the twenty-five years following 1890 were noblemen (of these, 45% were hereditary and 55% were personal nobles). The rest were minor civil officials or meshchane (3% each), merchants or priests (4% each), or junior military officers (5%). Gendarme officers married women of similar social standing. The forty-six married offi­ cers in the cohort selected as brides Russian Orthodox women whose fathers were hereditary nobles (24%), personal nobles (48%), merchants (17%, in­ cluding two merchants of the first guild, membership in which required a cap­ ital of 50,000 rubles), minor civil officials (6.5%), or priests (4.5%).21 One suspects that the social status of the gendarme officers posted in more remote locations was inferior to that of the Moscow cohort, but it seems that the vast majority were of unprosperous gentry background. Ambitious young men from gentry families who could not aspire to enter the elite guards units often hoped to serve in the Gendarme Corps, which to many of them seemed more glamorous and prestigious than the regular military service.22 Although the prestige of the Gendarme Corps had diminished some­ what since the early nineteenth century, the dark blue uniform still retained some of its appeal at the turn of the century, perhaps especially among provin­ cial gentry families. Aleksandr Spiridovich commented, “[H]aving grown up in the Arkhangelsk backwater, [my sisters] were free from the usual intelligentsia prejudices against the dark blue uniform and regarded the gendarme officer simply: officer, serious and very important service, good salary, attractive uni­ form, what else is necessary for [their] brother?” The service certainly appeared extremely important, at least to the new recruits. As Spiridovich asserts. In our units we were taught that “a soldier is a servant of the tsar and the fatherland and their defender against enemies external and internal.” To the question: Who are the internal enemies, they replied thus: “Thieves, swindlers, murder­ ers, spies, socialists, and in general all who go against the sovereign and the in­ ternal order of the country.” We knew that the gendarmes waged the primary struggle against them and this could not but attract us, since this was the same defense of our homeland, the very same war, but merely internal.

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A romanticized account of gendarme heroics that he happened to read and a real-life gendarme officer who once came to the aid of his sister also helped to convince Spiridovich that service in the corps was a worthy pursuit.23 Given the popularity of gendarme service among the lesser nobility, en­ trance into the corps was difficult. A secret directive of 30 November 1867 excluded Roman Catholics and Jews but apparently not converts from those faiths. Military training and service was essential. One had to graduate in the upper third of one’s class from a two- or three-year course in a military or cadet (iunkerskoe) school. Simply passing the officers’ qualifying examina­ tion was inadequate.24 About half of the above-mentioned Moscow cohort had attended distinguished military schools with their rigorous academic pro­ gram. In addition, three gendarme officers in the cohort had received some university training. Candidates also had to be military officers with a mini­ mum of six years of service, but usually below the rank of captain (rotmistr). The competition among candidates was fierce. In 1871, the gendarme chief selected 21 out of 142 applicants for consideration, and only 6 were allowed to become gendarme officers. Prospective candidates underwent a preliminary examination, including both an oral and a written component, at the Gendarme Directorate in St. Pe­ tersburg. The successful examinees were then allowed to register for the course that prepared officers for the entrance examination. An officer who made it past this second hurdle was transferred by Imperial order to the Gen­ darme Corps. Spiridovich describes waiting in 1897 along with forty other of­ ficers to take the preliminary examination at the Gendarme Directorate and details what happened next “in the famous building by the Chain Bridge op­ posite the Church of St. Panteleimon”: Everything seemed terribly mysterious and important. The only approachable and kind person was the doorkeeper. Everything else was frigidly cold.. . . The examination commission was composed of adjutants of the Gendarme Direc­ torate with the participation of a representative of the Police Department, privy counsellor [A. K.] Iankulio [the head of the Police Department’s fourth divi­ sion]. This lean old man, whose appearance reminded one of Pobedonostsev, inspired in us a peculiar fright, although we ourselves were not sure why. On the first day we took the oral exam. I was asked [inter alia] about the commen­ tary in Novoe vremia on Lev Tikhomirov’s Konstitutsionalisty v epokhu 1881 goda___In the written examination my topic was “The influence of the reform of the all-estate military obligation on the development of literacy among the people.” He added that the selection of officers was so severe, the applicants so numer­ ous, that without a patron it was impossible to register for the entrance exami­ nation.25 Candidates selected to stand for the examination often received assistance from an old clerk named Orlov. He gave them pertinent advice and a reading list, as Aleksandr Martynov, who joined the corps in 1899, revealed in his

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memoirs. Martynov knew many gendarme officers who for years afterward never forgot to give Orlov a few rubles each time they visited the directorate. But Martynov had another advantage. His brother, Nikolai, who had already passed the examination, furnished him with numerous relevant books. They covered a wide array of subjects, including administrative, civil, and criminal law; Russian and European history; geography; Russian governmental organi­ zation; and current events.26 On the specified exam day, the examiners posed questions from what Mar­ tynov assumed was a long-established repertoire. To test the candidate's power of observation, they included a trick question, “What is written on a box of matches?” Asked about the institution of land captains, Martynov be­ gan to recite verbatim the Imperial manifesto that had established it in 1889, whereupon the examination ended. For the written portion, he had received from his brother several well-written essays on topics usually proposed at the examination. One of them, “The Judicial Reforms of Alexander II,” was pre­ cisely the theme of his written examination, on which he received a grade of “excellent.”27 Anyone who has read Martynov’s often incisive reports to the Police Department presumes that he could have passed the test without this il­ licit assistance, but the episode offers a glimpse into the way in which the system worked: through inside information, favoritism, and patronage. It is not surprising that some of those who failed the exam spread rumors about outrageously difficult questions.28 Meanwhile, Spiridovich returned home to Vilnius, where he continued to serve in his regiment for almost two years. Only after the return of his patron from duty in the Caucasus region was Spiridovich summoned to take the preparatory course. The local gendarme station gathered the “most detailed” information concerning both his political reliability (for obvious reasons) and his financial history, because the Gendarme Corps rules disallowed the re­ cruitment of persons with monetary debts or criminal records. By investigat­ ing an applicant’s financial history, the gendarme authorities sought to deter­ mine that the prospective candidate was not economically dependent on anyone, since “a gendarme must be independent.”29 The subjects in the preparatory course, which lasted from three to six months, included the organization, functions, and regulations of the Gen­ darme Corps; the execution of formal investigations (doznaniia); and the methods of domestic counterintelligence (politicheskii rozysk). In fact, how­ ever, Spiridovich recalled that he had received no more familiarity with do­ mestic counterintelligence than could be afforded by an unsystematic perusal of “several volumes [of documents] on the plot [of 1887] to assassinate Alexander III.”30 Upon completing the course, the candidates answered de­ tailed questions before a board of examiners and again wrote an essay. The candidates with the best test scores were generally permitted to choose from among the available openings throughout the empire; most popular with the candidates were the cushy jobs on private railroads in big cities. This stage of the selection process appears to have been more meritocratic than the earlier

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stages. Even here, however, connections could override high scores. Mar­ tynov’s rivals, despite their lower test scores, bypassed him in their competi­ tion for placement at the Moscow Security Bureau because they had influen­ tial patrons.31 What kind of men were gendarme officers, how did they view themselves, and how did the public view them? Most gendarme officers were unquestioningly obedient to authority and committed to both the ideal of absolutist monarchy and to their oath of loyalty to the monarch. Their worldview was paternalistic and traditional. Despite their military training, they did not dis­ play the hallmarks of militarists. Their attitude was rather that of soldiers long accustomed to the conditions of peacetime, and the central value in their worldview seems to have been honor, not valor. This meant that few gen­ darme officers felt comfortable with the new demands of the Police Depart­ ment that they devote more energy to interdicting sedition. In the words of Martynov, himself a nobleman, the Russian nobility strongly believed that “it was unbecoming for them to engage in ‘business’ or ‘trade’ or anything that requires continuous, uninterrupted, painstaking, and difficult work—either physical or even mental. With such a prejudice, absorbed into the very flesh and blood of each nobleman, one could hardly expect an officer of the Gen­ darme Corps, a nobleman by origin and an officer of the Russian army by profession, to undertake the ‘dirty work’ of the security police.” In a similar vein, M. E. Bakai, a police official who defected to the revolutionary camp in 1906, described gendarme officers in general as “well-fed people” (liudi sytoi zhizni) who generally read the yellow press and of whom few read even Novoe vremia, A. S. Suvorin’s popular conservative daily. Bernard Porter has argued that the Victorian social ethos, which was largely aristocratic and antientrepreneurial, prevented the British government from developing a seri­ ous security service until late in the nineteenth century.32 Britain’s and Rus­ sia’s resistance in this regard was in stark contrast to most of the major conti­ nental countries, where violent revolutionary organizations and broad-based social upheaval confronted and even toppled regimes from early in the cen­ tury and where specialized, efficient security police forces were developed as early as during the Napoleonic era. Despite the rigorous selection process, it seems that many provincial gen­ darme officers were relatively incompetent, and a few of them displayed an astonishingly low level of professionalism. Ivan Petrunkevich, who was ex­ iled to Smolensk in 1881, described how the local gendarme chief, S. A. Es­ ipov, asked him to write his yearly report on the “state of the province,” be­ cause the new guidelines for such reports were more demanding than in the past. In his eagerness to receive assistance, Esipov agreed to send the report to St. Petersburg without revisions. Petrunkevich seized the occasion to rec­ ommend easing the censorship laws, creating a forum for the expression of public opinion, and reinforcing the rule of law. Esipov seems actually to have sent the report.33 A provincial gendarme chief who, out of laziness or inepti­ tude, asked for professional help from a man exiled to his province for politi-

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cal unreliability was surely a rare exception. Yet the repeated admonitions aimed by police officials at the provincial gendarme chiefs suggest that this exception was symptomatic of a general weakness throughout the network of gendarme stations. The self-image of many Russian gendarme officers seems to have been as a pillar of the Imperial order engaged not so much in an antisubversive strug­ gle as in upholding state and public order and promoting the common good. At least until 1906, they generally felt little personal or professional animos­ ity toward revolutionaries. They may have viewed “socialists” and “nihilists” as legitimate targets for repression, but few were willing or equipped to wage a shadowy war against them. Their distinctive uniforms made them overt symbols of the regime, positive ones to be sure from their own point of view, but like lightning rods for opposition sentiment, they drew to themselves much public animosity. In 1867, senior gendarme officials admitted that the gendarmes' blue uni­ forms inspired distrust. Nevertheless, in 1884 the Kakhanov Commission based its decision to oppose a proposed unification of the gendarmes and the regular police on the fear that this would weaken gendarme morale. The com­ mission concluded that the gendarmes were better trained, had a greater cor­ porate spirit, and were more esteemed by the population at large than were the regular police. Also, as Spiridovich asserted, not only his own family but “most people in Vilnius” looked favorably upon the gendarmes. This was probably true after the turn of the century as well, when one suspects that at least some of the avid readers of popular detective stories viewed the gen­ darmes with admiration.34 Be that as it may, within much of educated Russian society gendarme officers were not well liked. Thus, R P. Zavarzin felt a rup­ ture between himself and his “left-leaning” fellow regimental officers at the time of his induction into the Gendarme Corps in 1898; Spiridovich’s future father-in-law sought vainly to discourage him from joining the corps; and V. G. Korolenko knew of a military officer whose desire to enter the corps precipitated his dismissal from his regiment.35 The gendarme officers’ security-police functions were technically of two kinds: investigating state crimes and maintaining surveillance over the popu­ lation. Beginning on 19 May 1871 gendarme officers had borne the responsi­ bility for conducting formal investigations into political crimes. By far the largest number of such investigations were carried out by provincial gen­ darme officers in major urban centers. Prosecutors by law supervised each in­ vestigation. Given the prosecutors’ greater knowledge of the law and their ex­ perience in following legal procedure, they tended to dominate these investigations, and the gendarme officers often found themselves acting like clerks. A. F. Koni, the well-known liberal jurist who presided over the court that exonerated Vera Zasulich in 1878, was a prosecutor from 1871 to 1877. During those years, he found that many gendarmes felt uncomfortable about what seemed to them the excessive zeal of most prosecutors in their efforts to hammer together cases against alleged political criminals. It seems that the

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prosecutors’ ardor for pursuing political dissidents cooled somewhat as the century wore on, while that of at least a portion of the gendarmes increased. In any event, gendarme officers played an important role in combating sedi­ tion when they persuaded suspected revolutionaries to confess their guilt, to describe their methods of operation and the organizations of which they were a part, and, occasionally, to disclose information concerning their comrades.36 The second task shared by all gendarme officers and NCOs, but again pri­ marily carried out by provincial gendarme officers, was to serve as the “eyes and ears” of the government. This function reached beyond security policing. As late as 1875 an official directive perpetuated the gendarmes’ role as moni­ tors of the conduct of all government officials and priests. The directive also caused them to attend carefully to a wide variety of social phenomena, even as they sought to cultivate positive relations with the general population, so as to encourage ordinary people to turn to them for help.37 This was a remnant of Nicholas I’s conception of his gendarmes as guardian angels sent out to wipe away the tears of the sorrowful. As difficult as it probably was for gen­ darmes in 1875 to cultivate good relations with the public and to combat offi­ cial misconduct, keeping tabs on subversive elements must have been even harder. The main problem was the near absence of funding for secret infor­ mants. It is therefore not surprising that, as one senior gendarme official com­ plained to Mezentsev in January 1877, “no one even knows about the direc­ tive, and it is binding on none.”38 One year later, Mezentsev modestly increased the funding for informants. More important, senior police officials began to narrow the focus of gen­ darme surveillance. A directive of 1887, addressed only to provincial gen­ darme officers, required them to devote more attention to assessing “the gen­ eral mood of the population” and to watching assiduously for seditious phenomena, such as peasant and worker disorders and “harmful teachings.”39 The absence of any mention in the directive of covert methods of operation indicates that the majority of even provincial gendarme officers were not ex­ pected to match wits with conspirators. In fact, according to a directive of 1889, many provincial gendarme officers found it difficult even so much as to maintain under covert surveillance convicts released from prison and other categories of people specified in the decree on covert surveillance of 1 March 1882.^ Of the two principle gendarme methods, senior police officials considered gendarme interrogations to be the more important. Indeed, from the adoption of the 19 May 1871 law until after the turn of the century they held it to be the key method of combating the revolutionary movements. Yet specialized security officers such as Sudeikin argued that the skillful deployment of infor­ mants was the only effective means for sounding out the revolutionary under­ ground. Martynov even asserted that gendarme investigations occasionally hampered the painstaking work of specialized security officers by uncovering criminal activity against which formal legal action had to be taken prema­ turely.41 Either Sudeikin or Martynov might have added that recruiting infor-

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mants could have helped the provincial gendarme officers more effectively to conduct both their investigations into political crimes and their general watch­ fulness. But even such talented officers as Spiridovich confessed that they had initially felt revulsion at the thought of using informants to defeat the revolu­ tionaries. This sentiment had eventually dissolved under the guiding influence of the civilian Zubatov. As Spiridovich wrote, “We understood that without spies it was impossible to know what was happening in the enemy camp; we realized that informants were just as necessary as military spies . . . but for us officers, trained in the traditions of camaraderie and loyalty to one’s friends, it was difficult immediately to adopt the perspective of cold reason and to seek to persuade a person to betray everything dear to him. Our non-military chief [Zubatov] could not understand this.”42 General Novitskii, for example, never grasped the subtleties of employing informants. In an official report, his assistant argued that “the only informants liable to provide high-quality information are those who do not come into close contact with actual revolutionary activity but who are acquainted in part with the historical developments of the movement [to be infiltrated] and with its external manifestations at a given moment.” The police report relating these remarks added that they needed no commentary, since every security of­ ficer worth his salt knew that informants with inside knowledge of a conspira­ torial organization could provide enormously valuable intelligence about it.43 Since few provincial gendarme officers had the means or desire to employ specialized agents, and because they were not allowed to intercept mail, those who wished to combat sedition had few tools at their disposal. One was the interrogation of suspects under investigation. Each year hundreds of statecrime investigations yielded a wealth of information about the revolutionary movements. To systematize this information and thus make it useful to all an­ tirevolutionary combatants, in July 1881 the Police Department instituted an in-depth annual survey of major political crime investigations conducted by gendarme stations across the empire. Prepared by specialists at the Police De­ partment and printed in limited press runs, the two- to three-hundred-page surveys were distributed four times (later twice and finally once) yearly to all gendarme stations and security bureaus and were used in the training program for new gendarme officers.44 Not merely a compilation of facts and detail, the surveys were serious, intelligent, analytic reports on the state of the Russian revolutionary movements at home and abroad. Another method of intelligence-gathering used by provincial gendarme of­ ficers was the unsolicited denunciation. Delation, or denouncing illicit activi­ ties to government authorities, seems to have existed in all societies. In gen­ eral, the phenomenon of the government-encouraged denunciation of crimes against the state appears to be most common in polities with a weakly devel­ oped civil society and where ruling elites (secular and ecclesiastical, central and provincial) lay claim to extensive control over the behavior— even the thoughts—of the ruled, or where rulers are viewed as illegitimate or as usurpers. It is essential to the phenomenon, however, that at least a portion of

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the ruled be willing to furnish information about other people to the appropri­ ate governmental organs in accordance with rules (formal or informal) estab­ lished by custom or, in some cases, by those organs.45 Denunciation constituted the Russian security police’s most important source of information from Muscovy to the end of the eighteenth century, when Catherine II sought to curtail its use. Alexander II supposedly once spumed a list of Herzen’s visitors in London, remarking, “[I]t is shameful to read denunciations.” Even so, the Russian security service received a large number of denunciations throughout their existence. There was a flood of them immediately following Karakozov’s assassination attempt in 1866. Most were lodged against Poles, since many people expected the assassin to turn out to be Polish. The revolutionary spy Kletochnikov was demoralized by the enormous quantity of denunciations, the majority of which he considered spurious, that flowed steadily into his office in the Third Section in 1879 and 1880. The police archives house many stout files of denunciations to gover­ nors, governors general, gendarme stations, regular police stations, criminal investigation bureaus, and other police institutions—dating right past the turn of the century. Many of them concern alleged revolutionaries or subversive activities, such as threats against senior officials, imminent student disorders, and the possession of illegal literature or of firearms. Others denounce people with unconventional lifestyles or those who kept disreputable company.46 The intelligence value of such information was often trifling. In 1891, po­ lice officials reproached gendarme officers with launching investigations against persons named in denunciations without first subjecting the accusers and their accusations to a reasonable level of scrutiny.47 As the security ser­ vice developed more sophisticated methods of gathering information, they re­ lied gradually less and less on denunciations. As the revolutionaries grew more secretive and tight-lipped, gendarme investigations yielded fewer and fewer positive results. The specialized security officers, who followed in the footsteps of Sudeikin, needed to develop more offensive methods.

Security Officers The majority of gendarme officers, as stated above, preferred comfortable jobs on the railroad lines. A few hundred gendarme officers engaged in secu­ rity policing at the provincial gendarme stations. Only a very small number dedicated themselves to the struggle against sedition. A. I. Ivanov, chief of the Saratov Gendarme Station in the mid-1890s, for example, employed secret informants, plainclothes surveillants, and even perlustration (presumably by personal arrangement with local postal officials) to keep local radicals under surveillance. The results he obtained, however, were meager. His major coup, apparently, was the seizure in October 1894 of an anonymously published subversive text entitled Project o f a Russian Consti­ tution,48 Ivanov probably found it difficult to achieve more than the uncover­ ing of the modest conspiracies of provincial constitutionalists because of his lack of training in the methods of security policing and the paltry sums dis-

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bursed to provincial gendarme stations for the employment of informants. As late as 1897, the stations in key centers such as Kiev and Khar’kov received at most seven thousand rubles per year for this purpose (as compared to fifty or so thousand for the Moscow Security Bureau), and most disposed of fewer than one thousand rubles.49 During the decade before the creation of a network of security bureaus in 1902, there were perhaps three dozen specialized security officers. Sixteen were gendarme officers of the reserve (ofitsery rezerva) attached to the gen­ darme stations in Moscow, in St. Petersburg, and in several cities of the west­ ern and southern borderlands, such as Kiev, Riga, Warsaw, Khar’kov, and Ti­ flis. In the major gendarme stations, one adjutant also specialized in security policing. Finally, another dozen or so gendarme officers worked at the secu­ rity bureaus in Moscow and St. Petersburg.50 Those officers who devoted themselves to security policing were in many cases virtually disowned by the other gendarmes, who said, “We are gen­ darmes; you are employees of the Police Department.”51 This being the case, what prompted a tiny minority of gendarme officers to become security offi­ cers, or okhrannikil The call of duty must have inspired many to join the struggle against the revolutionaries.52 A love of adventure and a desire for power were almost certainly other important factors for many recruits. Mate­ rially, specialized security officers could expect inconsistent treatment. On the one hand, it seems that they were often promoted more slowly than ordinary gendarme officers.53 On the other hand, at the end of the century the Moscow Security Bureau chief earned four thousand rubles yearly plus free housing, while the gendarme station chief in Moscow earned roughly the same salary despite his higher rank.54 Whereas a provincial gendarme station chief usually bore the rank of general-maior and was never lower in rank than colonel, or polkovnik (classes 4 and 6 on the Table of Ranks), security bureau directors were never higher in rank than polkovnik and many were lieutenants (podpolkovniki) or even cap­ tains (rotmistry; classes 7 and 8 respectively). Even Sudeikin, inspector for Se­ cret Police at the end of his career, was a mere podpolkovnik, and Zubatov rose to its civilian equivalent (nadvomyi sovetnik) only on the eve of his retirement in 1903.55 These ranks were hardly commensurate with their enormous power.56 Just to take one example from Zubatov’s career as Moscow Security Bureau chief, he regularly sent his agents all across the empire to conduct se­ curity police operations. In many cases, these Zubatovites demanded and re­ ceived support from the provincial gendarmes. By contrast, no gendarme sta­ tion chief would ever have presumed to undertake anything so bold.

The Security Bureaus The two most important centers for security policing were Russia’s two biggest, most important cities, St. Petersburg and Moscow. The security bu­ reau at 2 Gorokhovaia Street in St. Petersburg dominated security policing and crushed the People’s Will organization in the early 1880s under the

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directorship of Sudeikin. After Sudeikin’s death in late 1883, despite many successes in the antirevolutionary struggle, the bureau declined in efficacy, in large part due to weak leaders, such as P. V. Sekerinskii, who headed the bureau from 1885 to 1897. According to a Police Department official and erstwhile informant, N. E. Pankrat’ev, Sekerinskii customarily met with his secret informants at the bureau’s headquarters, a practice hazardous to their anonymity. Predictably, Zubatov had a low opinion of Sekerinskii as a secu­ rity police officer. In 1897, following a formal inspection of Sekerinskii’s disbursal of funds for informants’ salaries and secret apartments, he was re­ placed by V. M. Piramidov. The Gendarme Corps immediately promoted Sekerinskii in rank and made him director of the St. Petersburg Gendarme Station, probably out of resentment toward the Police Department’s decision to remove him in the first place. Martynov, who served at the gendarme sta­ tion in 1901, described Sekerinskii as a “vestige of the past who each day made the rounds of the St. Petersburg Security Bureau, the Gendarme Direc­ torate and the Police Department, certainly not on business, but simply to maintain contacts and good relations and in order to get a sense of what was happening in high places.” One can understand Sekerinskii’s longevity as di­ rector of the security bureau in St. Petersburg only with reference to his cul­ tivation of relations with senior officials and to the accidental foiling of the plot to kill the emperor in 1887, which earned him a prestigious award and nearly six thousand rubles for his men.57 Moscow’s security bureau, by contrast, began to develop its full potential by the mid-1890s, thanks to the exceptional talent and energy of Zubatov. Under his leadership, it soon became the virtual operational center of the Im­ perial security system.58 After the turn of the century, the “Moscow system” served as the model for Russia’s security police in St. Petersburg and throughout the empire, despite the fact that St. Petersburg was the seat of the Imperial government, the official residence of the emperor and his family, and the headquarters of the Police Department. The Moscow Security Bureau’s duties and powers were delineated quite broadly in a report of 25 September 1880 by the Moscow city governor. They included the investigation of political crimes, the arrest and detention of polit­ ical suspects, covert and overt surveillance, the deployment of various kinds of agents, and the right to recommend candidates for administrative exile. The Moscow bureau, while formally subordinated to the city governor, was to in­ volve itself as little as possible with administrative matters.59 This stricture presumably meant that the new institution was to be less accountable to higher bureaucratic authorities than were other lower- and middle-level insti­ tutions in the provinces. The St. Petersburg bureau received a similar “job de­ scription” on 23 May 1887, that is, two months after an attempt on the em­ peror’s life. Approved by the interior minister, this document served as the legal basis for the bureau’s operations, as stipulated by the 1892 edition of the Digest of Laws. Oddly, the Moscow bureau’s legal status was never formal­ ized in this manner. Instead, according to the report of 25 September 1880, the

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bureau’s director was supposed to conform to the rules regulating the opera­ tions of its northern counterpart.60 In practice, the very opposite took place. The force of an official’s personality and the quality of his patrons often over­ rode the formal precepts governing his actions in late Imperial Russia. The security bureaus in Moscow and St. Petersburg were relatively small but complex institutions, with respective modest budgets of 50,000 and 90,000 rubles in the late 1880s and of 112,000 and 120,000 rubles in 1902. (The emperor’s security force alone disposed of 161,000 rubles in 1902.) The half-dozen to dozen gendarme and civilian officials in each bureau special­ ized in several key areas, including overseeing plainclothes surveillance, reg­ istering inhabitants in the two cities, guiding secret informants, researching suspicious addresses, verifying political reliability, and supervising arrests. The staff maintained various inventories— of departmental correspondence, wanted lists, and materials relating to passport verification. The bureaus also maintained a card catalog and, beginning in 1902 in the case of Moscow, al­ phabetic registers of people under their watchful eyes.61 The security bureaus often relied on support from the local gendarme sta­ tions, especially in maintaining surveillance over people and organizations with ties to the countryside. A typical, if somewhat colorful, case of such co­ operation occurred in June 1902. In that month, the rural police chief (ispravnik) of Moscow District reported to the local gendarme NCO that his men had recently observed late-night meetings at the school of the Russian Society of Amateur Gardeners. After further investigation, which indicated that the school had not received official permission to offer public lectures during the current year, the gendarme officer contacted Zubatov, because some members of the school resided in Moscow city. The two officials shared intelligence on the school and agreed to keep it under surveillance. During the summer, minor disturbances occurred there, culminating in the destruc­ tion on 8 August of a full-length portrait of Nicholas I and his wife, Empress Alexandra Fedorovna. The Russian penal code prescribed extremely harsh punishments for such actions, up to and including eight years of hard labor. With the approval of the security bureau, the gendarme station undertook a formal investigation into the incident. The investigation yielded illegal litera­ ture, a rudimentary printing press, and proclamations “of harmful tendency.” Nine people were arrested; none was charged with any crime; a few were kept under surveillance.62 As this case suggests, the specialized security offi­ cers and the provincial gendarme officers, despite their limited resources, kept watch over a wide range of social organizations and persons. They could not have done so without continuous support from the regular police.

Regular Police Assistance All regular policemen—both rural and urban—bore responsibility for un­ covering political crimes and were obligated to report on them to the appro­ priate local gendarme or security authorities and to*investigate such crimes in

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their absence.63 These authorities could not, however, always count on effi­ cient assistance from the regular police. While it is true that inefficiency in the lower ranks characterized all police systems before the twentieth century, regular police forces in some western European countries made significant strides in this regard during the nineteenth century. In Austria and England, police recruits underwent gradually more rigorous training programs. The English police, as a result of extensive training, became both efficient and courteous. The German policemen, who were recruited principally from the military, received little formal training. They were impolite toward the public, yet as crime-fighters they were probably as effective as their English counter­ parts. In Russia, after police reforms in the late 1890s, ordinary policemen still received only two to four weeks’ training.64 They generally were neither courteous nor efficient. Here one might recall the widespread illiteracy and authoritarian manner of the bulk of the Russian population, the peasantry, from which most regular policemen were recruited. The burgeoning opposition movements of the mid-1890s obliged the secu­ rity bureaus to rely ever more heavily upon the regular police, despite their shortcomings. Beginning in 1896, in response to the recent massive strikes, the security bureaus in Moscow and St. Petersburg began to employ, respec­ tively, forty-one and forty-eight regular police inspectors (nadzirateli) as li­ aisons with the cities’ regular police. The inspectors, who received a basic salary of forty-five to sixty rubles monthly plus a supplement from the secu­ rity bureau of five to twenty-five rubles, carried out general surveillance throughout the precincts, watching for suspicious behavior, especially among students and workers. In constant contact with other regular policemen, resi­ dential custodians (dvomiki), and night watchmen, each police inspector was to report to his precinct captain (pristav) on both the mood of the population and any unusual occurrences. In Moscow, eleven of the inspectors worked di­ rectly at security bureau headquarters but remained in constant contact with the inspectors working in the field, from whom they received daily reports on precinct life. These data were recorded in the various surveillance registers.65 Regular police surveillance took various forms. The most systematic was passport control, which permitted the security bureau to keep track of nearly every person entering or leaving Moscow. All persons staying longer than three days in Moscow, St. Petersburg, and the other cities under a state of re­ inforced security were compelled to yield their passports to hotel clerks or residential custodians for delivery to the local precinct police station in order to obtain a registration of domicile. This permitted the local police to check the documents for signs of forgery or other irregularities. Clerks or custodians who had suspicions about a person would naturally apprise the police of this as well. The precinct station clerks registered the passport and examined it in the light of lists, issued regularly by the Police Department, of falsified pass­ ports, of persons banished or exiled under the provisions of the security law, of foreign subjects banned from the Russian Empire, and of actual or sus­ pected state and regular criminals.66 The precinct station then discreetly sent

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the passport, along with any peculiar facts about the individual, to the secu­ rity bureau. There, clerks checked the document against the bureau’s list of persons under secret surveillance. In 1887, the Moscow Security Bureau maintained 344 persons under secret surveillance on orders of the Police De­ partment, at the request of the gendarme station, and on its own authority.67 Finally, before passports were returned to the police stations, security bureau clerks often consulted their bureau’s card catalog, which listed people who ei­ ther had committed a political crime or were suspected of having done so. Within no more than four days the visitors or new residents were again in possession of their passports, probably in most cases without the slightest inkling of their divagation. Of course, the most resourceful political activists possessed forged passports or evaded police scrutiny entirely, which casts doubt upon the effectiveness of this system of passport control in hindering the work of conspirators. It should be noted that Germany and Austria, unlike Russia, had universal registration systems. All German subjects, when moving to a new town, were obliged to notify the police of their departure and to submit proof of identity and a certificate of character to the police in their new place of residence. Any criminal records soon followed behind them. All these records and documents were very carefully scrutinized, making it hard to establish aliases.68 Un­ doubtedly, the system in Germany was much more efficient than its counter­ part in Russia. The security service hungered for all manner of information, not only con­ cerning persons but also about many aspects of society, including educational institutions, organizations and clubs of all kinds, and mutual aid societies. The regular police helped to satisfy these demands by maintaining a continual watchfulness in the precincts of the Imperial capitals and by reporting to the security bureaus on any unusual or suspicious phenomena. In St. Petersburg in the mid-1890s, the regular police kept watch over 49 hotels, 2,621 drinking establishments, 15 theaters, 16 clubs, 70 houses of prostitution, and 26 flophouses.69 The figures for Moscow must have been comparable. Information on the general population of each precinct in Moscow permitted the security bureau to compile lists of hotels and furnished rooms as well as to keep house-by-house registration books naming both residents and visitors staying in Moscow more than three days.70 Occasionally the security bureaus re­ quested precise information about, or exceptionally vigilant surveillance of, a particular sector of society, institution, or area of the city. The regular police also consistently maintained secret surveillance over specific persons (one hundred of them in Moscow in 1887) and investigated reports of imminent public disorders.71 The security bureaus used the raw observational and inves­ tigative material received from the regular police to analyze the daily reports prepared by surveillance officers, to develop a broad portrait of the public mood, and to detect incipient manifestations of seditious activity. One purpose that all these data served was the verification of “political re­ liability” (politicheskaia blagonadezhnost’). Some historians have translated

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this term as “political trustworthiness/’ but this translation is inaccurate. A standard dictionary of synonyms notes the following distinctions between the terms “trustworthy” and “reliable.” “A reliable messenger is one who may be depended on to do his errand correctly and promptly; a trustworthy messen­ ger is one who may be admitted to knowledge of the views and purposes of those who employ him and who will be faithful beyond the mere letter of his commission.”72 The Imperial government expected and demanded no more than reliability from Russian subjects; it wanted to rely on them not to engage in activities harmful to the state’s interests but did not expect them to lend ac­ tive support to the state. They were free to hold opinions at variance with those of the government, perhaps even to express those opinions in some veiled or moderate form, but were not supposed to utter them loudly or force­ fully. In a word, mere dependability was sufficient. By contrast, many Russ­ ian revolutionaries and, later, the Soviet government expected—and in some cases demanded—trustworthiness, that is, not mere outward adherence to cer­ tain rituals, principles, and beliefs, but also active support of them. On the same basis, one may contrast the verification of political reliability in Imper­ ial Russia with the French revolutionary government’s certificats de civisme: in Imperial Russia one needed merely to have a politically “clean record,” whereas in revolutionary France active support of the revolution was re­ quired; one had to be, in principle, not merely reliable but also trustworthy. After the adoption of the law on suspects of 18 September 1793, the failure to acquire a certificate became physically dangerous.73 In late Imperial Russia, the failure to meet the standard of political relia­ bility, while not a criminal offense, could cause one’s exclusion, by the au­ thority of the local governor, from educational institutions and from civil and military service. It could also result in the denial of permission to open a bookstore, library, or school; to found a newspaper or journal; to institute a society or professional union; or to organize a public lecture or other gather­ ing.74 Finally, petitions for special state privileges and pensions submitted by the politically unreliable in principle met with rejection. The procedure for assessing a person’s political reliability was established by a Police Department directive of 29 November 1891, although the practice had apparently existed for decades.75 Persons wishing to enter institutions of higher learning or to engage in the “sensitive” activities enumerated above of­ ten applied directly to the regular police for “certificates of reliability.” The regular police, however, being authorized to pass judgment on a person’s gen­ eral conduct but not his political reliability, sent these requests to the city or provincial governor. The latter also received information requests (spravki) regarding candidates for public, civil, or military service. A governor had the right to vouch for individuals known to him personally. In all other cases, he sent the requests to the local gendarme station or security bureau (where one existed). Employees at these institutions checked their records and supplied, without subjective judgment, specific information concerning the person’s political reliability, that is, whether the person had been arrested, investigated.

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or kept under surveillance in connection with politically criminal activity. A report was then sent to the Police Department’s third division either if the person had a security police record (for the Police Department’s files) or if political unreliability was only suspected (for final assessment). By the turn of the century the Police Department verified some twenty thousand cases of this nature each year.76 Applicants for government or military service under­ went more thorough background investigations, which might concern their moral qualities, marital status, acquaintances, occupation, financial means, professional connections, and age, as well as political reliability.77 The government sought to use this information to restrict the access of po­ litical dissidents to state service and to various means of communication, but it was not always successful. In 1894, police officials complained that a sig­ nificant number of people deemed politically unreliable regularly entered gov­ ernment service. As the opposition movements expanded, this trend must have intensified. A Police Department directive of October 1901 warned security police officials that keeping track of politically unreliable people was becom­ ing more and more difficult. Numerous people exiled to Siberia and the north­ ern provinces of European Russia were managing to flee abroad, then secretly returning to Russia and taking part in revolutionary activity undetected by the police. Keeping watch over people deemed politically unreliable was obvi­ ously of great concern to senior administrative officials, but so also was pre­ venting the harassment of innocent people. An Interior Ministry directive of May 1901 urged governors to avoid dismissing “suspicious” people from state service without careful consideration.78 Once again, officialdom was divided between defenders of state security and upholders of the rule of law. Regular police support of the security service’s mission went beyond mere passive watchfulness and extended to myriad forms of active assistance. Uni­ formed police officers monitored all public lectures and meetings for antigovemment utterances, on which they reported to the security police.79 The regu­ lar police were required to control contentious crowds, as well as to interdict activities “detrimental to public order and state security,” including the singing of irreverent songs, the possession or distribution of illegal literature, and the holding of unregistered public meetings.80 The regular police were also charged with defending the Imperial order’s ecclesiastical pillar, the Or­ thodox church, by preventing disorders in and around churches and forbid­ ding the sale of icons deemed improper by religious authorities.81 (There is, nevertheless, no evidence that clergymen spied on their flocks for the police in the late nineteenth century.) When the emperor visited Moscow, the secu­ rity bureau deployed the regular police to help temporarily “clean out” the city of all manner of “undesirable” people and to establish more thorough surveillance over those suspected of political unreliability.82 Also important was uniformed police implementation of security bureau orders to search political suspects on the authority of the security law of 1881. Search operations seem to have occurred relatively frequently in Moscow— on average, perhaps one to three times per month in the late 1890s

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and early 1900s.83 In most cases, information provided by secret informants motivated the search operations. Sometimes the security bureau had a clear idea of what it hoped to uncover—for example, bomb factories, illegal under­ ground organizations, or networks for the production and distribution of ille­ gal literature. Such search orders might demand the seizure of “all books” at a given domicile. Generally, however, the police were directed to confiscate anything that might be incriminating.84 It is worth noting that the police were not allowed to search the premises of numerous governmental and public institutions without first obtaining ap­ proval from both the procuracy and the relevant authorities—administrative, high school, university, military, or ecclesiastical. Without such approval, the security police had to restrict themselves to covert investigations, the results of which they were supposed to communicate to those same authorities. Nat­ urally, the search of residences of members of the Imperial family also re­ quired advance notice.85 A less frequent but equally burdensome security function of the uniformed police, also authorized by the security law of 1881, was administrative arrest. As in the case of searches, the regular police commonly detained individual political suspects on orders from the security bureau, but usually without the latter’s direct supervision. For the liquidation of major revolutionaries and, especially, of underground networks, however, one, two, or several okhranniki and perhaps a number of provincial gendarme officers customarily over­ saw the operation. In preparation for most major undertakings, the regular po­ lice and most security bureau personnel were kept in the dark about the designated targets in order to prevent leaks of information. The regular police took no part at all in extremely sensitive operations.86 In most cases these measures were successful, and the operations resulted in the periodic destruc­ tion of the underground organizations of the major revolutionary movements and parties. It remains to mention the criminal investigation police (sysknaia politsiia), which were theoretically obliged to render service to the security bureau but, except in cases of a seditious nature, in practice had little to do with security policing. The first criminal investigation bureau (sysknoe otdelenie), as noted above, was instituted in St. Petersburg in 1866. By the end of the century, a few other such bureaus had opened in Moscow, Kiev, Riga, Odessa, Tiflis, Baku, and Rostov-na-Donu. (A much larger network of bureaus was created only in 1908.) Each bureau, although much smaller than the security bureaus, was organized and operated in a similar manner to them. The criminal investi­ gation police seem to have been at the forefront of police technology. For ex­ ample, in 1890 they introduced to Russia Alphonse Bertillon’s system of an­ thropometry.87 Concerned primarily with apprehending thieves, murderers, extortionists, counterfeiters, and other regular criminals, the criminal investi­ gation police in the major cities nevertheless probably served the interests of the security bureau by controlling regular criminals, who sometimes main­ tained contacts with political criminals.

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The regular police, while themselves rendering assistance to the security bureau, had their own auxiliary agents in the form of residential custodians, or dvomiki. A law of 20 December 1883 obliged lessors of furnished rooms and apartments and their on-site custodians to notify the police of the arrival and departure of all lessees. It also required the custodians to report any un­ usual phenomena whatsoever to the police and to render assistance to them immediately upon request. Dvomiki received no regular wages from the po­ lice, save in a few important buildings. In 1902 there were 17,214 dvomiki in Moscow. The city governor’s office gave bonuses on holidays to dvomiki em­ ployed in schools and dormitories and year-round to a few dvomiki for partic­ ularly important services rendered. Even those who rendered the most consci­ entious assistance to the police could not possibly receive more than a few rubles per year. Yet refusal to cooperate with the police could cost them their job. In other words, the dvomiki were auxiliary police agents paid for by landlords.88 Although the regular police continuously assisted the security service in enforcing the laws on state crime, revolutionary activists often encountered police officers—even gendarme officers—sympathetic to their plight, or at least somewhat at odds with the security police as such. The SocialistRevolutionary G. A. Nestroev, for example, described in detail the special treatment he received from a variety of administrative officials after his ar­ rest in 1902. On the way to the district prison in Khar’kov Province, the rural police captain twice bought beer for Nestroev and his fellow prisoners. In prison, Nestroev and other political prisoners had the brightest, cleanest cells, could order dinner from local restaurants, and were allowed to move freely about the prison. One district gendarme officer went so far as to help them to prepare for interrogation by his colleagues in the provincial capital, as a result of which they were all released in about one month. The prison director, in collusion with the rural police captain, arranged for Nestroev to travel for free to Khar’kov. Then, under police probation in a provincial town, the police chief found him a job with the city architect. There Ne­ stroev lived for one year engaged in revolutionary activity, sometimes travel­ ing to Kiev, right under the noses of the police. One finds in the memoir lit­ erature other examples of police officials, especially in provincial towns, aiding and abetting known political criminals against the obvious wishes of the security police.89 Among the divisions within the bureaucracy—chinks in the regime’s armor, as it were—the dissident often found shelter from for­ mally Draconian laws and unyielding institutions.

C H A P T E R

T H R E E

New Security Policing Methods

D — H I— - ^ ^ ^ y the end of the century, the provincial gendarme officers and their approach to policing were no longer adequate to meet the new chal­ lenges facing the regime that they were supposed to defend. From the mid1890s to the first years of the new century, a robust labor movement, a mass student movement, and major revolutionary parties sprang up in Russia. Dur­ ing these years, conspiratorial revolutionaries grew far more numerous and operated over a wider geographic range than they had in the late 1870s. The security police at all costs had to isolate the conspirators and prevent them from gaining a mass following, since controlling a mass movement far ex­ ceeded the capacities of the comparatively tiny Imperial security service. To hold the conspirators at bay required breaking their defenses by means of re­ fined methods of detection. In general, the only policemen capable of rising to the occasion were the security officers, that is, the small group of gen­ darme officers and, in a few cases, erstwhile police informants, who special­ ized in security policing. Sergei Zubatov Born in Moscow in 1864, the son of an officer (ober-ofitser), Sergei Vasil’evich Zubatov entered the fifth class of the Fifth Moscow Gymnasium in 1880. One who knew him at that time relates that there was nothing child­ ish about Zubatov’s appearance or demeanor. His intense debates with his in­ structors initially alienated his classmates. During the next year, however, he became recognized as the best-read student. At that time he even organized a library and a discussion circle devoted to self-development. Zubatov had ex­ ceptional rhetorical talents and enjoyed a strong moral influence over others. His prestige increased as he alone among his schoolmates developed contacts among the revolutionary intelligentsia.1 According to another contemporary,

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the assassination of Alexander II in 1881 set off among high-school students a fervent movement in which Zubatov actively participated. The hallmarks of this movement were provocative dress and the formation of circles devoted to the study of the writings of D. I. Pisarev.2 Presumably what drew Zubatov and many other intellectually active Russian youths to Pisarev was less his ideas about revolution than his emphasis on cultural self-improvement and his be­ lief in the power of science and knowledge to liberate people from prejudice,

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tradition, and established institutions.3 Although much of the mass enthusi­ asm quickly subsided, Zubatov remained for the time being a committed “Pisarevist, cultural worker-idealist” (pisarevets, kuVtumik-idealist).4 By em­ phasizing the cultural-work aspect of Pisarev’s teachings, Zubatov probably meant that “progress was to be achieved through concrete individual deeds of service to the people in some professional capacity (doctor, teacher, midwife, and the like) or through step-by-step reforms introduced by a beneficent ‘so­ ciety’ or a patriarchal government authority.”5 This set him at odds with such revolutionary activists as M. R. Gots, a People’s Will activist and later a founder of the Socialist-Revolutionary Party, who advocated violent opposi­ tion to the regime. It seems that Zubatov’s father withdrew him from high school during the seventh, or penultimate, grade in 1882 or 1883, fearing that his acquaintances at the school (especially the Jewish ones) would land him in trouble. He soon found work as a clerk in the Moscow post office. He also moonlighted at a private self-education library on Tverskoi Boulevard and married the propri­ etress of the library, A. N. Mikhina. The library was known throughout Moscow as a meeting place for radical youths, where one could obtain publi­ cations forbidden by the censors such as the works of Charles Darwin, Karl Marx, and Nikolai Chemyshevskii, as well as “illegal literature,” that is, agi­ tational literature produced by Russian revolutionary groups. One witness re­ called that Zubatov*eagerly engaged in lengthy conversations with the clients.6 Zubatov’s claim to the police that he had been entirely unaware of the un­ toward uses of the library was probably false, but his assertion that he re­ jected the violent radicalism of Gots and others seems true. It is possible that Zubatov by this point had begun to formulate his promonarchist views. He also had a reason to feel personal aversion to Gots and his close associates. According to a contemporary, they “acted as though they owned” the library, on account of their contributions of books to it, although Gots himself admit­ ted that he and M. I. Fondaminskii strongly disliked Zubatov.7 As a sensitive man, the future police official may well have perceived the nature of their feelings toward him. Sometime in 1885, he went to the security bureau at 5 Gnezdikovskii Lane and offered to report to the bureau’s director, N. S. Berdiaev, as an informant; thereafter he facilitated the arrest of numerous members of the People’s Will organization.8 Zubatov’s service in this capacity did not last long. On several occasions, he avoided arrest or was unaccountably released from police custody. This suspicious treatment caused some revolutionary activists in early 1887 to sus­ pect that he might be an informant.9 His association with radicals, mean­ while, landed him in a gendarme investigation, which precipitated his dis­ missal from the post office in May 1888. The Police Department could not demand his release from the investigation without the approval of the office of the prosecutor, but Governor General E. K. Iurkovskii apparently ordered his reinstatement at the post office. Having received his first civil service

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rank, on 14 January 1889 he left the post office and joined the security bureau as a permanent official. Zubatov made himself indispensable to Berdiaev, whose assistant he became in May 1894 and whom he replaced in August 1896.10 Zubatov was of medium height and had a thickset build, a round face, a small beard, a distinctly “civilian” mustache, and combed-back auburn hair. He wore gold-rimmed glasses and, usually, an unbuttoned double-breasted frock coat. Spiridovich remembered his appearance as that of “a typical intel­ lectual.” D. N. Liubimov, head of the interior minister’s chancellery from 1902 to 1906, likened him to a seminarian and recalled that he spoke calmly, slowly, and always intelligently.11 Zubatov gradually became an adamant supporter of absolutism. He pas­ sionately argued that the people never profit from revolutionary violence, that only the emperor was capable of implementing needed reforms in Russia, and that the country would be lost without the absolute monarchy. He threw him­ self fervently into a campaign against the revolutionary intelligentsia, “fight­ ing with the ‘reds’ and quarrelling with the ‘blues’ [gendarmes],” as he later phrased it.12 Zubatov showed an enthusiasm and energy that were attractive to some revolutionaries lacking deep convictions and that permitted him to win the trust of a few of them. The discursiveness, wit, and biting comments of his reports and correspondence set them apart from those of other security policemen. While most of his peers adopted a scrupulously impersonal tone in their official writing, Zubatov refused to conform to their bureaucratic ethos of dispassionate formality. One senses that he never considered himself a bureaucrat, and this attitude may help to account for his obvious disdain for his colleagues and superiors who aspired to no higher calling than to be civil servants. Zubatov, by contrast, professed a “profound love for and faith in his cause” and imparted to several of his protégés an ardent commitment and dedication rarely encountered in gendarme officers; this was a more common attitude, indeed, among their enemies, the revolutionaries.13 Zubatov believed that mass discontent would continue to build if the Impe­ rial government failed to undertake social reforms. Whereas the opposition “movement” had comprised a few dozen members under Nicholas I and only a few thousand under Alexander II and Alexander HI, it fell to Nicholas II’s lot to rule over an empire in which political opposition gradually became a mass phenomenon and conspiratorial organizations boasted large member­ ships and huge sympathy bases. As a former radical himself, Zubatov realized that it was necessary to distinguish between nonviolent opponents of the regime and genuine revolutionaries. It had been precisely the inability to make such distinctions that obliged the old-school gendarmes to gather only a vague idea about the existence or activity of a revolutionary group before pro­ ceeding to liquidate it. Yet without secret informants operating within revolutionary circles, it was hard to ensnare important revolutionary leaders, who had begun to adopt con­ spiratorial methods. Sudeikin had placed secret informants at the very heart

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of the security system. After his death, the St. Petersburg Security Bureau lost its preeminence, and the debility of the revolutionary movement during the 1880s derived less from the strength and professional sophistication of Russ­ ian security police institutions than from the movement's own inherent weak­ nesses. Then just when political opposition received new life at the end of the century, Zubatov adopted Sudeikin’s method and hung his portrait in the se­ curity bureau’s office.14 Zubatov’s replication and refinement of Sudeikin’s methods were the most significant milestone in the development of the Russian security system since the creation of the Third Section. A tireless critic of both the gendarmes and their old-fashioned approach to security policing, Zubatov charged that most political cases prosecuted by gendarmes were not political at all. He also ar­ gued that suspects should be exiled administratively only if substantial infor­ mation pointed to their involvement in political crime. The government, ac­ cording to Zubatov, had to try to avoid creating martyrs and alienating the public.15 Zubatov also used administrative exile more often than the Moscow Prosecutor’s Office would have liked, though he claimed to have good reason to do so.16 Most prosecutors were more ardent partisans of the rule of law than was Zubatov. Although he avoided indiscriminate police repression in order not to alienate public opinion, his main goal was to defeat opponents of the regime, not to prove their guilt in court. In general, before .arresting the members of an underground group, Zuba­ tov preferred to wait for them to come into possession of incriminating evi­ dence, such as illegal literature, forged passports, explosives, or weapons, or to make contact with a major revolutionary leader. The purpose was to let the group develop its potential in order both to learn more about the broader movement of which it was a part and to catch it in flagrante delicto.11 More­ over, Zubatov always left one or more political suspects at large, for “breed­ ing,” that is, so as not to lose sight completely of the organization of which they were a part.18 This was true even if he ultimately recommended that those arrested be exiled administratively and not be tried in the regular courts. Over­ all, the Police Department favored Zubatov’s approach, in witness to which he and his agents in the first months of 1898 were sent to Kiev and other south­ ern and western cities to help local gendarmes to improve their security polic­ ing capabilities.19 It must be added that if Zubatov’s methods were more ef­ fective and fruitful in the long run, they were also more dangerous. By allowing the revolutionaries room to maneuver, the police risked letting them perpetrate crimes. Likewise, informants were obliged to participate more fully in the work of the illegal organizations, which laid them open to charges of provocation.20 Given the difficulties and dangers inherent in the new ap­ proach, it is hardly surprising that most provincial gendarme officers contin­ ued to prefer the older, less sophisticated, more legalistic methods. As military men, they also probably preferred the apparent certainty of immediate action to what they might have called the timidity of mere watchfulness. A senior security police official described the Moscow Security Bureau from the mid-1890s to 1902 as the “quasi-official central investigatory [rozy-

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sknoe] agency of the Police Department” and “a school for informants and surveillants.” Even Paris security chief Rachkovskii stopped in Moscow for training each time he traveled from Paris to St. Petersburg. In 1894, as Spiridovich recalled, the bureau “crushed . . . the People’s Justice Party, by arrest­ ing its leaders in various cities and seizing in Smolensk its [illegal] press.” It arrested the Rasputin terrorist circle in 1895 and “extended its reach even to St. Petersburg, in 1896 shutting down the press of the ‘People’s Will group’ in Lakhta [a northwest suburb].”21 The Moscow Security Bureau went so far as to “borrow” plainclothes agents, or surveillants, from the St. Petersburg Secu­ rity Bureau in order to conduct its empirewide operations—a practice on which one police official blamed the St. Petersburg bureau’s relative weak­ ness.22 Indeed, politically inspired public disturbances, such as strikes and demonstrations, were more frequent in St. Petersburg than in Moscow.23 This is not to imply that the St. Petersburg bureau enjoyed no successes in its struggle against sedition. On the contrary, surveillance in the capital was very tight. Seven days after V. I. Lenin arrived in the capital on 31 August 1893 the security bureau reported on his whereabouts to the Police Department. Then over the next twenty-seven months, he felt the need to change his residence eight times. The St. Petersburg Security Bureau, moreover, struck blow after blow against revolutionary agitators in the 1890s, including M. I. Brusnev’s group in 1893, the St. Petersburg section of the People’s Rights Party in 1894, and numerous prominent members of the Union of Struggle for the Libera­ tion of the Working Class in 1895-1897. Even so, in contrast to the Moscow bureau, its sphere of activity remained limited almost exclusively to St. Pe­ tersburg.24 Meanwhile, the de facto epicenter of security policing shifted to Moscow sometime in the mid-1890s—that is, roughly when Zubatov became assistant director, then director, of the security bureau in 1894 and 1896—and it reverted back to St. Petersburg only with Zubatov’s transfer to the Police Department in 1902. Zubatov’s superior talents, energy, and passionate dedi­ cation are the most likely explanation for the bureau’s preeminence. One pre­ sumes that he was not summoned to St. Petersburg earlier than 1902 because he lacked a patron in the northern capital, whereas in Moscow Dmitrii Trepov, the City Governor, and Grand Duke Sergei Aleksandrovich, the Moscow Governor General, supported him staunchly. Berdiaev, the bureau’s director since the early 1880s, was a straightfor­ ward, decent man, rather like Novitskii.25 He gave Zubatov considerable lati­ tude soon after he joined the bureau’s permanent staff in 1889. By May 1895 Zubatov assumed the key responsibility of the Moscow bureau, namely, the direction of informants. Thus, even before Berdiaev retired in 1896 amid ru­ mors of his having lost a huge sum gambling at Moscow’s Hunters Club, Zu­ batov had effectively become security chief in Moscow.26

Plainclothes Surveillants The tools of police detection that time and again permitted Zubatov to re­ main one step ahead of revolutionary activists were of several kinds, none of

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which he himself invented. Three of them, the interception of private mail, the analysis of anonymous denunciations, and the interrogation of political suspects, have already been described. These were what one may call “tradi­ tional” methods. Two other, more sophisticated methods permitted security officers often to stay a step or two ahead of conspiratorial activists. By means of “external surveillance” (naruzhnoe nabliudenie), plainclothes police agents, called surveillants (filëry), observed suspects without entering into contact with them. “Internal surveillance” (vnutrennee nabliudenie) consisted in deploying police informants, or “secret employees” (sekretnye sotrudniki), to report on suspect organizations “from within.” These two branches of secu­ rity policing complemented each other, although in time external surveillance came to play a subordinate role to the more effective—and more risky—sys­ tem of internal surveillance. The gendarmes’ easily recognizable dark blue uniforms made them inca­ pable of conducting covert surveillance, yet before the early 1880s they were allowed to undertake plainclothes operations only in exceptional cases. When terrorist activists adopted sophisticated procedures for escaping police detec­ tion in the late 1870s, the gendarmes found themselves unable to penetrate their organizations. Despite the major reorganization of police institutions in 1880, police authorities in St. Petersburg were .slow to reformulate security police tactics. In the early 1880s, a few gendarme noncommissioned officers dressed in civilian clothing acted as surveillants on an irregular basis, but as one police official later admitted these gendarmes “sometimes forgot to re­ move their spurs.”27 Sudeikin had himself used regular police inspectors as surveillants.28 Yet systematic development of external surveillance began only in the early 1880s at the Moscow Security Bureau, under the direction of an Old Believer of peasant stock. Evstratii Mednikov was plump and of medium height and had a ruddy complexion, a full beard, a small mustache, combed-backed, long, light brown hair, and calm, light blue eyes.29 He had worked for several years in Moscow first as a street policeman and then as a police inspector before join­ ing the Moscow Security Bureau in 1882 as a plainclothes surveillant. His formal education must have been limited, but his letters to Zubatov, full of homey expressions, earthy images, and “street smarts,” reveal an agile, highly practical mind. He was also persistent and had a great capacity for work,30 qualities that permitted him to rise to the position of senior surveillant. At the same time, his simple background seems to have enabled him to win the trust of his surveillants, who might have felt less comfortable with Zubatov, given his more sophisticated intellect. Mednikov eventually bore full responsibility for external surveillance, which significantly unburdened Zubatov. Although some revolutionaries imagined themselves surrounded by armies of surveillants (or shpiki, in their argot), the Moscow Security Bureau em­ ployed only seventeen in 1880 and fifty in 1902. It seems likely that the num­ ber of surveillants throughout the empire never exceeded seven hundred. In any event, Mednikov believed that a few skillful surveillants were more valu-

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able than four times as many clumsy ones, who were likely to blow their own cover.31 Since surveillants usually worked in pairs, the number of persons un­ der their eye was necessarily small, even considering the fact that they rarely maintained constant surveillance over suspects. As a rule surveillants watched people, and sometimes places, about whom the security bureau had received specific information from other sources. Comparing a variety of data permit­ ted the security service to discern relational networks and patterns of behav­ ior among persons under observation. By maintaining periodic, instead of constant, surveillance over persons suspected of involvement in political crime, the bureau was able in 1895 to keep within its immediate field of vi­ sion 185 people, mostly revolutionary activists and leaders.32 The number of people watched increased only modestly over time. Mednikov recruited his first surveillants from among gendarme noncom­ missioned officers. He gradually abandoned this practice, however, since in his opinion the gendarmes’ training often made them contemptuous of the humble duties of surveillants. Instead, he began to draw primarily upon army NCOs, whom he considered better disciplined, more reliable, and quickerwitted than possible nonmilitary candidates. Surveillants could be neither Jewish nor Polish. Most of them were married men, although a few female surveillants posed as the spouses of their male colleagues to render both less conspicuous. It was preferred that these women be married to male surveil­ lants,33 probably because single women would have been perceived as a source of distraction and jealousy for the male surveillants. Zubatov and Mednikov sought to elicit from their external surveillance personnel honesty and a selfless devotion to the cause. Pointing to their rela­ tively high monthly wages of, on average, fifty rubles plus thirty for expenses, Zubatov denied that his surveillants took bribes.34 He might have added that the surveillants disposed of their time more freely than did industrial workers. Of course, for their wages the surveillants stood watch, sometimes for hours at a time, in the cold, rain, or heat. The job could be both monotonous and dangerous, and surveillants were not even permanent civil servants with pen­ sion rights. Yet in the archives one finds astonishingly few cases of reported negligence or malfeasance.35 It is true that Mednikov’s surveillants drank on the job, but then so did midcentury London policemen. He managed, how­ ever, always to keep his men in line—he was not above striking the insubordinate—and to win their utter trust and dedication.36 Surveillants were supposed to lead the secretive life of a detective, hiding their true profession even from friends, but they were not expected to be sleuths. Their job was merely to observe and to report on the movements of political suspects and the places they frequented, and for this reason they re­ ceived only vague information about the revolutionary movement. Their ob­ jects of surveillance changed frequently, both to protect the surveillants from discovery and to increase their ability to spot suspects easily, but also to insu­ late them from the suspects, to whom they might otherwise become attached. Indeed, one police official later asserted that some surveillants both admired

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and pitied the militant radical activists over whom they kept watch.37 Initially, surveillants received minimal training. Gradually Mednikov de­ veloped a detailed program of instruction. The agents memorized Moscow’s physical layout, including restaurants, bars, factories, cab stations, and street­ car routes, as well as streets, alleys, and courtyards, to enable them to maneu­ ver freely around suspects. They also committed to memory the uniforms of military units and schools, long-distance train timetables, and the work schedules of factories and workshops. During training, experienced agents accompanied fresh recruits on their rounds and taught them to recognize and to commit to memory facial features through the systematic study of physiog­ nomy and by poring over photographs of revolutionaries. Finally, the novices learned to employ makeup and disguises, of which the security bureau kept an abundant supply. A few other surveillants who were experienced with horses received training as cabbies (izvozchiki) to permit them to conduct sur­ veillance in places where pedestrians would have been too conspicuous. These special surveillants had to know the profession’s argot and customs, and a few of them, especially in Moscow, became expert cabbies. In time, Mednikov created a “school for surveillants,” which brought new recruits to Moscow from other parts of the empire for training.38 Pairs of surveillants (or more in important cases) usually began their watch one hour before a suspect was likely to appear in public. As the person under observation proceeded on his way, one agent walked behind, while the other circled around the block to head him off. For each new target, the agents made up a nickname, which captured some aspect of the person’s appearance, gait, or manner. Thus, for example, surveillants dubbed A. F. Kerenskii “Swifty” (Skoryi) and N. A. Berdiaev, “Disheveled” (Lokhmatyi). Likewise, if one suspect nicknamed “Perch” (Okun*) was seen in the company of three other people, a quick-witted surveillant might call the other three “Ruff” (Ersh), “Gudgeon” (Piskar’), and “Crucian” (Karas*)—other kinds of fish.39 Pocket albums containing photographs and lists of physiognomic features of notable revolutionaries permitted surveillants to identify important new faces.40 During the first encounter, the surveillance team sought to commit to memory each detail of the clothing, demeanor, bearing, and, especially, phys­ iognomy of the person being watched. At the same time, they strove to avoid the person’s gaze, in order to render themselves less conspicuous. Some sus­ pects remained under the watchful eye of surveillants for only a day or two and a few almost permanently, but on average external surveillance over a particular person lasted for about one week. The agents sometimes followed their targets into bars or restaurants, for which they received expense money, but usually they lingered outside. While waiting, they entered their observa­ tions into thin notebooks, which in the evening they presented to Mednikov, who led discussions about the day’s work and gave them assignments for the next day. Woe to those surveillants who shirked their responsibilities and— even worse—presented false reports to Mednikov. He would berate them

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harshly in the midst of their fellows.41 But those who displayed the greatest initiative and dedication could aspire to become one of the forty or so police inspectors, who earned an extra five to twenty-five rubles monthly plus civilservant status.42 Surveillants’ notebooks, tens of thousands of which are preserved in the police archives, provided the raw material for an entire system of record keep­ ing. The notebooks generally contain little more than a dull catalog of mun­ dane occurrences in the life of the persons being watched.43 Yet Zubatov and Mednikov argued that the smallest detail, when pieced together with facts de­ riving from other sources, might provide the key to unraveling an entire web of interrelationships.44 Security bureau clerks prepared from this data a welter of finding aids, including biweekly reports concerning persons under surveil­ lance, their contacts, and places visited; a register of persons arriving in, or departing from, Moscow; a register of the dates on which surveillants began and ended out-of-town surveillance trips; and alphabetical registers providing information on persons under surveillance. Many of these lists run to several hundred names.45 Even toward the end of the century, as informants became the primary investigatory tool of the Moscow Security Bureau, external sur­ veillance retained its importance, both for tracking the daily activities of sur­ veillance targets and for verifying information provided by informants.46

The Mobile Surveillance Brigade In the meantime, the terrible famine and epidemic of 1891-1892 breathed new life into the Russian revolutionary movements. Radical activists fanned out across the famine-stricken regions, seeking to aid—and to incite to rebel­ lion—the hunger victims. Although the intellectual activists were often re­ ceived coldly in the villages, their shared experiences led to the creation of a variety of radical and revolutionary organizations throughout European Russia, especially in the northwest and in the south. The provincial gendarmes’ unpre­ paredness to confront the new danger permitted the movements to develop rel­ atively quickly. By 1894, the Police Department authorized the Moscow Secu­ rity Bureau to create a mobile unit of experienced surveillants ready to combat subversion wherever it appeared. Moscow was chosen as the headquarters for the mobile surveillance brigade (Letuchii otriad filërov) both because of its central location in European Russia and since the bureau had already acquired its reputation as the nerve center of the Russian security service.47 Developed by Mednikov and Zubatov as a sort of movable security bu­ reau, the mobile brigade uncovered distribution networks of revolutionary lit­ erature, illegal printing presses, and propaganda rings. It enabled Zubatov to extend his reach to neighboring provinces, throughout Ukraine, to St. Peters­ burg, as far afield as Siberia, and, equipped with translators, to the Baltic re­ gion. Thus Zubatov became a virtual codirector of Imperial security police operations. From his headquarters in Moscow, and in constant contact with the Police Department, he coordinated major surveillance, search, and arrest

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operations across the empire.48 The brigade, it should be stressed, was en­ tirely at the disposal of Zubatov and took no direct orders from the Police De­ partment. The brigade fielded thirty surveillants in 1894 and fifty in 1901.49 They re­ ceived much the same training as, but almost double the salary of, ordinary surveillants: an average of ninety rubles monthly. The brigade’s operations sometimes reached immense proportions. For example, in 1902, during a large campaign in the south, thirty-eight surveillants, along with a few senior security officers from the Moscow Security Bureau, were stationed for three months in thirteen different locations.50 Local police authorities and railroad gendarmes were obligated to assist the brigade’s agents, particularly in de­ taining fugitives.51 To Novitskii, the brigade epitomized the evils of the new system: it was surreptitious and controlled by civilians. Some gendarme chiefs besides Novitskii resented the presence of Zubatov’s brigade in their own backyard, as it were, while others were glad to receive the brigade’s as­ sistance in carrying out difficult operations.52 The brigade became the scourge of revolutionary activists in Russia. The key to its success was its ability to deploy rapidly a relatively large number of well-trained surveillants, always under competent leadership, anywhere in the empire at short notice. As an added advantage, these agents were able to conduct external surveillance in small towns, where permanently stationed surveillants would find it hard to maintain their anonymity.

Secret Informants Even with his dedicated staff and the mobile brigade, Zubatov could never have dealt repeated, damaging blows to the revolutionary opposition had he not employed secret informants. Every security force set against conspirator­ ial fanatics needs agents illuminating their activities from within. To uncover plots devised by well-organized conspirators requires agents equal to them in acumen, learning, and cunning. In Imperial Russia’s counterrevolutionary struggle these were few but deadly: just as one lone Kletochnikov neutralized the Third Section by betraying its intimate secrets to People’s Will, so did a single Degaev destroy that terrorist organization by disclosing its plans and the identities of its members to Sudeikin. That a few informants not only con­ trived to wreak as much havoc among the radicals as Degaev but also retained the trust of their prey for one decade and more is a tribute both to their fitness in the craft and to the skill of those who directed them. It also stemmed from the stubborn self-righteousness of many revolutionaries, who refused to admit that traitors could be found among their closest collaborators, even if nearly all revolutionary activists knew—or at least suspected—that this milieu was permeated with police informants.53 The total number of informants at any given time before 1905 was only a few hundred, yet their systematic penetra­ tion of conspiratorial revolutionary organizations helps to explain the revolu­ tionaries’ later obsession with “provocation” (provokatsiia). Before describ-

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ing the careers of some of the most notable informants, it is necessary to ana­ lyze the methods by which security police officers recruited and directed these valuable agents in general. “Without informants, the security police are blind,” wrote one security po­ lice official, “since the internal life of the revolutionary organizations is a world apart.”54 Experienced security officers knew well that data obtained solely through external surveillance, or any other single source, could prove counterproductive by leading to false arrests and, consequently, to the alien­ ation of the public. Such data, when corroborated by secret informants (who were referred to collectively as agentura), generally yielded a far more com­ plete picture of underground organizations.55 It behooved security officers therefore to recruit high-quality informants in many sectors of society but es­ pecially among radical political activists. Indeed, the careers of many security officers were made or broken with reference to the caliber of their informants. This was the heart of the security service’s capacity for surveillance. This sophisticated system of deploying informants did not develop all at once. Before the rise of People’s Will, the Third Section had employed a small number of secret informants, who generally remained outside the groups or organizations on which they informed. The Third Section was un­ derstandably almost entirely at a loss when confronted with disciplined con­ spirators. The first attempts to create a system for recruiting and guiding in­ formants were made in the early 1880s by Sudeikin and V. K. Plehve, the Police Department director from 1881 to 1884. These first steps yielded im­ portant successes, including the decapitation of People’s Will, but they also met with notable setbacks. When Plehve sought to persuade gendarme offi­ cers to enter the ranks of secret revolutionary organizations, only a couple consented to do so.56 Nearly all gendarme officers considered such activity beneath their dignity, just as English security policemen in the 1890s avoided covert operations among the anarchists, which required looking disheveled and smoking “offensively foul foreign cigarettes.” Informing on the Russian terrorists was also a dangerous business. In June 1876 members of Land and Freedom poured acid on the face of N. E. Gorinovich and left him for dead because he had made a confession to the police, and in February 1880 a St. Petersburg dvomik was murdered for leading the police to an illegal printing press on Vasil’evskii Island.57 It was also unlikely that government officials of any kind could pass themselves off as members of revolutionary organiza­ tions, even had they wanted to. The public and the official spheres in late Im­ perial Russia were like separate worlds. What kind of people became informants? Why did they do so? How did security officers recruit them? What forms did their training and employment take? Although informants could be found in many social categories and pro­ fessions in late Imperial Russia, the vast majority were drawn from the same segments of society as were the members of revolutionary organizations, namely, students, intellectuals, journalists, and industrial workers. Of the thir­ teen informants employed by the Moscow Security. Bureau in 1885, most

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were current or former university students.58 As the labor movement devel­ oped in the second half of the 1890s, industrial workers began to be recruited as informants. Even so, since most revolutionary leaders were intellectuals, the majority of informants were always relatively well educated. It is proba­ bly impossible to know the social origin of most of the educated informants, since detailed biographical data on informants was not recorded. It is easier to ascertain the ethnic background of informants. Like the revolutionary leaders themselves, the majority of police informants seem to have been Russians and Jews. After the Social Democratic and Socialist-Revolutionary Parties de­ veloped around the turn of the century, the majority of informants naturally were found in their midst.59 One revolutionary alleged that informants never acted out of conviction and were usually drawn from the dregs of society and the bureaucracy, while another warned his comrades that they were generally both intelligent and loyal to the government.60 The memoirs and letters of police officials, as well as official documents, reveal that informants served for a variety of reasons— often in intricate combination. Zubatov’s reasons, for example, included a wish to prove his reliability to the government, a desire to take revenge upon his erstwhile comrades, and a resolve to fight against what he viewed as a dangerous form of radicalism. Still other reasons motivated individual infor­ mants, such as a penchant for adventure, the charisma of a given security offi­ cer, and the fear of punishment. Spiridovich recalled one informant who for two months had distributed leaflets for a revolutionary organization whose lo­ cal leaders had promised to buy him a pair of galoshes but had never got around to it. Extremely bitter, the man brought Spiridovich a pile of procla­ mations and told him all the secrets he knew. Spiridovich immediately gave him a pair of rubber galoshes.61 An indispensable lure for most prospective informants was material gain. The informant’s emoluments took many forms, including money, opportuni­ ties for travel, even certificates of political reliability.62 In 1895, informants at the Moscow Security Bureau received from 30 to 250 rubles monthly. Later, a few particularly important informants earned up to 500 rubles per month. The star informants in Paris earned the highest salaries of all—one earned over 1,000 rubles per month. Valuable, longtime servers, after retirement, could hope to receive a yearly pension of as much as 3,000 rubles or even more for the few stars, or a one-time lump-sum subsidy of as much as 5,000 rubles.63 Zubatov perfected the art of directing informants, but since he ran his bu­ reau like a family business, he never committed his methods to paper. Even so, their rudiments were known to his predecessors, and a variety of official documents, including specialized directives prepared by his successors, shed light on them.64 A report prepared by Berdiaev’s assistant in 1885 rightly un­ derlined the desirability of maintaining, for purposes of cross-referencing, more than one informant in each revolutionary group. (This was apparently a standard security police method in other countries as well.)65 Yet much of the

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report needed reformulation. It asserted, for example, that informants could remain effective for only a short time. In fact, under the rules developed by Zubatov, informants occasionally served for one decade or more, since his cardinal rule was never to arrest all of the members of an underground organi­ zation so that they could not easily guess from which direction the blow against them had fallen. He also deliberately bruited information liable to sow doubts in the minds of revolutionaries about the loyalty of activists who were not informants in order to deflect attention from those who were. Mock search and arrest operations served the same purpose. In spring 1893, for ex­ ample, Zubatov ordered his men to search the apartment of a known revolu­ tionary, B. A. Keller, and purposely to find nothing incriminating.66 The point was to protect valuable informants at all cost. Security officers recruited informants in a variety of ways. A very few peo­ ple, such as Azef and the well-connected polyglot, spiritist author E. P. Blavatskaia, simply proposed their services to the police. It seems that most such offers, including that which Blavatskaia tendered in 1872, were rejected.67 In other cases, chance meetings were used with industrial workers or with members of other target sectors of the population as opportunities to recruit them as agents. The majority of informants, however, began to work for the police after interrogation. It is natural to desire a pardon, perhaps even to repent, during the period of fear and loneliness that accompany arrest. With this in mind, case officers often sought to persuade political detainees to serve the government by bullying some and promising leniency to others, depend­ ing on each individual’s character. In order to fathom their prisoners’ weak­ nesses, case officers were encouraged to chat with those who came to visit them. Similarly, the old ruse of confining a suspect in a cell with a police agent was actively promoted. Some detainees simply broke down without much effort by the police,68 but most did not yield easily. Zubatov was a master at questioning radical activists and persuading them to become informants. To begin with, he opposed trying to intimidate them, since they often did not fear exile or even death. It was more effective, he thought, to appeal to their idealism. Thus, he assured his prisoners that the “monarchist idea, properly understood, can provide everything that the coun­ try needs, including the unleashing of social forces, and all without blood­ shed.” He argued that only the absolute monarchy, an institution above classes and estates, could advance the workers’ interests and that the revolu­ tionaries wished to use the workers only to further their own political goals.69 V. M. Chernov, who was arrested in 1894, provides the best account of an interrogation by Zubatov. Over tea, Zubatov told Chernov that he had long known everything about him and his organization. “Our government is strong,” he said, “and can afford to be indulgent.” He then told him about his own experiences with illegal activities and explained why he had chosen to work for reform by legal means. He reasoned, “The Education Ministry is drafting a project for universal literacy. Don’t you think this will do more for the Russian people than all the revolutionaries combined?” Zubatov admitted

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that the incompetence of many gendarmes drove some people to radicalism but assured Chernov that he intended to reform the security police. Such re­ form was impossible, however, without support from educated people. In any event, argued Zubatov, nothing was worse than political terror: “Sometimes I think that terror was invented by extreme reactionaries. . . . A terrorist brings repression not only on himself, but on everybody. Thus, he is abusing other people’s rights.” Chernov remained unpersuaded by Zubatov’s arguments but had to admit that he was indeed well informed about the revolutionary under­ ground.70 At their second meeting, Zubatov assured Chernov that he approved of his loyalty to his comrades. Zubatov added that the monarchy had on its side faithful devotees such as L. A. Tikhomirov, who had betrayed no one but had switched sides for idealistic reasons. “All of your favorite historians,” contin­ ued Zubatov, “admit that in some periods the absolutist system was progres­ sive for a time, just as capitalism is progressive for its own time, so why can­ not you believe that some people are honestly and deeply convinced that the time for absolutism is not yet over?” He warned Chernov that if the revolu­ tionaries kept teasing the mighty absolutist state with cardboard swords, the government would stop the reformists’ work. Then Zubatov began asking very concrete questions about dates, people, and events. Again Chernov was overwhelmed by how much Zubatov knew.71 When a person agreed to inform, without having been arrested, jailed, or interrogated, the case officer met with him or her in a neutral public place, such as a hotel, a cafe, or a park. He posed general questions about the per­ son’s connections, position in the target organization, and motives for con­ senting to inform. From this moment on, the case officer dealt with the prospective informant as he did with those whom he recruited during their de­ tention. Since informants were the security service’s principal and most valuable means of surveillance, each security chief’s main task was to acquire and to supervise the direction of informants. As noted above, once Zubatov sup­ planted Berdiaev as director of the important informants, he became ipso facto director of the bureau. Of course, as the number of informants in­ creased at the two security bureaus from (in the case of Moscow) a dozen in 1895 to five times that number before the 1905 revolution, it became neces­ sary for security chiefs to share the direction of their informants with one or more assistants.72 If a preliminary investigation of a prospective informant revealed nothing suspicious, the case officer set up frequent initial meetings. He asked about the agent’s personal life, but without insistence, and developed friendly but not close relations with the person. Zubatov called his system for directing in­ formants “devilishly difficult” to master and emphasized that case officers must win their agents’ trust, protect them from discovery, assist them in ad­ versity, and increase their faith in the monarchical system. He urged his offi-

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cers to treat each informant “as a beloved woman with whom you have en­ tered into illicit relations.” He continued, Look after her like the apple of your eye. One careless move and you will dis­ honor her. Remember: the unmasking [pmval\ of an informant for you results in a slight setback to your career; for the informant it means civil, and often physical, death. Take this to heart: treat these people as 1 am advising, and they will understand your needs, will trust you, and will work with you honestly and selflessly---- Never repeat the [true] name of your informant to anyone, even to your director. Forget his true name and remember only his pseudonym.73 Zubatov was willing to work assiduously to win high wages, bonuses, and more considerate treatment for his best informants. On behalf of one infor­ mant, Mikhail Gurovich, he wrote to his superiors, “[H]e is a committed, not a mercenary okhrannik. Giving of his whole heart, he has the right to expect that he will be treated with respect and from the heart. Take the trouble to en­ noble the principle of informantship [agentumyi printsip], so that each infor­ mant working for the government will feel that he is an honest and highly valuable toiler and not a self-seeker and a rogue. This issue, beyond helping [this particular informant], has immense significance as a matter of principle for the cause of informantship in general.”74 Although high wages undoubt­ edly increased an informant’s sense of self-worth, by themselves they could not suffice to “ennoble” the trade of informing. It was far more important, in Zubatov’s view, that security officers seeking to recruit informants manifest a principled devotion to absolute monarchism. Meetings between informants and case officers took place in secret (konspirativnye) apartments. At the turn of the century, the Moscow bureau main­ tained four or five such meeting places, which one case officer described as “warm retreats from the strain of [the informants’] double life.” In the interest of security, the apartments were changed frequently. The newest, and there­ fore presum ably least trustw orthy, inform ants saw only the oldest apartments.75 Housekeepers on the security bureau payroll resided in each apartment. One such housekeeper, P. I. Ivanova, was an utterly reliable em­ ployee who helped to train new informants and worked in this position for twenty-five years.76 Informants were encouraged to provide high-quality, firsthand information on an irregular basis, rather than frequent but indirect and insignificant re­ ports. As one police official put it in 1893, “Verbosity and theoretical discus­ sion are not necessary. We value only factual information and the most precise indication of names, addresses, or other data useful for [our] investigation. The interior life of the [revolutionary] circle and new revolutionary tendencies naturally interest us, but you may dispense with day-to-day trifles.. . . All ex­ aggeration and insufficiently grounded conclusions must be scrupulously avoided.”77 Zubatov might have been happy to receive some information on “day-to-day trifles,” but in general he probably would have approved of these

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recommendations. Since most informants furnished no written reports (Azef was an exception), case officers summarized their oral depositions, of which each one furnished between five and twenty per year. Security bureau and gendarme station chiefs used this information in conjunction with data obtained from surveillants, perlustration, and other sources to prepare monthly informant (agentumye) reports for the Police Department.78 Case officers attempted to advance their informants’ careers in the revolu­ tionary milieu by a variety of means. Sometimes they provided them with in­ side information, obtained through other sources, or instructed them about revolutionary doctrine, in order that the informants might impress their revo­ lutionary contacts. Alternatively, a case officer might encourage his infor­ mants to offer assistance to revolutionary activists. An informant might pro­ vide money or printing equipment or might agree to help store and distribute seditious literature. The purpose of these ploys was to help one’s informants to win the trust of revolutionary activists.79 Although it seems likely that most informants were motivated primarily by materialistic or egotistical considerations, a few were quite idealistic. One such informant was Anna Serebriakova. Affectionately called “Mommy” (Mamochka and Mamasha) by Zubatov and his staff, Serebriakova was per­ haps as gifted an informant as Azef. Unlike him, however, she did not partici­ pate directly in violent criminal activity and seems to have opposed the revo­ lutionaries out of conviction. One police official, M. F. von Koten, remarked that she possessed a rock-solid emotional equilibrium, and Zubatov later went so far as to attribute his bureau’s greatest successes to her labors.80 Bom in 1860, Serebriakova studied history and literature at Moscow’s Ger’e Institute for Women. She worked first as a journalist, then at the Moscow Provincial Zemstvo Board, and she translated scholarly books on the side.81 As the Moscow representative of the so-called revolutionary Red Cross, which collected money for political prisoners, she had the perfect fa­ cade for her double game. She and her husband, P. A. Serebriakov, a statisti­ cian with the Moscow District Zemstvo Board, opened their home to a vari­ ety of radicals and liberal professionals.82 A. V. Lunacharskii, a frequent visitor to her home in the 1890s, commented, “She was an exceptionally lively woman, with a homely but congenial face and very bright eyes that shone with a kind of special brilliance. She was extremely loquacious, un­ usually affectionate, and considerate in both public and private affairs. . . . Upon leaving her, one unavoidably thought, ‘But what a kind and sweet per­ son Anna Egorovna is.’” When Lunacharskii arrived from abroad in 1898 with a letter of introduction from P. B. Aksel’rod, he went straight to her as a key contact in the Russian Social Democratic underworld. It was not idle boasting when Zubatov claimed, “[N]ot one revolutionary comes illegally to Moscow without reporting to her.”83 The bill of indictment brought against her by the Soviet government in 1925 stated, “[S]he was well informed about nearly the entire revolutionary underground . . . and Serebriakova her­ self was a source of much of what was necessary for underground work: she

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stored and distributed [revolutionary] literature; she gathered money for dis­ tribution to political prisoners; business meetings and conferences [of revo­ lutionaries] took place in her apartment; and, by her intermediary, comrades arriving from elsewhere were received by the Moscow underground organi­ zations.”84 Tragically, her three children, who saw only her “Marxist” persona, grew up to become committed revolutionaries. This further insulated her from sus­ picion and permitted her to shed light on student organizations for the secu­ rity bureau.85 She must often have been tom between maternal concern and her loyalty to the antirevolutionary cause. In any event, the radicals trusted her fully, and over the years the police were obliged to carry out only one “decorative raid” on her residence—until her exposure in October 1909. It is a measure of the extreme care with which Zubatov and his successors shielded this valuable informant that the Soviet government, having combed the police archives for proof of her guilt as a “provocateur,” found documents and testimony tying her unequivocally to only one antirevolutionary police raid (of 29 November 1902).86 Another devoted informant was the Bundist Mania Vil’bushevich. Zubatov convinced her in early 1900 that the government was working to improve the condition of workers in Russia. Later in 1900, several other Bundists launched a concerted attack on Zubatov, accusing him of careerism, oppor­ tunism, and “corrupting the working class.” Vil’bushevich, shaken, warned Zubatov that she would return to the revolutionaries if their attacks on his character proved well founded. Zubatov immediately responded, assuring her of his full sincerity and reiterating his faith that the Russian government was better suited to reform Russian society than were the revolutionaries. Vil’bushevich then replied that Zubatov’s “soul is the dearest thing to me in the world,” because “an honest person can commit treason [that is, betray his comrades] only if he works for an honest soul.”87 In other words, without un­ equivocal confidence in her mentor, she would surely have broken down un­ der the strain of leading a double life. The beautiful Zinaida Gemgross-Zhuchenko, also an idealistic informant, was bom in 1872 of noble lineage and attended the prestigious Smolnyi Insti­ tute in St. Petersburg. Recruited in St. Petersburg in 1893, she provided infor­ mation that enabled Zubatov in 1895 to foil a plot to murder Nicholas II orga­ nized by I. Rasputin and T. Akimova.88 In order to protect Zhuchenko, Zubatov arrested her and arranged to have her exiled for five years in Geor­ gia, but with a 1,000-ruble bonus and a 100-ruble monthly allowance. She lived with her parents in Kutaisi, then moved to Europe, where, still on the government payroll, she lived until 1905. Zhuchenko began to inform again in 1903. In September 1905, as Russia slid toward civil disorder, she returned to Moscow to engage in active combat with the revolutionary movement.89 A historian has written that Zhuchenko’s case officers “adopted an attitude to­ ward her of great respect, friendly deference, and utter trust. They did not di­ rect her, but [rather] worked with her, as they would work with any experi-

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enced gendarme officer and even with more confidence, deferring to her ex­ perience, intelligence, and pedantic precision.” She continued to serve until she was unmasked in 1909. At that moment she declared to a revolutionary activist that the Police Department was a “sacred institution” employing the “best people in Russia.”90 One revolutionary called female informants the “most terrible” kind, be­ cause “from no one does our conscience, our honor, our faith demand more than from our fiancées, wives, sisters, and daughters.”91 While male revolu­ tionary activists may well have been more likely to let down their guard be­ fore a woman than before a man, male informants enjoying the trust of thencomrades could cause just as much damage to their target organizations. Mikhail Gurovich was one such informant. Of him, Zubatov said, “[H]e was a leader among the revolutionaries; through him . . . we knew everything.”92 Exiled to Siberia for revolutionary activity in 1888, Gurovich found a revolu­ tionary “mentor” in the widely respected radical political activist and histo­ rian V. Ia. Iakovlev-Bogucharskii. Gurovich turned informant in the early 1890s and later in the decade served Zubatov under the code name “Friend” (PriateV). In 1902 Petr Struve’s Osvobozhdenie exposed him, and now use­ less as an informant, he changed his hair color from red to black and openly joined the Police Department, where he played a key role until his retirement in 1906. Possessing a suspicious but logically rigorous mind, Gurovich was a subtle judge of character and a demanding and skillful security officer who always treated gendarme officers with tact.93 According to Leonid Menshchikov, he kept “a Mauser in his office and a Browning in his living room.” Yet a revolutionary who knew Gurovich well described him as very self-pos­ sessed, “clearly not a coward.” In 1905, according to security officer P. P. Zavarzin, he walked up and down the streets of Rostov-na-Donu, where Cos­ sacks and revolutionaries were shooting at each other.94 Evno Fishelevich Azef was Imperial Russia’s most notorious informant— and an infamous double agent. In 1893, as a Russian student in Karlsruhe, he sent a letter to the Police Department director offering to inform on the nascent Socialist-Revolutionary coalition for “no less than fifty rubles per month.”95 The Police Department accepted his offer, and Azef proceeded, at least in part, to keep his side of the bargain for sixteen years. Zubatov worked closely with Azef from fall 1899 until the informant was sent abroad to infiltrate the Socialist-Revolutionary underground in late November 1901. Yet Azef never yielded all the information at his disposal, and, while informing against the So­ cialist-Revolutionaries, he also worked for them.96 Throughout his career, Azef pilfered funds from the party. Yet his comrades, because of his seemingly great dedication to their cause, refused to believe him capable of either theft or trea­ son until the evidence against him became incontrovertible in 1909. An aston­ ishingly successful double agent, Azef nevertheless represented an aberration. No other Russian informant, it seems, managed to trick two sets of such inveterately suspicious people and to use them for his own self-aggrandizement. Although a few of the most talented and successful informants were

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women, the vast majority of all informants were men. Of 371 informants em­ ployed by the Russian security police in Moscow, Paris, and Warsaw on the eve of the February Revolution, only thirteen (that is, only one in thirty) were women.97 From the point of view of the Imperial bureaucracy, which ex­ cluded women from the civil service, female informants were a great anom­ aly. It seems likely that most provincial gendarme officers, who generally dis­ liked the whole idea of deploying informants, refused on principle to recruit females. If such was the case, then the female proportion of all informants employed by security bureaus and gendarme stations must have been even slighter. Although the revolutionary milieu was more a man’s than a woman’s world, it is generally accepted that women made up a larger proportion of the major parties than one in thirty. For example, women constituted perhaps 15 percent of the total membership of the Socialist-Revolutionary Party in the first years after its founding in 1902.98 The overall number of informants in late Imperial Russia was never great, and before the turn of the century there were very few indeed. Kletochnikov, who had access to the security police’s most sensitive files from January 1879 to December 1880, discovered 385 informants in the whole empire, 115 of whom regularly reported to the police during four months in 1879. As late as 1895, the Moscow Security Bureau employed only twelve informants, and before 1900 only a few provincial gendarme stations had any at all.99 It is likely that in 1899 there were at most two hundred permanent informants in the entire security system. Their number increased dramatically in 1902 and 1903 in response to the resurgence of revolutionary terrorism, the outbreak of large-scale agrarian violence, and the growth of mass political opposition movements. In 1903, the funding for informants, including a variety of inci­ dental expenses, totaled roughly 200,000 rubles: 149,000 rubles for the three security bureaus (one in Warsaw was founded in 1900), 52,000 rubles for thirteen smaller security bureaus, created in 1902, and a further 5,300 rubles for sixty-three gendarme stations. Since informants generally received an av­ erage of 30 to 40 rubles per month, their total number within the empire in 1903 must not have greatly exceeded five hundred.100 It seems that the num­ ber had not significantly increased by 1905. Despite the relatively small number of informants employed by the Imperial security service, their destructive effect on the revolutionary movements was far from trivial. Martov admitted that even in the early 1890s the fear of informants in their midst exerted a “significant restraining factor” on revolutionary ac­ tivists. In 1903, the Social Democrat N. E. Bauman acknowledged that he and his comrades considered Moscow such a nest of informants that many of them had given up trying to engage in party work there. Similarly, A. I. Ul’ianovaElizarova, V. I. Lenin’s sister and a Social Democratic activist, acknowledged that “the fear of provocation [in Moscow] often forced people to isolate them­ selves from each other. . . forsaking the very idea of uniting.”101 It seems likely that the considerable effectiveness of even a few well-placed informants led many radical activists to overestimate their actual number.

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A few particularly intelligent and talented informants, such as Rachkovskii, Zubatov, and Gurovich, rose to important positions within the security police system after their exposure as police agents. Among these was Leonid Menshchikov, the only man with whom Zubatov shared the direction of his infor­ mants. As a highly talented security expert, he served from 1888 to 1907. Spiridovich described him as “sullen, taciturn, proper, always coolly polite, a solid blond man with gold-rimmed glasses and a small beard.” Further, Menshchikov was an exceptionally hard worker. He kept to himself. He was of­ ten away on business, but in Moscow he usually “worked on perlustrationthat is, he responded to Police Department queries regarding intercepted letters. He also wrote general reports to the department with regard to data yielded by in­ formants. . . . Menshchikov knew the revolutionary milieu and his reports on revolutionary activists were exhaustive.102 That was a genuine compliment from one of the most penetrating, analytical minds in Russia’s security system. After modest efforts to remain silent at the time of his interrogation in 1887, Menshchikov agreed to become an infor­ mant, owing to, in the words of the Zubatov protégé S. Vinogradov, “an incli­ nation to live with a measure of comfort.” He failed as an informant, however, and then tried his hand at external surveillance,, also without much success. Vinogradov recalled that “he spent all of his time wooing the ladies, serenad­ ing them on the guitar and mandolin, and boasting of his exploits to his com­ rades.”^ In time Menshchikov found his way to Mednikov’s heart through flattery. After a fruitless attempt at general office work, he also managed to impress Zubatov, who beginning in 1896 sent him out on missions into the provinces. Here Menshchikov’s talents glistened. Time and again he orchestrated raids on illegal presses and broke up underground networks. In late 1896, for ex­ ample, Zubatov’s informants reported that a shipment of illegal literature would soon arrive in St. Petersburg via Koenigsberg and Vilnius. An inter­ cepted letter yielded the smugglers’ secret passwords, which permitted Zuba­ tov to dispatch Menshchikov in January 1897 to Vilnius, where he received two shipments of illegal literature (totaling over one thousand copies). He then went on to deliver the publications to the designated underground con­ tacts in order to elucidate the entire distribution network.104 This gambit reveals as much about the boldness—even recklessness—of Zubatov as it does about Menshchikov’s talent and skill and the damage he inflicted on the revolutionary underground. Nearly all gendarmes and proba­ bly even most security officers would have recoiled in horror from such an audacious plan, which cast the security police as facilitators and accomplices of the revolutionary underground.105 Zubatov, however, was willing to run the risk of allowing illegal literature to enter circulation within the empire in or­ der to illuminate more of the shadows among which the revolutionaries oper­ ated. He employed a similar scheme when he left a few revolutionaries at large “for breeding” after a group had been arrested. He could not have found

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a better security officer than Menshchikov, to whom a Police Department re­ port attributed the carrying out of thirteen major antirevolutionary operations from 1898 to 1902.106 Menshchikov’s skill in the field won Zubatov’s trust; soon he gained access to more sensitive materials and was assigned weightier tasks. Since he also manifested a real talent for preparing clear, concise re­ ports on complex issues, Zubatov put him in charge of reporting to the Police Department on the bureau’s major state-crime cases.107 Whereas surveillants were almost entirely under the direct control of po­ lice officials, informants enjoyed far greater freedom, since they could hope to preserve their anonymity only by virtue of shrouding their activities in a veil of secrecy. This room to maneuver may have been essential to the protec­ tion of informants, but it also placed their case officers in danger. In 1883, Degaev murdered Sudeikin, Mania Vil’bushevich during a moment of crisis contemplated killing Zubatov, and one of Spiridovich’s informants twice at­ tempted to slay him, the second time nearly successfully.108 Indeed, security experts realized that most informants eventually grew to loathe their work, whereupon they became labile and thus dangerous. How could it be other­ wise, given both the normal tensions of “spying” and, in most cases, at least periodic doubts about the rectitude of one’s actions? Case officers needed to sense the coming crisis and then to help their informants leave the revolution­ ary milieu and establish themselves in society. Aleksandr Martynov, for ex­ ample, helped one of his informants to sever his ties with the police and to at­ tend art school, where he became a sculptor.109 In short, the danger connected with employing informants had at its roots the problem of how one could win the complete trust of one’s agents while retaining one’s own suspicions. To diminish the risks that reliance on informants presented, case officers were taught to maintain more than one agent in each target organization and to employ each agent’s reports (as well as information from other sources) to corroborate those of other agents. They also strove to isolate informants in or­ der to reduce the potential damage caused by defections and to prevent infor­ mants from comparing notes.110 In an effort to demonstrate the security bu­ reau’s “omniscience” to informants, and thereby to banish from them any thought of providing false reports, case officers occasionally divulged infor­ mation obtained from one informant (or, again, from diverse sources) to oth­ ers operating in the same milieu. Thus, for example, having received Azef’s anonymous offer of services in 1893, Georgii Semiakin launched an investi­ gation into his identity. Carelessly, Azef had sent a similar offer to the gen­ darme chief in Rostov-na-Donu (his hometown), who forwarded it to the Po­ lice Department. Comparing the handwriting in each letter, police clerks established their similarity and thereby Azef’s identity. Another police official then checked into Azef’s background and activities. Armed with the fruits of this research, Semiakin was able to demonstrate to Azef the futility of at­ tempting to hide secrets from the Police Department.111 (In the long run, of course, Azef proved more clever than at least some of his case officers.) Case officers sometimes went to great lengths to preserve the anonymity

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of their informants, especially the most influential, well-placed, or talented ones. An interesting case in this regard concerns Leopold Ruma, a Belgian citizen, whom the Social Democrats expelled from their ranks as an alleged informant. Assiduous research by Soviet archivists never produced a shred of evidence that he had aided the Imperial security service. It seems likely, on the contrary, that Zubatov had purposely spread rumors of his having been an informant as a means to divide and weaken the Social Democrat leadership and to deflect attention from his real informants.112 Nevertheless, the infiltra­ tion of revolutionary organizations remained dangerous work. The fact that only a few people worked as informants for longer than three years bore wit­ ness to the precariousness of their positions, and those who were unmasked risked death at the hands of their erstwhile comrades. One factor that complicated the effort to control informants was the cloak of secrecy under which the security police operated. Naturally, the most effi­ cient deployment of informants required immense care and tight security, which Zubatov, himself a former conspirator, cultivated instinctively. This was one of his most consequential and portentous legacies. Earlier security police officers, excepting Sudeikin, had expended little effort to preserve the secrecy of their sources of information and methods of operation. Even Sudeikin had proved a poor judge of his key informant’s reliability. Zubatov, by contrast, tirelessly argued that the security service must spare no effort to defend itself against intrusion. The watchword for Zubatov was konspiratsiia, that is, acting stealthily, avoiding detection through a disciplined observance of elementary rules of secrecy. Maurice Laporte observed that the word “kon­ spiratsiia ” may be unique to the Russian language. Connoting an entire lifestyle, konspiratsiia was an essential characteristic of the outlook and methods of operation of the security police and revolutionaries alike. For a security police officer, this meant, among other things, concealing profes­ sional matters even from his spouse, “forgetting” the true names of his infor­ mants, and striving not to be a creature of habit, whose movements might be revealing to observant revolutionaries. For security bureau directors, it also meant forestalling attempts by revolutionaries to penetrate their defenses in the manner of Kletochnikov. Spiridovich, in a lecture on security police the­ ory for the training of gendarme officers, listed konspiratsiia as one of five es­ sential qualities for a security officer. The other four qualities were moral su­ periority over the enemy, a high level of education, an understanding of the revolutionary movement, and inner calm. For revolutionaries, konspiratsiia meant using aliases, false passports, and secret meeting places, among other tools of subterfuge. Indeed, a Soviet historian has called it the “most impor­ tant principle” of the Bolshevik underground, and the writer V. Ia. Iretskii wrote in 1918, “When one learns about the [security police’s] rules on how to organize conspiratorial apartments, one wonders who learned from whom: the okhranniki from the revolutionaries or the revolutionaries from the okhranniki”m This was the point at which the worlds of security service and underground activists met and overlapped.

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It is important to dispel the confusion engendered by use of the term “agent provocateurs” (provokatory) in reference to informants. In its narrow sense, a provokator was understood to be a person who encouraged or incited political activists to commit crimes so that they might be repressed by the po­ lice. Many active opponents of the Imperial regime, as well as all Soviet his­ torians, knew that few informants were provokatory in this sense of the term, yet they insisted on applying it indiscriminately to all informants. How can one account for this misrepresentation? “Provokator” sounded far more pejo­ rative than “informant” or “agent,” for it implied involvement in criminal ac­ tivity on the part of the Russian government and its servants. Moreover, the regime’s critics were apparently outraged by the informants’ betrayal to the police of people to whom they professed loyalty. Indeed, the term “traitor” (predateU) was often used as a synonym for “provokator.” One Soviet histo­ rian, N. A. Troitskii, having studied the efforts of Degaev to disorganize Peo­ ple’s Will, indignantly recoiled at the thought of Degaev’s betrayal of his comrades. Obviously, for Troitskii, the motives and character of each member of the group should have been utterly above suspicion.114 It was the radicals’ commitment to violent revolution—a commitment, to be sure, aroused by the arbitrariness and backwardness of the Imperial regime—that prompted the government’s security service to develop sophisti­ cated methods of training and directing secret informants. While the mighty Imperial government clung stubbornly to its prerogatives and as the tradi­ tional Russian estates continued to evolve slowly toward social complexity and economic diversification, the minute number of dedicated revolutionaries and the even smaller number of police informants who circulated among them took part in a dance macabre, a conspiratorial combat. Of course, some informants committed provocation in the narrow sense of the term. Trained jurists in the Police Department issued many directives de­ manding the criminal prosecution of informants engaging in provocation, yet nowhere did the Police Department define the concept precisely; indeed, one senses that “useful” provocation was permissible. In July 1897, for example, Zubatov directed Gurovich to propose to certain revolutionaries the publica­ tion of illicit political works, including a pamphlet by the well-known popularizer of Marxist theory Shimon Dikshtein, in order to discover the location of an elusive printing press.115 Such endeavors, called “sting operations” in contemporary American parlance, were undoubtedly a form of provocation. Yet if they permitted the police to apprehend criminals, were they nefarious? Many educated Russians apparently thought so, but one suspects that if they had strongly disapproved of revolutionary activism, then their attitude to such provocation would have been more forgiving. More damning were the claims, made in a few cases by former security police officers, that some of their col­ leagues outfitted “printing presses” and “bomb factories” in order to be able to report to their superiors in St. Petersburg that they had scored major “antirevolutionary coups.”116 Such cases seem to have been rare, yet since promo­ tion in the service depended in part on seizures of printing presses, illegal

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literature, bomb factories, and weapons caches, duplicity of this nature may have been irresistible to some security officers. Among the most problematic informants from the point of view of the government were “central” informants (tsentral’naia agentura), that is, those who sat on the revolutionary parties’ central committees. Such agents, wh o were quite few in number, were able to divulge that party’s innermost secrets to the police. Yet achieving this high status in a revolutionary party demanded a willingness to take an active, continuous, and comprehensive part in its work. Spiridovich recalled that Zubatov vehemently opposed the use of cen­ tral agents. Several other security officers and senior police officials held that only informants who penetrated a party’s central committee could fùlly illu­ minate the revolutionaries’ plans and activities.117 This was a dangerous game, but one that it was perhaps impossible not to play, especially once the Socialist-Revolutionary coalition launched a large-scale program of political terror in 1902. The central agents mentioned above were almost always directed by case officers stationed far from their place of operation. Some of these “remote” informants were under the direction of the Special Section chief; others were directed remotely by security chiefs in Moscow, St. Petersburg, or Paris. Most operations officers, including Zubatov, agreed that an informant without close, direct, personal supervision was liable to become a source of danger. Azef was a remote informant, for example, when he helped to orchestrate the murder of V. K. Plehve in 1904 and of Grand Duke Sergei Aleksandrovich in 1905. His case officer, Leonid Rataev, was based in Paris at the time, which made it hard for him to guide Azef effectively. Azef’s leash was shortened considerably when Aleksandr Gerasimov was made director of the St. Peters­ burg Security Bureau in February 1905. A specialist in directing informants, Gerasimov was in a much better position than Rataev or officials in the Police Department to hold Azef accountable for his actions. Still, the case of Azef il­ lustrates the dangers inherent in trying to control informants at the heart of the revolutionary underworld.

A Security Officer of the New Generation One important consequence of Zubatov’s methods was that they inevitably deepened the gulf of incomprehension separating security officers and ordi­ nary gendarme officers. A senior police official wrote in 1902 that 90 percent of all gendarmes knew nothing of security policing.118 Exaggeration aside, the official meant that gendarmes on principle resisted employing secret in­ formants, whom they considered both unreliable and treacherous. The radical activist V. V. Vodovozov explicitly contrasted ordinary gendarme officers and security officers: [Novitskii] was menacing to individual persons who fell into his hands, he was menacing for the peaceful inhabitants of Kiev, perhaps [also] for moderate lib­ eralism, but the revolutionary movement flowed right past him, suffering from

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him much less than from the more refined heroes of security policing, like Zubatov, and perhaps it even benefited from [Novitskii]. He gave too many people an excellent lesson in Russian state law and he obliged too many people to think seriously about the nature of the Russian state system.119 Instead of working vigorously to raise the gendarmes’ level of competence, which probably seemed a Sisyphean task anyway, Zubatov endeavored to shunt them to the periphery of the security police system by building his se­ curity bureau into a sophisticated antirevolutionary force. He could not succeed in this task, however, without the support of several well-trained gendarme officers. None assimilated his lessons more thoroughly and successfully than Aleksandr Spiridovich. As previously noted, Spiridovich and his fellow gendarme officers who joined Zubatov in his antirevo­ lutionary crusade were at first reluctant to work with informants, for it vio­ lated their sense of personal honor. Yet Spiridovich states, “[S]oon the perspective of the demands of the state won out. We became conscious offi­ cers of security policing.” It must be remarked, however, that Zubatov for his part did not at first extend to these gendarmes his full trust. Only Mednikov and Menshchikov—two civilians— enjoyed his entire confidence, and only Menshchikov gained permanent access to the inner sanctum of the bureau, the office for the direction of informants. For this reason Spiridovich always envied and admired Menshchikov. He later brought to memory the astonish­ ment and deep pleasure that he had felt when Menshchikov, before departing on a business trip, had put him in charge of the office.120 He could not have done so without Zubatov’s full approval. Aleksandr Ivanovich Spiridovich was one of the most remarkable gen­ darme officers of late Imperial Russia. Bom into a provincial gentry family in 1873, he was educated at the Arakcheev Cadet Corps in Nizhni Novgorod and the Pavlovskoe Military School in St. Petersburg. He spent seven years in the 105th Orenburg Infantry regiment and two more at the Moscow Gendarme Station before Zubatov recruited him for his security bureau in January 1902. Zubatov took a great liking to him (becoming the godfather of Spiridovich’s daughter Kseniia) and soon entrusted him with important responsibilities.121 In January 1903 Spiridovich was made director of the newly created Kiev Se­ curity Bureau, where his abilities shone so brightly that, after the 1905 revo­ lution, he assumed responsibility for the emperor’s personal security. Spiri­ dovich and gendarme officers like him adulated Zubatov. Spiridovich retained such a deep respect and affection for the master okhrannik that in 1946 he still referred to the disgraced, long-dead, and widely vilified Zubatov as his “teacher.”122 Beginning in the mid-1890s, Zubatov’s students introduced his tactics throughout the Imperial security system.

C H A P T E R

F O U R

Combating Conspiratorial and Broad-Based Opposition 1891-1902

. opular unrest intensified from the beginning of Nicholas II’s reign into the new century. This was a time of dramatic increase in the number of gendarme investigations into political crimes, from 56 cases involving 559 people in 1894 to 347 cases involving 1,678 people in 1902. The next year the numbers rose to 1,522 cases involving 6,405 people.1 Civil strife reached an apogee in 1905, amid the strains of war with Japan. Tightly organized, centralized conspiratorial organizations worked hard to undermine the regime. Representing another, more widespread challenge were the tens of thousands of young people committed to bringing enlightenment, in the form of inexpensive but entirely legal publications, to the Russian masses. As op­ position movements, revolutionary parties, and terrorist organizations grew in strength and daring, the very survival of the regime depended in part on the performance of its security service. That service was remarkably effective at combating “professional revolutionaries,” yet how well could it perform in the face of mass popular movements and disturbances?

N eo-Populist and L abor Movements Until the mid-1890s, the government considered the vestiges of the Pop­ ulist, or agrarian socialist, and the People’s Will movements the most promi­ nent adversaries of the established order. They had been undoubtedly the most numerous and best-organized opponents of the regime, but their key strength lay in the “heroic” tradition that they represented. Throughout the 1880s, con­ tinued arrests dogged the remnants of People’s Will and foiled their terrorist

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plots, most notably the one aimed at murdering Alexander HI in 1887. The Police Department’s survey for that year boasted, “[A]s the police have grown in strength and efficiency over the past few years, it has become impossible to establish and to maintain revolutionary organizations in the empire.” In 1889, People’s Will was further weakened when one terrorist blew himself up and another inadvertently left a draft of a terrorist proclamation in a boutique. As a result of the latter indiscretion, the police arrested numerous revolutionaries across the empire.2 The government, apparently, had triumphed. This state of quiet did not endure, however, and soon the security police were scrambling to keep revolutionary activists at bay. Perceived government ineptitude in dealing with the terrible famine of 1891-1892 gave both liberals and radical opponents of the regime a new impulse to action. Radical activists traveled to the famine-stricken areas, where they educated, healed, and fed people, and agitated for a revolutionary uprising.3 Many of the activists were discouraged by the cold reception given them in the villages; E. D. Kuskova, who sought to incite peasants to rebellion in Saratov, was saved from being lynched by them only because of timely intervention by the police. A general disillusionment with the peasantry drove a wide variety of radical and revolu­ tionary activists in summer 1893 to join together in founding the People’s Justice Party with the sole aim of overthrowing the absolutist monarchy. The party established a network of affiliates in several cities of the empire and planned to launch empirewide demonstrations to demoralize the government. The network, however, was undermined by coordinated police arrests in five towns on 21 April 1894. These arrests had an important impact on the devel­ opment of political opposition in Russia by clearing the way for Marxism to win the hearts and minds of radical intellectuals.4 It also helped the Marxists that the security service continued to focus on repressing Populists and neo-People’s Will groups. In 1894, I. Rasputin founded a terrorist group in Moscow, as did lu. D. Mel’nikov in Khar’kov. Rasputin, drawing around himself T. Akimova, V. Bakharev, and Zinaida Gemgross-Zhuchenko, made plans to heave a bomb at the emperor from a window or a bell tower during the emperor’s state visit in Moscow. Zhuchenko assisted Rasputin in his terrorist preparations by translating French chemistry books for him, but at the same time she was reporting continuously to Zubatov. When Rasputin and thirty-five others were arrested on 4 May 1895, both Zubatov and Zhuchenko received large bonuses. As for the Mel’nikov circle, Zubatov’s agents arrested its principle members on 6 January 1895.5 The mobile surveillance brigade scored another important coup on 24 June 1896 when it seized an illegal printing press that had been operated by Pop­ ulists in and around St. Petersburg since 1894. The seizure led to the arrest of numerous Populists and Marxists, who also used the press. Police Depart­ ment Director Sergei Zvolianskii expressed “sincere gratitude” to Zubatov on behalf of Interior Minister I. L. Goremykin. A new Populist group was founded in fall 1896, but it too, along with a printing press, succumbed to po­ lice repression on 27 March 1897.6

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In the early 1870s, labor disturbances had prompted senior officials to di­ rect the police and gendarmes to increase their surveillance in factories and over propagandists and agitators seeking to incite industrial workers to unrest. Third Section officials had drawn up plans for significant labor legislation, but they had been shelved. Further labor unrest in the 1880s had prompted the adoption of relatively generous labor laws, especially that of 3 June 1886, which limited the power of factory managers over workers and regulated la­ bor contracts. Also in 1886, bureaus for factory affairs had been created in the provinces. Nonetheless, factory disturbances, mostly economic in nature, had continued to increase in number.7 As early as 1884, senior police officials had concluded that “patriarchal re­ lations” between employers and industrial workers had disappeared in Russia.8 For the remainder of the 1880s, the police had maintained close sur­ veillance over industrial workers involved in unrest, arrested and exiled strik­ ers and strike instigators, and prepared detailed, province-by-province reports on labor disorders. In addition, in 1894 the police had created a separate divi­ sion in the Police Department (the sixth) to oversee the drafting and imple­ mentation of factory legislation.9 Police authorities, given their concern with maintaining order, were among the few officials who realized that industrial workers, in spite of their relatively small number, represented a potentially powerful and explosive force and as such presented an extremely promising target for revolutionary activists. If the government was unwilling to do more on behalf of industrial work­ ers, radical activists were ready to step into the breach. The Populists were Russia’s first labor organizers. In the late 1880s, while émigré Marxists were engaged in theoretical analysis and arguments, the Populists were on the ground in Russia working closely with industrial workers, inciting them to rebel. The Populists’ association with terrorism and their higher profile drew them to the attention of the police, however, who time and again arrested Populist leaders and foiled their attempts at organization. Until 1894, nearly all of the major political trials concerned Populists, who continued to receive harsh judicial sentences. By contrast, members of the incipient Social Demo­ cratic movement, considered less dangerous, usually got off with probation or administrative exile to their home provinces. The Imperial censors even per­ mitted the publication of volume 1 of Capital in 1872 (“few in Russia will read it and even fewer will understand it”) and did not immediately ban vol­ ume 2 when it appeared in 1893.10 In the words of V. I. Lenin, “Until the gov­ ernment bestirred itself, until the ponderous army of censors and gendarmes sought out and fell upon the new enemy [that is, Social Democrats], much time elapsed.”11 Social Democratic labor organizers did not enjoy full immunity from po­ lice repression, and in Moscow especially they faced a grim adversary. There the security bureau dealt blow after blow to the inchoate Social Democratic movement from 1894 to 1902. It shut down or arrested successively the S. I. Mitskevich circle, the Worker’s Union, and A. I. Smirnova’s women’s circle

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in 1894; numerous individual activists in July and August 1895; the Moscow Worker’s Union in July 1896; the I. S. Badazhan, V. E. Vorovskii, N. Rozanov, I. F. Dubrovinskii, and V. Elagin circles in 1897; the committee of the Social Democratic Party in Moscow and the Moscow Union of Struggle for the Liberation of the Working Class in 1898; A. and M. Karaseva, S. N. Smidovich, and A. V. Lunacharskii in 1899; and the Social Democrats’ Moscow committee in 1900, 1901, and 1902. Numerous lesser arrests oc­ curred throughout each of these years as well. Consequently, many experi­ enced Social Democratic activists simply refused to work in Moscow. By fall 1896, according to N. E. Bauman, “one could not even contemplate conduct­ ing systematic revolutionary work. Everything, it seemed, was under the strictest control of the security bureau.”12 Out in the provinces, however. Social Democrats had an easier time orga­ nizing themselves. Illustrative is the case of Iulii Martov, who was arrested in 1893 and banished from the empire’s major cities. He chose Vilnius as his place of residence, on the advice of his comrades, because of its large worker population. Before his departure, the police allowed him to remain in St. Pe­ tersburg for one month. His group used this time to confer on future plans and tactics. In Vilnius, Martov joined the Social Democratic underground, which imposed extremely strict rules of secrecy. Among the rules were prohi­ bitions on using the real name of a comrade in speech, on writing unencoded letters, on acknowledging a comrade’s presence in public, and on speaking loudly indoors. The rules were effective. The police archives, later consulted by Martov, contained no suspicious information about his Vilnius interlude. Martov’s “good behavior” allowed him to visit St. Petersburg in early 1894 for medical reasons. Naturally, he spent his time establishing revolutionary contacts. Back in Vilnius, as Martov put it, his “group developed, but the po­ lice still slept.”13 In Vilnius, he met Arkadii Kremer, the author of a pamphlet on tactics for Social Democratic organizers entitled On Agitation. The two men’s collabora­ tion, indirectly promoted by the administrative exile system, was an impor­ tant step in the development of Social Democracy in Imperial Russia. Bor­ rowing from Populism, Kremer proposed to organize the broad masses of Jewish artisans in the Pale of Settlement by focusing on their everyday con­ cerns and frustrations.14 The approach formulated in On Agitation formed the core idea of the Union of Struggle for the Liberation of the Working Class. The union was created in St. Petersburg in autumn 1895 to unite the disparate Social Demo­ cratic circles, which had recently fallen prey to assiduous police repression. The repression continued. Many members of the Union of Struggle fell into the security police’s nets in December 1895 and January 1896, after the union had launched a massive campaign of agitation among the city’s indus­ trial workers. In all, the police arrested 100 activists, including nearly every intellectual leader (this was when V. I. Lenin was exiled to Siberia), which effectively neutralized the movement until the following autumn. Further

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arrests took place in the summer of 1896, and again on 21 March 1897.15 This repression had three critical results that decisively shaped the devel­ opment of Social Democracy in Russia. First, extremely young, inexperi­ enced, and highly impetuous activists came to fill the void and to lead the movement in the short term.16 Second, in Siberian exile Lenin, undoubtedly outraged at the ease with which he and others had been arrested, developed his plan for a tightly organized and highly disciplined cadre of professional revolutionaries. He would soon call battling against the security police the “revolutionary art” par excellence. Third, divorced from the practical work of organizing industrial laborers in Russia, Marxist theorists in exile abroad sank into hairsplitting doctrinal disputes. This activity alienated them from most Russian industrial workers, many of whom on the eve of 1905 were drawn more to Zubatov and Georgii Gapon than to Lenin and Martov.17 Despite the arrest of many radical labor organizers, the Union of Struggle managed to issue proclamations demanding better economic conditions for laborers. In the midst of the campaign, as many as 36,000 workers struck in St. Petersburg textile factories in June 1896. The strike agitation had suc­ ceeded, in the estimation of both a St. Petersburg Security Bureau employee and a Social Democratic activist, due to its focus on purely economic de­ mands.18 Renewed strikes and labor unrest in January 1897 caused many St. Peters­ burg manufacturers unilaterally to shorten the regular workday in their facto­ ries to eleven and one-half hours. The government extended this concession to the whole country in a law issued on 2 June 1897. Given the strikers’ em­ phasis on economic demands, the authorities punished the instigators much less harshly than they had punished them in the summer of 1896. They also, contrary to usual practice, released detailed information on the strikes, the magnitude of which raised the spirits of radical activists.19 The particular strikes of January 1897 took the Union of Struggle by surprise, since most of its leaders had been placed under arrest in late December 1896 and early Jan­ uary 1897, and fear of police repression kept many workers from associating with revolutionary activists. An interministerial committee was probably right, however, to lay much of the blame for the spate of strikes on intellec­ tual agitators in general.20 The security police in the capital might well have further weakened the strike movement had they more vigorously repressed those agitators. The future Kadet V. A. Obolenskii, for example, was sum­ moned to the security bureau in spring 1896. A gendarme colonel, unaware of the man’s propagandists efforts among the workers, questioned him in detail about his activities during the famine of 1891. The colonel was himself em­ barrassed that he had to trouble Obolenskii about something so trivial. “What can we do?” he inquired. “We are now wrapping up old cases.”21 The Police Department sought to spur administrative officials to greater vigilance by means of directives of 5 April and 12 August 1897. These direc­ tives urged governors and gendarmes to establish thorough surveillance in factories, to coordinate with factory inspectors and regular police their efforts

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to maintain order in those sites, and to arrest immediately all strike instiga­ tors. The August directive, which nevertheless exhorted governors to try to promote a peaceful resolution of the tensions between employers and their employees, specified that strike instigators should be subjected to administra­ tive punishments.22 As a result of this directive, only two out of twelve strikes in 1897 and 1898 were handled in the regular courts (after 7 February 1898, strike cases were tried behind closed doors). Meanwhile, the number of peo­ ple exiled administratively for involvement in factory disorders from 1896 to 1900 was 1,741, that is, twelve times more than the total of 145 for the previ­ ous sixteen years. In all, the Police Department issued nine directives on in­ dustrial workers from August 1897 to November 1902.23 As early as 1896, Zubatov had begun to formulate a very different ap­ proach to controlling the labor movement. As Bismarck had done during the years of the antisocialist laws, he combined repression with an imaginative program for labor reform.24 Indeed, it seems likely that Zubatov could not in all conscience have exercised his considerable talents for repression had he not been able simultaneously to promote the material and cultural interests of industrial workers. Convinced that industrial workers who participated in street demonstrations and strikes in 1896 were essentially loyal to the monar­ chy and would be deeply grateful if the monarch were to take it upon himself to promote their welfare, he envisioned organizing industrial workers under state auspices.25 This idea developed under the immediate intellectual impact of Eduard Bernstein’s argument, with which Zubatov was well acquainted, which maintained that improving the lives of industrial workers was achiev­ able within the confines of the social and political system then existing in western European countries. Having spent many hours speaking with workers and worker intellectuals, Zubatov believed that he understood their aspirations. As had Bernstein (and Kremer), he took their aspirations to be almost entirely economic in nature. Like many reformist bureaucrats under Alexander II, however, Zubatov could not conceive of progress or reform outside the framework of absolutism. As he later argued, an absolute monarch can ensure people’s freedom better than any constitutional principle because it stands above material interests or polit­ ical parties.26 In April 1898 he wrote, “If the petty needs and demands of the worker can be exploited by the revolutionaries for . . . profoundly antigovemment goals, does it not then behoove the government as quickly as possible to seize this weapon from the revolutionaries’ hands and to take the fulfillment of this task upon itself?”27 Zubatov was proposing to continue to repress revo­ lutionary activists while encouraging administrative officials to attend to the material needs of industrial workers. Zubatov did not advocate corporatism, that is, he did not deny the exis­ tence of inherent tensions and conflicts between employers and their work­ ers. His project was not, in other words, syndico-fascist. It was, rather, prag­ matically monarchist. Zubatov considered the monarchy indispensable, because there existed no other force capable of counterposing itself to both

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the industrialists and the radical intelligentsia, each of which, according to Zubatov, wished to exploit industrial workers for specific ends. Zubatovism was also not “police socialism,” since, as Zubatov himself argued, Zubato­ vism consisted in “fighting socialism, protecting the principles of private property in the economic life of the country, and ensuring the further devel­ opment of capitalism.”28 Due to support by D. F. Trepov, the well-connected city governor, and Grand Duke Sergei Aleksandrovich, the emperor’s uncle, Zubatov was able gradually to implement his program in Moscow and in a few cities of the Pale of Settlement, despite staunch opposition from Sergei Witte and the Finance Ministry. Witte, who felt a strong aversion to police institutions in general, opposed Zubatov at every turn.29 For example, he persuaded the Interior Min­ istry to issue, on 4 September 1898, a joint directive with the Finance Min­ istry entrusting the factory inspectorate with full authority within factory premises. A factory police force was created on 1 February 1899 under the Interior Ministry’s auspices, and a directive of 8 April 1899 urged governors both to maintain a close watch over workers, especially Jewish workers, and to prevent factory disturbances using both force and mediation. Yet a Police Department directive of 14 August 1899 reaffirmed unambiguously that fac­ tory inspectors enjoyed full authority inside factories and that the police had jurisdiction only outside of them. The police were obligated, under the rules, to leave to the discretion of the factory inspectorate the resolution of even the most egregious worker complaints about employers or even about factory in­ spectors.30

The Special Section The rising tide of opposition worried senior officials. In 1898, Justice Min­ ister N. V. Murav’ev reported that from 1892 to 1898 the yearly number of people involved in the “social-revolutionary movement,” whose cases were handled by Imperial order, rose from a few hundred in 1892 and 1893 to well over 1,000 in 1897 and 1898. Murav’ev warned that antigovemment activities would continue to expand.31 The Police Department responded to this threat by increasing its capacity to supervise and to coordinate security police institutions in the field. As late as 1897, the Police Department lacked a unified command center for security policing. Officially its third division bore that responsibility, but since 1883 a separate subdivision, the Special Section (Osobyi otdel), had gradually ab­ sorbed a number of security policing functions. In early January 1898, on the advice of the vice director of the Police Department, Georgii Semiakin, the Special Section became the nerve center of the security system. Thereafter, the third division retained only administrative functions.32 The first director of the newly constituted Special Section was Leonid Rataev, a long-serving official of the Interior Ministry who had headed the of­ fice since 1894. In the interest of security, he and his four assistants concealed

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the true nature of their work, claiming to be scholars, writers, or merchants. One entered their secretive realm by passing through Rataev’s office on the top (fourth) floor of the Police Department building at 16 Fontanka Quay.33 Although Rataev claimed that the Special Section was a “fighting institution [and, as such,] must ever be on a military footing, fully prepared for action,” it acted more as a clearinghouse for information sent by local surveillance or­ gans and the postal censors than as an active coordinator of crime fighting. The Special Section analyzed, classified, and interpreted data furnished by police institutions, informants, and perlustration; surveyed the various oppo­ sition groups and movements and prepared assessments of their strength and significance; compiled, organized, and indexed information on social disor­ ders, students, workers, and the general mood of the Russian population; and coordinated the search for political criminals.34 To assist with accomplishing these tasks, the section maintained a complex and sophisticated filing system, which was divided both thematically and geographically. By 1901, a card file contained 20,000 photographs of suspected political criminals; another listed 55,000 people who had attracted the police’s scrutiny. The offices of the French prefect of police, in comparison, comprehended 25,000 political dossiers in the 1830s, that is, about half the number of files in a country with one-quarter of Russia’s population.35 The Special Section did not concern it­ self directly with the search for and arrest of political suspects, the applica­ tion of administrative punishments, or the determination of political reliabil­ ity, which were the responsibility of security officers and senior administrative officials. It also left to other divisions of the Police Department tasks such as regular policing, the funding of police operations and institu­ tions, and police legislation. The collection and analysis of a broad array of social and political data provided the Special Section with information necessary to evaluate the per­ formance of police institutions in the field and to determine the appropriate­ ness of specific actions undertaken by them at any moment. Information at the Special Section’s disposal also provided the substance for periodic reports to the emperor on the state of his empire. Unofficially called the “tsar’s leaflet” (tsarskii listok), the reports were an amalgam of sophisticated intelli­ gence on the revolutionary and opposition movements and sensational re­ portage concerning disasters, disorders, and deaths.36 Technically called the “D igest of Notew orthy Police D epartm ent Inform ation” (Svod zasluzhivaiushchikh vnimaniia svedenii po Departamentu politsii), these re­ ports, which filled five to 600 pages yearly, were read only by the emperor and his closest advisers. Submitted monthly in the early 1890s, biweekly until 1902, and weekly beginning in 1902, they supplied details on arrests, illegal publications, state crimes perpetrated, plots foiled, explosions, natural disas­ ters, significant confessions by criminals, sensational regular crimes, and other matters worthy of note—usually two or three dozen features per report. Judging by their regular jottings in the margins, Nicholas and his advisers ap­ parently found them compelling reading, which from-the point of view of the

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security service presumably had the added benefit of helping to justify their work. Unlike the interior minister’s reports to the emperor, these reports did not interpret the data, make assessments about political stability in the em­ pire, or offer suggestions for overall strategy in the battle against sedition. To do so no doubt would have seemed inappropriate to the emperor and his se­ nior officials, who bore sole responsibility for political decision making in Imperial Russia. It is also notable that in these reports the police themselves remain in the background, their actions or sources of information often being referred to only by implication or oblique mention (as agentumye svedeniia, that is, information received from secret informants and perlustration). As part of its work, the Special Section developed a massive collection of illegal political literature, which in 1901 contained 5,000 items. First devel­ oped by the Third Section, the collection became more systematic with the creation of the Police Department in 1880 and received illegal literature from the censors, gendarme stations, prosecutors, and security bureaus. Analysts used the literature, along with data provided by a variety of other sources, to study the revolutionary organizations and to prepare relatively in-depth re­ ports on them. Materials in the collection were also regularly lent to local po­ lice organs, some of which developed their own collections. Numerous illegal publications have been preserved for posterity pnly as a result of the assidu­ ous efforts of the Special Section.37 In order to obtaip a broader perspective on revolutionary activists and movements, Special Section draftsmen painstakingly prepared two kinds of schematic diagrams showing the interrelations among persons being watched.38 The first kind, which focused on individuals, placed the suspect at the center and indicated by lines radiating out to circles the personal and pro­ fessional relations of various degrees and types. The second kind, party dia­ grams, delineated the structure of relations among party members and their acquaintances. Some of the charts are almost absurdly complex, with as many as 200 circles and a dense network of interconnecting lines. Security police officials hoped—apparently with some justification—that the establishment of these personal interrelations would yield an understanding of the entire or­ ganization of which each was a part. This method also permitted the police to maintain thousands of people under loose surveillance, in case they should later begin active revolutionary work. Hannah Arendt saw in these diagrams a first attempt to realize the “utopian goal of the totalitarian secret police,” which she described as being able “at any given moment to establish who is related to whom and in what degree of intimacy.”39 Of course, keeping loose watch over a few thousand individuals hardly inspires much awe or dread nowadays. These sketches would probably appear quite innocent next to the methods of the post-1917 governments of eastern and central Europe for dealing with dissidents. Systemically unable simply to neutralize—by arrest, exile, or other means—all of those suspected of active opposition to the regime. Imperial Russia’s security police in most cases merely observed them until they committed some definite crime or until

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a security officer considered it opportune to arrest them. It is perhaps a “total­ itarian” impulse to maintain radicals under an elaborate web of surveillance, but to leave them at liberty doubtless is not. A comparison of the size of the French and Russian security police is illu­ minating. The French police prefecture in 1898 fielded 147 commissaires spé­ ciaux, aided by 188 inspecteurs spéciaux, whose sole task was to collect in­ formation on public opinion, the “state of mind of the different social classes, the labor movements, the activities of parties, and the behavior of their lead­ ers.”40 The closest Russian equivalent was probably the Gendarme Corps’s 150 special surveillance personnel who were stationed in the provinces at the end of the century. Given France’s thrice-smaller population, its special sur­ veillance officials constituted a force six times greater than that of Russia. The watchfulness of modem states seems to depend on the resources avail­ able to governments and the range and diversity of social phenomena to be watched. It is not surprising, then, that the French state’s capacity to conduct surveillance was relatively greater than that of the Russian state. One should perhaps add a few words about two above-mentioned senior security police officials. Georgii Semiakin, a graduate of the Imperial School of Jurisprudence, headed the Police Department’s third division from 1883 to summer 1897. At that time he became assistant director of the Police Depart­ ment, replacing Sergei Zvolianskii, who himself became its director. Al­ though Zubatov considered Semiakin incompetent as a security police offi­ cial, Semiakin had sufficient talent to recruit both Azef and Zhuchenko and to direct their first steps as informants. It was also he who gave Zubatov the lati­ tude necessary to expand the scope of his operations well beyond Moscow. Zubatov’s low opinion of his new immediate supervisor, Leonid Rataev, was corroborated by Spiridovich who described Rataev as “a handsome, worldly Don Juan, a passionate theatergoer . . . known in St. Petersburg as ‘Space Cadet’ [Komet Otletaev]” It is not surprising that Azef had little trouble lead­ ing him by the nose.41 In such hands now formally rested the coordination of security policing in the empire. De facto, however, Zubatov remained the key player in the system and occasionally kept Rataev in the dark about some as­ pects of important cases, largely in order to preserve as much room for ma­ neuver as possible. For example, Zubatov dominated the massive arrest of Social Democrats in March 1898. Since August 1897 he had been on the trail of the Social De­ mocrats’ secret press, which he knew to be operating in the south. At this time, it seems that he was Russia’s only security police official with infor­ mants in Social Democratic circles. Probably from Anna Serebriakova, Zuba­ tov learned that A. A. Ioganson was the Social Democrats’ liaison for contacts between Moscow and Kiev. Surveillants were detailed to follow Ioganson, who led them to several Social Democratic activists in Kiev, Odessa, and Ekaterinoslav. Zubatov’s mobile surveillance brigade settled down in these cities and maintained a presence in others as well. A security police confer­ ence was convened shortly after 2 February 1898 under Semiakin’s direction,

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and plans were laid for the arrest operation. Meanwhile, the Russian Social De­ mocratic Party was founded on the first and second of March in Minsk. Zubatov apparently never divulged to his superiors all that he knew about the dele­ gates, because he intended to leave a few of them at liberty in the hope that their movements would tell him more about the organization than they were likely to reveal under interrogation. Ten days later the police in the empire’s southern borderlands arrested as many as 1,000 people, including many of the conference delegates. In Kiev alone, which Zubatov considered the most dan­ gerous center of Social Democratic activity, 142 people were apprehended. In Ekaterinoslav, the Social Democrats’ secret press was seized. Immediately af­ ter the operation, General Novitskii warmly thanked Zubatov for his agents’ as­ sistance.42 In July Zubatov coordinated the arrest of fifty-five leading members of the Bund in eight cities and towns in the Pale of Settlement.43

The Student Movement In February 1899 student disorders broke out at St. Petersburg University and spread to other universities in the Russian Empire. Spiridovich later re­ marked that this movement had “served as the commencement of that social movement, which, growing steadily thereafter, won over an ever broader range of people, merged with the revolutionaries, and flowed into the revolu­ tion of 1905.”44 Mofe recently, Richard Pipes has argued that the student dis­ orders of 1899 not “merely foreshadowed 1917 but led directly to it.’’45 One may also argue, more concretely, that the rise of the student movement fos­ tered the radicalization of the bar by expanding the number of radical law stu­ dents; stimulated the publication of 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 avail­ able to opponents of the Imperial regime if only they could rouse the popula­ tion against it.46 Student disturbances, occurring nearly every year in the late 1870s and early 1880s, had provoked the imposition of the notorious university statute of 1884. Further disturbances in 1887, 1890, 1893, and 1894 had led to the adoption of other restrictive regulations.47 Confrontation between the govern­ ment and university students was probably inevitable: the last two Russian emperors both promoted the expansion of education and instituted a system of restrictions on university students, whom they viewed as largely threaten­ ing to the maintenance of absolutist rule in late Imperial Russia.48 During the yearly commemoration of the founding of the University of St. Petersburg on 8 February, students had the run of the town. Unimpeded by the police or university authorities, they staged “mock political assemblies,” which sometimes led to violent confrontations between students and less for­ tunate Russian subjects. Disorders had taken place in 1895, 1897, and 1898, and therefore on the eve of 8 February 1899 the university administration for­ mally warned the students that unruly behavior during the festivities would be

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severely punished. Many students took the warning as an affront and orga­ nized a demonstration. During the demonstration, protesters clashed with po­ licemen, and several students were wounded in the melee. Much of public opinion reflected indignation at the violence of the encounter, in which stu­ dents, traditionally a privileged group, had been treated as peasants.49 Amid strong public support, St. Petersburg University students went on strike. Students at other universities followed suit, and by March 35,000 stu­ dents had taken part in strikes and demonstrations. Indiscriminate repression put an end to the disturbances. In March and April 400 students were arrested in Kiev and 1,000 were expelled from Moscow University.50 On 29 June 1898 the government issued, but did not immediately implement, “temporary rules” authorizing the military conscription of student strike instigators (to the consternation of military authorities). The treatment of the students, although considered “surprisingly mild” by Samuel Kassow, continued to provoke out­ rage among educated society.51 Public pressure caused the government to relent, and most students were allowed to return to school in the fall. This was a self-defeating policy. Many radical students had suffered police repression sufficient to reinforce their anger at the government; yet their treatment by the police was generally in­ sufficiently harsh to deter them from the paths of radicalism. On the contrary, students incarcerated in connection with the strikes and disorders enjoyed far more privileges and freedoms than ordinary inmates. Inevitably the govern­ ment relented, which gave both students and the broader public further reason to scorn it. As Leonid Rataev and an exiled student both argued, Who could respect a government that repeatedly countermanded its own orders?52 Disagreements on how to deal with the student rebels led to conflicts among police officials. Zubatov knew the student milieu fairly well because of such informants as Gurovich, who opened wide his dining room to stu­ dents in St. Petersburg. In summer 1899, Zubatov proposed to single out the most radical student organizers and to recommend their—and only their— expulsion from the university. A few preventive arrests of the ringleaders of an oppositional group, he argued, were more effective than trying to maintain a continuous police presence (torchanie politseiskikh).53 At the very least, the government in general and the police in particular had to avoid alienating the broader educated public by seeking to apply repression in a more discriminat­ ing fashion. Perhaps most important, the various elements of the opposition movements had become too broad for the police to stab at them blindly. Zubatov, meanwhile, was engaged in a personal struggle with his patron, City Governor Trepov. In September 1899 Trepov ordered Zubatov’s bureau to work side by side with the regular police and the university authorities to contain student disorders. Taking part in overt repression, of course, deflected the security service from ferreting out radical instigators. Zubatov argued that the security bureau should assist the regular police only by providing intelli­ gence and by training them in methods of “conspiracy” and should concern itself only with the clandestine activities of elements opposed to the regime.

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It was sensible, from the point of view of efficiency and professionalism, for the security police to concentrate their limited resources on those tasks that they did best. It was also prudent for the security police not to involve them­ selves with matters that the regular police were well suited to address. Indeed, when the press got wind of Trepov’s “secret” directive, a public scandal erupted and more student unrest ensued.54 Zubatov complained to Rataev and Trepov that Moscow’s regular police force often spoiled search and arrest operations. To improve their perfor­ mance, in late 1899 Zubatov composed a detailed guide for city precinct cap­ tains (uchastkovye pristava) on how to conduct arrests, searches, and seizures on behalf of the security bureau. Some of the provisions in the directive were intended to restrain police power (“use force only in extreme circum­ stances”), while others invited abuse. For example, regular policemen were given broad discretion in deciding which papers and books merited seizure and were authorized to search even those persons who might arrive during a search operation. Initially Trepov seems to have resented Zubatov’s meddling in regular police affairs, but he soon yielded under pressure from the Police Department, and the guide was issued to all precincts in September 1900.55 Zubatov may have won the battle, but the attempt to increase the efficiency of the regular police stole time away from his more important war. In March 1900, arguing that the student movement had become an em­ pirewide phenomenon, Zubatov requested additional funds from the Police Department for the expansion of his mobile surveillance brigade. One year later, as the student movement was again gaining strength, the brigade’s yearly budget was increased from 8,000 to 20,000 rubles, permitting the num­ ber of mobile surveillants to increase from thirty to fifty.56 Ultimately, how­ ever, the mere expansion of the mobile brigade was not sufficient to check the rapid growth of organized opposition in Russia. Only the creation of a net­ work of security bureaus in trouble spots was likely to permit the security ser­ vice to mount a credible defense against seditious activity in the empire.

Combating Social Democrats and Socialist-Revolutionaries In early 1899 Zubatov, in collaboration with Rataev, also sought to under­ mine the Social Democratic movement by helping to found a revisionist jour­ nal, Nachalo.51 Zubatov’s informant, Gurovich, stood at the center of the plan—in part because his common-law wife, A. A. Voeikova, was a publisher. Although many Marxist intellectuals disliked Gurovich, he was well con­ nected among the literary elite of St. Petersburg. Gurovich’s most important contact was Iakovlev-Bogucharskii. Zubatov prolonged their relationship by recommending in 1896 and 1897 that Bogucharskii, despite his clear “politi­ cal unreliability,” be allowed to reside in Moscow and in St. Petersburg. In January 1899 Voeikova offered the editorship of Nachalo to P. B. Struve. Al­ though the editorial board was dominated by revisionist Marxists, such as S. N. Bulgakov and M. I. Tugan-Baranovskii, the first issue (January-February

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1899) boasted a broad range of contributors, including D m itrii Merezhkovskii, E. V. Tarie, N. E. Mikhailovskii, and Viktor Chernov, thus en­ suring the journal’s popularity with the educated public. The venture, which was intended both to support Economists against orthodox Marxists and to keep them under close watch, resembled the funding by a French police pre­ fect of the newspaper Révolution sociale in the late 1870s.58 The scheme ran into problems from the very beginning. The first issue (nos. 1-2), once printed, was seized on orders of the Censorship Department of the Interior Ministry because an article by A. N. Potresov, an orthodox Marxist, was deemed subversive. The next two issues (nos. 3 and 4) were held up by the censors. In early June the Committee of Ministers deliberated on the journal’s fate, and a subcommittee of three ministers and the director of the Holy Synod moved to close the journal on 22 June 1899. Promoting a radical periodical publication seemed to them an inadmissible method for thwarting revolutionary movements.59 This was another case in which a lack of coordination within the Imperial bureaucracy hampered the work of the se­ curity police—work that probably would have borne fruit. Martov believed that the journal would have hurt the Social Democratic movement, which was then undergoing a crisis brought on by Revisionism.60 Another threat to the Social Democratic movement was Zubatov’s labor program. In March, April, and May 1900 he arrested dozens of Bundists in Minsk. Several of them, including Mania Vil’bushevich, accepted his promonarchist arguments and joined the anti-Marxist Jewish labor organiza­ tion that he was sponsoring. In June the detainees returned to Minsk full of enthusiasm and a desire to promote the economic well-being of Jewish arti­ sans in the Pale. Vil’bushevich sent regular reports to Zubatov, which permit­ ted him to arrest prominent Bund leaders. Their absence from the scene fur­ ther strengthened the new organization.61 Back in Moscow, Zubatov further developed his plan to wean industrial workers away from the Social Democrats. In a letter of 10 September 1900 he recommended creating adult education programs for industrial workers. The Justice Ministry, he wrote, could write popular tracts on Russia’s system of law, for “schools teach the law of God [zakon Bozhii, or catechism] and the laws of nature but not the laws of state.” Educated elites could help create schools, theaters, and concerts for the masses. He argued further that the gov­ ernment should turn a blind eye to nonpolitical strikes (though the legaliza­ tion of strikes in general was apparently an idea too radical for the paternalis­ tic monarchist) and should encourage governors to treat industrial workers with tact and paternalistic concern. Such actions as these, he insisted, would leave the revolutionary leadership without a following, like a “general staff without an army.” Around the same time, Zubatov submitted a memorandum, drafted by Lev Tikhomirov, in favor of organizing the “working class into a worker estate [soslovie]” that is, not an artificially separate entity but one of several organic estates.62 It is not hard to see why this vision, similar to that of Catherine II, appealed to Zubatov’s powerful patrons in the government.

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Zubatov’s vision just as surely exasperated Social Democratic activists. Any reforms or any improvement in the living and working conditions of indus­ trial laborers (which orthodox Marxists believed could only be temporary) necessarily reduced their propensity to revolt. What could be more abhorrent to people dedicating their lives to bringing about a revolution? Although he advocated social reform, Zubatov had no intention of letting down his guard as a security official. First, he proposed to train more gen­ darme officers at the Moscow Security Bureau and to send them out to the trouble spots throughout the empire. Second, he advocated further centraliz­ ing the work of surveillants by expanding the mobile surveillance brigade. Third, he recommended decentralizing the supervision of informants by en­ couraging all gendarme officers in the field to learn to deploy them skillfully. Zubatov’s purpose in advancing the first two proposals may have been in part to magnify his own power. After all, he personally controlled the mobile brigade, so who better to train gendarmes in the craft of security policing than the master himself? Still, he was doubtless right to assert that refinements in security policing would “strike a much stronger blow at the revolutionaries than could the most terrible repression.”63 Combined with an earnest bid to strengthen the industrial workers’ support for the monarchy, the refinements might well have brought the Social Democrats to ruin. But the Social Democ­ rats were not the regime’s sole adversary. As mentioned above, one of the indirect results of the student disorders of 1899 was the founding of the Socialist-Revolutionary Party. It 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 peas­ ant-centered program of revolutionary propaganda. Each current claimed a considerable following within the movement. Spiridovich in part attributed the Police Department’s failure to prevent the coalescing of the SocialistRevolutionary Party to Rataev. He writes, “[The] unification took place abroad, where the extremely talented official Petr Ivanovich Rachkovskii re­ ceived information directly from Azef. [But] the central and directing organ of security policing [the Special Section] was not in control of the situation. [It] boasted of its knowledge of security policing, but made irreparable mistakes. It is not for nothing that the Special Section was directed by . . . Rataev.”64 The Socialist-Revolutionaries soon launched a campaign of political terror under the impact of the assassination of Education Minister N. P. Bogolepov, whom critics of his handling of the student disorders of 1899 called “Mr. Ab­ surd” (Nelepov). A Socialist-Revolutionary Party operative, A. D. Pokotilov, was in St. Petersburg preparing to kill Bogolepov when P. V. Karpovich shot and fatally wounded him on 14 February 1901. Karpovich, a former student twice excluded from university for involvement with the student disorders, had apparently acted alone. Soon, however, he became a prominent SocialistRevolutionary terrorist—and Azef’s close assistant.65 Karpovich’s deed set off an intense bout of student unrest, during which

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radical student leaders lauded the assassin. In many places across the empire industrial workers joined with students, clashing violently with the police. In St. Petersburg, radical intellectuals also took part. The huge demonstration on Kazan' Square in the capital on 4 March 1901 stunned the government, which reacted with great vehemence. Some 1,500 demonstrators were arrested. This seems to have been another important step along the road toward the 1905 revolution, when students, industrial laborers, and liberal and radical intellec­ tuals banded together to launch a united attack on the Imperial regime. As of­ ten had occurred, the government first overreacted, then relented. It expelled or banished from the capital hundreds of students and even conscripted dozens of them into the army on the authority of the law of 29 June 1899. In St. Petersburg, police and Cossacks with their billies flailing surrounded crowds of students and corralled them into jails filled to overflowing. Then, as if it had all been a mistake, most students were readmitted to the universities in the fall.66 Such erratic behavior no doubt simultaneously further alienated many students and emboldened the radicals. One should pause here to mention briefly one of the diverse means em­ ployed by the Imperial government to deal with popular discontent, namely, official cover-up. The Censorship Department of the Interior Ministry regu­ larly issued directives forbidding the press to mention a host of topics. Among the proscribed topics were trials against police officers, biographical details about terrorists, popular disorders and public disturbances, strikes, “tendentious references” to poor harvests, and details concerning the assassi­ nation of public officials. For example, one directive specifically forbade any published reference to Karpovich’s assassination of Bogolepov or to the trial against Karpovich. Although the censor’s grip was loosened somewhat in May 1901, it was again tightened after the appointment of V. K. Plehve as in­ terior minister one year later.67 Interior Minister D. S. Sipiagin responded swiftly but ambiguously to the disorders of late February and early March 1901. Appointed in October 1899, Sipiagin “wanted to be in charge of everything, to watch over everything, to be an all-Russian governor,” in the words of S. E. Kryzhanovskii. In March 1901 Sipiagin authorized the expulsion of several prominent public activists from the capital; yet the activists were allowed to choose their place of resi­ dence. For example, N. F. Annenskii and V. A. Miakotin chose to reside in Finland, very close to St. Petersburg; A. V. Peshekhonov chose Pskov; and Struve chose Tver, the seat of zemstvo radicalism. It was easy for each of them to help organize the opposition movements from these central locations. In a directive of 12 March 1901 Sipiagin accused the empire’s governors of failing to grasp “that they must not only stop disorders as they occur but must also prevent them from breaking out.” The minister pointed to the governors’ broad discretionary power, founded in part on the security law of 1881, and exhorted them to “nip each disorder in the bud” by exiling agitators adminis­ tratively and, as a last resort, by calling for military assistance.68 (At that time, slightly more than one-third of the population* of the Russian Empire

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and nearly one-half of the population of European Russia lived under rein­ forced security.) The interior minister doubtless failed to see that the use of discretionary power to exile radical activists to places close to St. Petersburg and Moscow was unlikely to eliminate the threat they posed to the regime. In April Sipiagin chastised the governors for sending rural police captains or even sergeants to observe public lectures. This responsibility, he insisted, should be borne by district gentry marshals or land captains, since “they can better understand the meaning [of such lectures].”69 The government was def­ initely in a bind. Its lower-level administrative officials could not be relied upon to watch over the more sophisticated elements of the burgeoning civil society, but surely the land captains had more important things to do than to attend public lectures in their districts. Gendarme officers would have been best suited to this task, but with fewer than a dozen of them per province they were in no position to cany it out. Administrative officialdom’s goal of main­ taining the whole of society under its watchful eye overstretched by a huge margin the capacities of its available personnel. Under these circumstances, many administrative officials in the field seem at times to have acted in an almost desperate manner, issuing a flurry of nearly unenforceable administrative orders, in the face of growing social un­ rest. The Social Democrat V. D. Bonch-Bruevich cited two such cases that took place in 1901. First, the governor of Iaroslavl’ made the failure to state one’s true identity to the police a crime punishable by a fine of up to 500 rubles or by a period of detention of up to three months. Second, the governor of Chernigov Province ordered all homeowners, residential superintendents, cabbies, and even bystanders to assist the police in their line of duty. BonchBruevich viewed these measures both as unenforceable and as evidence that the Imperial government was less powerful than most people imagined.70 Of­ ficials had the formal authority to impose ruinous tines on people without proper identification; they could demand public cooperation with the police. But could they maintain public order? Could they halt the work of “profes­ sional” revolutionaries? Bonch-Bruevich himself knew from experience that the Imperial security system as a whole was relatively lenient. Active in revolutionary organiza­ tions from a young age, he emigrated in 1896 to avoid arrest. In Europe he took part in the development of the Social Democratic Party and joined the Bolsheviks in 1903. In January 1905 they sent him illegally to Russia, and he traveled around the country until October promoting the Bolshevik faction. In November, having traveled to Geneva, he made his way back to St. Peters­ burg with twenty-five kilograms of explosives. From then until 1917, despite repeated arrests, he nearly uninterruptedly devoted himself to legal and illegal party work inside the Russian Empire, primarily in St. Petersburg.71 Russia’s revolutionaries viewed themselves as a kind of holy brotherhood of men and women dedicated to bringing down the Imperial regime and to putting a more just order in its place. In their quest for right they expected to fall into snares and to suffer pain and privations, including arrest, imprison-

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ment, and exile. These were deemed the unavoidable work hazards, the oblig­ atory trial and proof of their courage and devotion to the cause, a “natural, in­ evitable addition (dobavlenie) which perfects one’s entire activity,” in the words of the Socialist-Revolutionary terrorist Grigorii Gershuni. One counted devotion to the cause in terms of jails visited and places of exile known. The Bolshevik V. R Nogin’s tally, for example, reached fifty.72 By contrast, con­ sistent evasion of the police’s dragnet inevitably provoked suspicion among one’s comrades. In a milieu riddled with police informants, one felt most comfortable with several bouts of police repression under one’s belt. The punishments themselves, which usually took the form of periods of imprisonment and exile to Siberia or distant parts of European Russia, were generally far from cruel. Since many of the leaders of the various opposition movements were of the privileged classes and nearly all were educated, gov­ ernment officials at every level tended to treat them with respect. The Social­ ist-Revolutionary G. A. Nestroev reported that as late as 1902 political pris­ oners still enjoyed a privileged status; when they asked for a better cell it was immediately given them. Similarly, I. V. Gessen related that he and two other administrative political exiles en route to Vologda had an entire railroad car­ riage to themselves, while the mass of third-class passengers, crammed in like sardines, grumbled at the comfort enjoyed by the political exiles. Exile was often far more agreeable than prison, given the freedom of movement en­ joyed by the exiles. In Siberian exile, V. I. Lenin received a government stipend of eighteen rubles per month, wrote several pamphlets, and completed a major work, The Development o f Capitalism in Russia.73 By exiling mem­ bers of the opposition to dozens of places across Russia, for the most part in relatively decent conditions, the police both reinforced their beleaguered mentality, without undermining the commitment of any but the faint-hearted, and promoted the spread of their ideas.74 Still, administrative exile helped to preserve tranquillity in the Imperial capitals and other major cities. The attempts of Social Democrats to estab­ lish and to maintain an organizational beachhead in Moscow, for example, met with continuous frustration. N. E. Bauman admitted that “in February 1901, when, it is fair to say, all of Moscow was in a state of ferment, the SD committee was silent.”75 With the hard-core Marxists on the run, the security police kept up the pressure on Legal Marxists as well. Information acquired by Gurovich during a New Year’s Eve party he threw in St. Petersburg for former contributors to Nachalo led to the arrest in January and March of such prominent Marxists as S. G. Strumilin, Struve, and Tugan-Baranovskii. Not long thereafter, Gurovich himself was unmasked (because of an indis­ cretion unrelated to these arrests). Struve was stunned that Gurovich had so successfully fooled him and other brilliant intellectuals, since he seemed far less intelligent than they. It appears that, though he was not a true intellec­ tual, Gurovich was very clever in his ability to flatter and to feign loyalty, a skill that Anna Serebriakova also displayed in abundance. Gurovich was im­ mediately placed on the official payroll of the Special Section, where he

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advised Rataev and prepared the Police Department digest.76 In St. Petersburg, the security police were still weaker, and the industrial workers more militant, than in Moscow. A major confrontation between the police and 3,500 workers took place on 2 May 1901. Five days later a violent clash between police and workers left one person dead. Although V. M. Piramidov, the director of the St. Petersburg Security Bureau, blamed the fac­ tory management for the debacle, it seems likely that a better security officer could have averted it.77 Indeed, Piramidov appears to have been highly inef­ fective at recruiting and directing informants; even external surveillance un­ der his leadership was poorly organized. One can only speculate by what combination of patronage and ingratiating himself with senior officials he managed to remain in such a key position for four years. In any event, he died in a freak accident in July, whereupon the bureau’s resources deteriorated fur­ ther still. During the interregnum, Gershuni lived in St. Petersburg for three months under his own name. Later in the year, Zubatov was able to ensconce his own assistant, Iakov G. Sazonov, in the vacant directorship. Sazonov claimed that upon taking charge of the bureau he received only one mediocre informant for all of St. Petersburg. He immediately set about recruiting infor­ mants and as early as 3 December undertook a series of arrests of activists connected with Iskra,78 One wonders why Zubatov himself was not transferred to the directorship of the St. Petersburg bureau. Perhaps he believed that he could better oversee security-police operations throughout much of European Russia from Moscow, the empire’s heartland. It is possible that senior police officials pre­ ferred to keep the ambitious and willful Zubatov some distance from the seat of government. One might also suppose that the security man’s patrons— Dmitrii Trepov and Grand Duke Sergei—preferred to keep him in Moscow. In any event, from Moscow Zubatov launched more assaults against the incipient Social Democratic and Socialist-Revolutionary organizations in early fall 1901. On 23 September the mobile brigade covertly supervised the local gendarme station’s seizure of the main Socialist-Revolutionary press along with numerous party affiliates then operating in Tomsk. Twelve of these affiliates were exiled to further reaches of Siberia.79 Then, on 27 September 1901, as a result of intelligence furnished by Anna Serebriakova, Zubatov thwarted the attempt by six Social Democrats to found a permanent commit­ tee in Moscow. In order to protect Serebriakova’s identity, Zubatov pretended to mistake the Social Democrats for Socialist-Revolutionaries. His purpose was to make it seem that he had fallen upon the Social Democrats by acci­ dent. Several years later, I. I. Skvortsov-Stepanov, one of those arrested and exiled to Siberia, still had no idea that this had been a deliberate ploy. “It was often thought,” he wrote, “that Zubatov knew everything, but in fact he did not.” Two months later, M. G. Kogan-Grinevich visited Moscow on behalf of Rabochee delo (the chief rival of Iskra) and made straight for Serebriakova’s home. He departed Moscow under the attentive gaze of plainclothes surveil­ lants, traveling to Voronezh, Khar’kov, and Kiev. He made contact in each

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town with Social Democratic operatives, whose identities now became known to Zubatov. Kogan was then permitted to emigrate abroad because, as an Economist, he would continue to struggle against the more radical Social De­ mocrats associated with Iskra.80

Zubatovism in Action In the Pale of Settlement, a Zubatovist Independent Jewish Workers’ Party was founded in June 1901 in reaction to the increasing politicization of the Bund. Thanks to Mania Vil’bushevich and the energetic, talented—even charismatic—support of Gendarme Chief N. V. Vasil’ev, the independents’ or­ ganization in Minsk grew very popular among Jewish artisans, craftsmen, and petty employees. It was quite radical and autonomous and had many of the at­ tributes of a political party. This was a unique experiment in Imperial Russia, which gradually spread to other cities in the Pale.81 In Moscow, Zubatov’s labor program was less radical and more tightly controlled than in Minsk. On 26 May 1901 the Moscow Society of Mutual Help of Workers in Mechanical Factories convened its first meeting under po­ lice auspices and on the basis of statutes drawn up with the assistance of a professor of financial law at Moscow University, I. Kh. Ozerov. The founding members of the society, that is, Zubatov’s agents in the factories, were experi­ enced worker-intellectuals who deeply revered Zubatov and commanded the respect of their fellows. As industrial workers, they were, in the opinion of Professor Ozerov, quite impressive intellectually. He and other intellectuals prepared lectures on a wide variety of topics, continuously emphasizing the benefits of trade unions and labor legislation.82 Some evidence suggests that Zubatov’s agents occasionally used such meetings to ferret out radicals, who were later arrested.83 On 11 October 1901 a Council (Sovet) of Workers of Mechanical Factories of the City of Moscow was founded to coordinate district assemblies through­ out the city and, most important, to receive grievances from industrial work­ ers of every trade.84 Zubatov expected it to become the voice for industrial workers in Moscow and, as such, a tool of the government for controlling them. Worker grievances brought to the attention of the police usually prompted immediate action. Trepov regularly telephoned managers and fac­ tory inspectors directly in an effort to resolve the disputes.85 Between 1901 and 1903 Iskra alone published thirty-eight reports on Zu­ batovism, including twenty designed to expose Zubatov’s “attempts to cor­ rupt the Moscow workers politically.” N. E. Bauman admitted at the second Social Democratic Party congress in 1903 that for the previous two years “in Moscow revolutionary social democracy capitulated in the face of police so­ cialism.” Citing Iskra, Bauman remarked that “police corrupting [industrial workers] is more terrible to us than is police brutality.” Similarly, A. I. Ul’ianova-Elizarova, Lenin’s sister and a Social Dempcratic activist, admitted that “Zubatovism contributed to the disaggregation of the [SD] movement in

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Moscow.” These statements were surprisingly candid admissions of Zubatovism’s success among industrial workers.86 This success stemmed in part from the radicalism of Zubatov’s labor pro­ gram in the Russian context. His rhetoric, for example, provoked a few outra­ geous interpretations in the minds of some industrial workers who implied or asserted that the government would seize the factories and give them over to those who toiled in them.87 Conservatives in industry and most of officialdom viewed the program in a similar manner and denounced it as seditious. Their criticism frustrated Zubatov. Citing a lack of cooperation from administrative and police officials, on 26 July 1901 he threatened to tender his resignation.88 Nor did the picture brighten immediately. Zubatov’s conservative critics scored a notable coup when the Interior Ministry abolished the society’s lec­ ture series in November 1901. It recommenced only in June 1902 with cler­ gymen and monarchist intellectuals as lecturers and with a corresponding curriculum. This outcome pleased conservative elements in high society, but it apparently diminished worker interest.89 Ironically, although Zubatov himself apparently believed in a strong, cen­ tralized monarchy, his success in implementing his labor program owed much to the Russian monarchy’s relatively uncoordinated nature. Thus the support of Dmitrii Trepov and Grand Duke Sergei in Moscow and a few other senior officials prevented the powerful Witte and his ally, Interior Minister Sipiagin, from putting an end to it. Another key supporter of Zubatov was Police De­ partment Director Sergei Zvolianskii. In November he asked Zubatov to re­ port on his labor program’s progress and even to suggest how it might be ex­ tended to the student movement. In his reply of 28 November Zubatov argued that many students were either apolitical or conservative and were therefore likely to act as a bulwark against radical agitation if allowed to form informal groups and organizations. This proposal was perhaps more liberal than Zvo­ lianskii had expected, which may account for why it received no high-level support from the government. In early December Zubatov submitted his as­ sessment of his labor program. He admitted that despite its success the labor movement had remained a force to be reckoned with. Zubatov therefore advo­ cated an undertaking of the magnitude of the emancipation statutes of 1861 on behalf of the country’s industrial workers. The government, he argued, ought to attend to the welfare of industrial workers by providing special sub­ sidies for the birth, baptism, and schooling of children and for workers in times of unemployment. “If we do not act,” he wrote, “then monarchism will lose its moral authority among the masses, who are increasingly corrupted by the intelligentsia.”90 It seems that Zubatov’s vision for reform was growing more radical under the impact of the increase in public and popular discon­ tent. One can only wonder whether he really imagined that the Imperial gov­ ernment was likely to implement it. As chief of the security bureau in Moscow, Zubatov had no authority to do so. From his point of view, then, the only hope of realizing his projects lay in advancing in the civil service. In St. Petersburg he could perhaps shake things up, but he had to overcome a seri-

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ous impediment: Leonid Rataev, the director of the Special Section. Rataev, for his part, recognized Zubatov’s preeminence in the struggle against sedition. On 8 November he enthusiastically endorsed Zubatov’s plan to send his mobile surveillance brigade, under the direction of Leonid Menshchikov, to oversee all security operations in the south. What Rataev could not have realized was that Zubatov, who had nothing but contempt for Rataev, was at that very moment traveling incognito throughout European Russia in order to establish contacts and to inspect the security system. Upon returning to Moscow, Zubatov reported the successful conclusion of his trip without ex­ plaining why he had undertaken it. Rataev wrote back almost in desperation, complaining that Zubatov was acting as if the Police Department’s only role was to disburse funds.91 One presumes that Zubatov would never have per­ mitted himself such flagrantly insubordinate behavior had he not been reason­ ably sure that Rataev could do nothing about it. Perhaps Zubatov doubted his chief’s trustworthiness or, as was more likely, hoped already to supplant him. The tone of their correspondence suggests that Rataev considered Zubatov less a subordinate than a coequal, or even perhaps a rival.

The Opposition Gathers Strength Student agitation and demonstrations recommenced in Khar’kov in late November 1901, taking on a distinctly “antigovemment character,” according to a report of the Interior Ministry. They flared up again in Kiev, Moscow, and St. Petersburg in late January 1902, leading to massive disturbances in those cities in early and mid-February. In Moscow, radical student leaders planned to hold a major demonstration on 9 February 1902. Although the police ar­ rested forty-seven activists beforehand, disorders took place at Moscow Uni­ versity. The next day, City Governor Trepov ordered the police to repress stu­ dent disorders “at any cost.” As a result of this order, on 9 and 17 February the police arrested 682 people, most of them students. Ninety-five were exiled administratively to Irkutsk Province for two to five years; 567 were impris­ oned for three to six months, for the most part in Arkhangelsk. These were very stiff punishments, but as will be seen below, in the summer the govern­ ment amnestied all those sent to Siberia. A. A. Polovtsev, referring primarily to the growth of mass opposition movements and popular discontent, lamented, “[T]he situation with every passing day is becoming not only more and more serious, but menacing.”92 Also threatening from the perspective of the security police was the simultaneous proliferation of conspiratorial revo­ lutionary activists. By the turn of the century most revolutionaries placed a high priority on secrecy and conspiratorial methods of operation. Semen Kanatchikov, a worker-intelligent, wrote that he and his fellow Social Democrats knew prac­ tically by heart Bakharev’s tract of 1900. Its strictures, according to the So­ cial Democrat E. D. Stasova, were extremely effective.93 A few revolutionar­ ies, such as Lenin, made this a central element of their program. Already in

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late 1897 he argued that it was necessary for revolutionary activists to be­ come more specialized and more isolated from each other, in order to protect themselves from penetration by police informants. Then in October 1899 he wrote: Against us, against the small groups of socialists all huddled together through­ out the vast Russian “underground,” stands the gigantic mechanism of the most powerful [mogushchestvenneishego] modern state, which is straining every nerve in order to crush socialism and democracy. . . . To be able to conduct a systematic battle against the government, we must raise the revolutionary orga­ nization, discipline, and conspiratorial techniques to the highest level of per­ fection.94 Having returned from Siberia in early 1900, he developed this idea, argu­ ing in May 1901 and, at greater length, in February 1902 that, while the masses might fight successfully with soldiers and the regular police, the rev­ olutionary movement required professional revolutionaries to prevail against the security service. By this he meant not that an elite cadre of professional revolutionaries could by itself overthrow the Imperial regime but that it would prepare to direct and to guide the masses, whose discontent in­ evitably would burst out in an unpredictable, elemental explosion. Again, he did not intend for these full-time conspirators to sit idly by awaiting the up­ heaval; rather he expected them actively to organize the industrial labor movement, to channel its energy toward political demands, and to defend it from Zubatovism. Lenin considered this essential. “Give us an organization of revolutionaries,” he wrote, “and we will overturn Russia [perevernem Rossiiu]”95 He planned to build up such an organization around an em­ pirewide newspaper distribution network, whence originated the great em­ phasis he laid on Iskra. Central to the task of creating a cadre of professional revolutionaries were clandestine apartments, secret meeting places, forged passports, systematic vigilance against informants, secret codes, disciplined behavior under interro­ gation, and aliases—Lenin himself used 150 of them. A revolutionary un­ versed in the methods of combat with the security police, he wrote, was merely an amateur (kustar’), not a true revolutionary, whose primary task and art was “struggle with the security police.” He insisted that the revolutionary movement would triumph only if a “few professionals, as highly trained and experienced as our [security] police” were allowed to organize it.96 This statement demonstrates consummately the central position that the security police occupied in Lenin’s strategic vision. Lenin was essentially proposing to build up the Social Democratic Party in the image of the most conspirator­ ial institution within the late Imperial bureaucracy: the security police. One can conceive of no worse foundation or model for an organization with the potential to wield political power. Lenin was right to fear the penetration of the Social Democratic organiza­ tions by police informants. As one Iskra agent wrote, “I consciously never

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traveled to Moscow, where in those days [1902] Zubatov reigned and which for us . . . conjured up images of a city teeming with spies and provocateurs.” The revolutionaries’ fear of informants was palpable and justified. In January 1904 Lenin went so far as to argue that killing informants was sometimes “absolutely necessary” and to recommend creating an organization that would “hunt them down and train the mass of workers [not to fall prey to them].”97 Police successes in infiltrating conspiratorial organizations bene­ fited from the very nature of underground revolutionary work, which required constant movement, the use of false documents, the concealment of one’s identity, and subsistence on party funds.98 It was not difficult to recruit infor­ mants among such revolutionaries, presumably because some of them came to view conspiratorial action as an end in itself. The revolutionaries’ need to communicate to a broader public sometimes laid them open to police detection. The security police discovered that they could locate secret printing presses—the pumping stations of the revolution­ ary movements’ life blood—by studying the distribution patterns of their seditious output.99 Lenin considered a newspaper distribution network the best means for organizing an underground party, but it could also offer the police a pathway to the heart of a conspiratorial organization. For example, in early 1902 an informant named la. A. Zhitomirskii, who operated within the Iskra organization, acquired the key to Iskra’s code for international correspondence, along with a list of addresses of important con­ tacts within the empire. In mid-March police censors intercepted a letter from N. K. Krupskaia to G. M. Krzhizhanovskii announcing a secret rendezvous in Voronezh and indicating the designated password. Leonid Menshchikov (re­ peating his performance of January 1897) was quickly dispatched to the “safe” address in Voronezh, where, posing as an Iskra representative named Ivan Alekseevich, he met with A. N. Liubimov, who furnished him with fur­ ther addresses. Menshchikov then made the rounds of each “safe” address in Iaroslavl’, Kostroma, and Vladimir, along the way meeting with Fedor Dan, who was making the same rounds following the Social Democratic confer­ ence in Bialystok. As a result of Menshchikov’s peregrinations, fifty-one ac­ tivists (including Dan) were arrested in April, and an important part of the Iskra organization (the Northern Workers’ Union) was brought down.100 The security service gradually became much better informed about the ac­ tivities of the major revolutionary parties in the Russian Empire. If Zubatov had had only vague prior notice of the first Social Democratic congress in 1898, for example, he was intimately knowledgeable about the Bialystok con­ ference of March 1902. Osip Ermanskii, who both attended the conference and consulted police archives after the February Revolution, marveled at how well informed the police were about the activities of him and his Social Democratic colleagues. Zubatov’s mobile brigade knew in advance that the conference was to take place and followed several revolutionaries to Bialystok. At the conclu­ sion of the conference, most of the participants were arrested; Ermanskii him­ self got as far as Elizavetgrad, where Zubatov’s surveillants arrested him.101

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While Zubatov and his mobile surveillance brigade were holding conspira­ torial Social Democractic activists at bay, in January 1902 the SocialistRevolutionaries publicly declared their intention to launch a campaign of po­ litical terrorism. Gershuni, the chief advocate of terrorism, became a key figure within the party leadership. A man reputedly of almost hypnotic influence over young radicals, whom Zubatov called “an artist in the business of terror,” Gershuni transformed his secretive, semiautonomous combat orga­ nization into the bane of Russian officialdom as it carried out repeated at­ tempts on the lives of such prominent statesmen as K. R Pobedonostsev, V. V. von Wahl, V. K. Plehve, and D. S. Sipiagin.102 For several years, beginning in the second half of 1902, the security police devoted more attention to the Socialist-Revolutionaries than to the Social Democrats.103 (It is worth noting that the disunity and theoretical squabbles that racked the Social Democratic Party contributed in part to this policy.) Despite police vigilance and success at foiling numerous plots, however, terrorism continued unabated. Revolution­ ary recruits were never lacking, and educated society largely refused to con­ demn political murder.104 Public refusal to support the government in the face of terrorism doubtless stemmed from the unwillingness of the government to integrate educated Russians into the political process and from the arbitrary repression to which it occasionally subjected them. It is difficult to gauge the frequency or level of repression of nonrevolutionary political activists at the turn of the century, for even fragmentary statistics are lacking. Abundant biographical data suggest, however, that many individual opponents of absolutism suffered administra­ tive punishments merely for expressing or peacefully acting upon their oppo­ sition. One of the most egregious cases involved A. A. Kornilov, who, along with 600 other public figures, signed an appeal to the government in March 1901 protesting the violent treatment of student demonstrators and calling for more opportunities for the public to express opinions on governmental affairs. He was summoned to the Police Department, and his apartment was searched. Only a few old foreign pamphlets and manuscripts passed from hand to hand were found in his possession, yet Kornilov was administratively banned for two years from residing in any university town in the empire. He lamented in a petition to the emperor, “[E]ven a murderer would be punished only after a careful study of his case. Many are now persecuted simply be­ cause they believe in justice and legality.” It is not surprising that Kornilov, who edited a newspaper in Saratov during his banishment, became an active member of the Union of Liberation and of the Kadet Party.105 Police repres­ sion of this kind was hardly likely to deter a man such as Kornilov from polit­ ical activity. On the contrary, it was likely to make him a more resolute oppo­ nent of the government. A somewhat graver, but also noteworthy, case involved the writer A. V. Amfiteatrov in January 1902. In a feuilleton entitled “Gospoda Obmanovy,” which was unaccountably approved by the censors for publication, Am­ fiteatrov satirized the emperor as a moronic country gentryman.106 The feuil-

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leton was an instant success in high society, and several guests passed it around at a ball at the Winter Palace in mid-January. Amfiteatrov, who seems to have written the piece out of desperation at his lack of success as a writer, was exiled administratively. Further, the Interior Ministry’s Censorship De­ partment ordered its staff to work overtime to ferret out that sort of seditious literature. Amfiteatrov’s punishment outraged public opinion; even the arch monarchist A. V. Bogdanovich thought it meant that “we live under a despotic rule.”107 Here was another example of how apparently arbitrary police repres­ sion caused much of the educated public to further question the legitimacy of the Imperial regime. Yet Russia was not the only country in which “mere words” could land one in exile or prison. In 1898, V. L. Burtsev was sentenced to eighteen months’ hard labor by an English court for extolling terrorist methods in a Russian-language publication. At this time, “English courts did not spare .. . any Englishman found inciting to violence.” While Amfiteatrov had not in­ cited violence and he was punished administratively, the Russian penal code prescribed for his crime a term of hard labor for ten to twelve years.108 One major difference between the handling of seditious activity in Russia and Britain may have been that the government in the former could nots—or be­ lieved it could not—rely on the support of either society or the judiciary in its efforts to prosecute such cases. The fact that sedition was far more extensive in Russia than in Britain further complicated those efforts. Sedition in Russia, moreover, was beginning to take on broad-based di­ mensions. In late March and early April 1902 massive peasant disorders shook Poltava and Khar’kov Provinces. A state of reinforced security was im­ mediately imposed in Poltava (it was already in force in Khar’kov), as well as in a number of other localities. Although between 1899 and 1904 hundreds of localized peasant disturbances occurred throughout Russia, those in 1902 be­ tokened a major change in the nature of agrarian unrest and peasant behavior in Russia. Thereafter, some governors began to encounter “an unwillingness to accept the moral authority of government officials” even when force was employed.109 Senior officials who investigated the unrest in Khar’kov, in Poltava, and, a few months later, in Saratov concluded that it had resulted pri­ marily from discontent over difficult economic conditions, although most ad­ mitted, too, that agitation and propaganda had exacerbated such feelings. In direct response to this finding, on 21 May 1902 a Police Department directive warned governors to make every effort to prevent contacts between revolu­ tionary activists and peasants by establishing thorough surveillance over reli­ gious seminaries and rural agricultural and medical schools, that is, the incu­ bators of rural intellectual propagandists.110 There was, however, little likelihood that Russia’s numerically small police forces could manage to keep several thousand revolutionary activists away from 100 million rural inhabi­ tants. Similarly, as the opposition movements grew larger and bolder, the se­ curity police became ever more hard-pressed to control them.

C H A P T E R

F I V E

Zubatov’s Unfinished Reforms 1902-1904

^ l ^ m p e r i a l Russia in the years following' the turn of the century witnessed, on the one hand, a murderous campaign to destabilize the regime and, on the other hand, a’rising tide of popular discontent among both educated and noneducated segments of society. A bridge soon began to arise between these heretofore disparate threats to the stability of the Imperial order—the Liberation Movement. Critical to its development were the student demon­ strations and strikes of 1899 and 1901, which prompted “Legal Marxists,” such as Struve, and zemstvo activists and ex-Marxists to begin to conceive of an empirewide, multiclass movement for the “liberation” of Russia from the absolutist system of government. For this task, they hoped to unite all avail­ able social and political forces—liberals and Marxists, workers and students, as well as some members of the Imperial bureaucracy. In June 1902 Struve took the first step toward creating such a broad coalition by founding in Euro­ pean emigration a weekly newspaper, Liberation (Osvobozhdenie). Ironically, the government greatly facilitated the organization of opposition movements by creating hundreds of provincial and district committees, which were domi­ nated by public activists, to discuss agricultural problems in spring and sum­ mer 1902. This was “the most extensive sounding-board of public opinion that Russia had ever known.” 1 In order to avoid alienating the public further, above all else the security police in Russia needed to seek to combat sedition in the most unobtrusive manner. This meant further refining police methods and, as much as possible, distinguishing carefully between violent and peace­ ful means of bringing about social change. To achieve these goals would re­ quire expanding the ranks of security officers and reorganizing security police institutions.

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Prelude After the turn of the century, the Moscow-centered security system had be­ gun to show signs of inadequacy. Neither the provincial gendarme stations, nor the three existing security bureaus, nor even Zubatov’s mobile surveil­ lance brigade could cope with the growing and diversifying opposition— student unrest, peasant disturbances, revolutionary organizations, stubborn terrorists. Gendarmes across Russia were being deflected from conducting formal inquests into state crimes by the necessity to match wits with revolu­ tionary activists, an occupation for which they were insufficiently prepared. The mobile brigade, which had been created to make lightning strikes in spe­ cific localities, was now stretched to the limit of its resources, its agents al­ most permanently based in more than a dozen places. The security system proved inadequate even to measure the capabilities and extent of the revolu­ tionary opposition, let alone to render it harmless to the existing state order.2 To increase the security police’s efficiency, Zubatov proposed its reorgani­ zation. In order to enlist support for the plan, he persuaded his superiors in St. Petersburg to convoke gendarme chiefs and security officials for a summit meeting at the end of 1901.3 Zubatov apparently expected support for his pro­ gram to catapult him into a position of greater responsibility in the Police De­ partment. At a Christmas party, one security bureau official read a speech ex­ pressing the hope that Zubatov would quickly realize his “high ideal, the unification of the activity of all of the institutions defending our state order into one close and harmonious family.” The official rejoiced that Zubatov would remain their chief, but “at a higher level.”4 On 29 December 1901 the summit meeting convened in St. Petersburg with the participation of eighteen gendarme station chiefs from provinces in which revolutionary propaganda was believed to have sunk deep roots. Leading secu­ rity chiefs were also invited, including Rachkovskii from Paris and Sazonov from St. Petersburg. All were expected to submit an analysis of the revolution­ ary movement in their jurisdictions and to offer suggestions on ways to strengthen the security system.5 Zubatov proposed the creation of a network of smaller provincial security bureaus relatively independent of the provincial gov­ ernors and gendarme stations, following the model of the Moscow bureau. His proposal won the approval of a majority of the participants. Aleksandr Gerasi­ mov, who attended the meeting as the assistant gendarme chief in Khar’kov, later wrote that he and the Police Department director, Sergei Zvolianskii, had opposed Zubatov’s plan because it would have subordinated senior gendarme officers to younger ones, thus undermining military discipline. Gerasimov and Zvolianskii certainly had a point; many provincial gendarme officers tended to resent the existing security officers. Would not that resentment increase were their number multiplied manyfold? Zubatov was right, however, that he and the handful of other security officers were far more valuable in the fight against conspiratorial sedition than many times more provincial gendarme officers. In any event, Zvolianskii vetoed the proposal, and Zubatov had to swallow his

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pride and remain in Moscow awaiting more favorable circumstances.6 Having returned to Moscow defeated, Zubatov wreaked havoc on the Iskra organization through large-scale arrests that yielded the greatest mass of docu­ mentation and incriminating evidence of state-crime activity ever seized by the Police Department. Almost as if to justify Zubatov’s demand for a reform of the security system, however, gendarmes bungled the formal investigation of these materials, made poor use of the evidence, and permitted the escape of twelve of the most important suspects.7 In early 1902, a police report also lent support to Zubatov’s position by admitting that large numbers of opponents of the government were continuing to engage in revolutionary activity even while under sentences of police probation.8 Since such politically unreliable people were found largely outside the main urban centers, the failure to watch them closely was necessarily the fault of the provincial gendarme authorities. Meanwhile, Zubatov’s efforts to strengthen popular loyalty toward the monarchy drew attention to him in the highest government circles. Emblem­ atic of those efforts was a large industrial-worker procession that Zubatov or­ ganized on 19 February in memory of Alexander II and his abolition of serf­ dom on that date. Roughly 50,000 laborers gathered solemnly, even religiously, before the statue of Alexander II inside the Kremlin walls with Grand Duke Sergei in attendance. This serene demonstration of popular monarchism stunned nearly everyone, but none so profoundly as the revolu­ tionary leadership. T he latter had been unable to organize empirewide antigovemment demonstrations on 19 February, in large part because of the diligent labors of Zubatov’s mobile surveillance brigade. Over this moment of triumph there hung a cloud, however, for a censorship directive of 26 Febru­ ary urged newspaper and journal editors to attach little importance to the demonstration in the Kremlin.9 Russia’s rulers had never been comfortable with public displays of political sentiment. Zubatov attempted nevertheless to consolidate worker loyalty to the monarchy by supporting striking weavers at the formidable Goujon and Mussi plant of the Association of Silk Mills in March 1902. The security bureau pro­ vided 250 rubles per week to the workers during their walkout, and Trepov sought to intimidate the factory directors, as well as Jules Goujon himself, threatening him with exile as a dangerous alien. This unheard-of governmen­ tal pressure coupled with the specter of a general strike incited Moscow in­ dustrialists to close ranks. Confident of the French ambassador’s and Witte’s support, Goujon refused to yield, and Zubatov had to back down.10 One month after the security police conference at which Zubatov’s ideas for reform had been rejected, Rataev, still chief of the Special Section, ad­ vanced his own ideas for reform. In a lengthy memorandum to Zvolianskii, he argued that, while the revolutionary movement had not ceased to expand since the outbreak of student demonstrations in February 1899, the govern­ ment continued to employ police methods “fit for use perhaps one hundred years ago.” The key defect in the system, according to Rataev, was a lack of institutional unity. This was an obvious criticism of the police system, one

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that Zubatov also made. Yet Rataev’s solution differed markedly from Zuba­ tov’s. Whereas the governors had the power to halt the spread of revolution­ ary activity, he wrote, only the gendarmes were genuinely apprised of condi­ tions in the depths of their provinces. Instead of drawing on the gendarmes’ expertise, however, most governors relied on military force to quell disorders as they cropped up, which tended to demoralize military personnel. Rataev therefore proposed to subordinate all the police institutions of a given province to the provincial gendarme station chief, who would acquire the title “deputy governor for police affairs.” 11 It seems likely that Rataev, aware of Zvolianskii’s objections to Zubatov’s plan to create a network of security bu­ reaus, hoped to use this counterproposal to shore up his position within the Police Department. The idea, however, came to naught. Senior police officials distrusted the majority of gendarme officers and feared conferring more power on them. A reform of the security police system might have been delayed indefi­ nitely had not S. V. Balmashev, a Socialist-Revolutionary terrorist, slain Inte­ rior Minister Sipiagin on 2 April 1902.12 Sipiagin’s successor, the hard-line V. K. Plehve, decided to shake up the system by displacing Rataev and per­ mitting Zubatov to institute a network of provincial security bureaus. A por­ tion of the public reacted optimistically to Plehve’s appointment, because of his legal training and early career as a prosecutor. Yet Plehve was no stranger to police repression. He had directed the Police Department from 1881 to 1884, when Sudeikin had decimated the People’s Will organization. Plehve had then served as deputy interior minister from 1885 to 1894, a period when the police had found it relatively easy to maintain domestic tranquillity. It was perhaps natural for him to suppose that better senior leadership might permit the security service to crush the mass opposition movements in 1902. In Rataev’s opinion, Plehve “did not believe in the revolution,” that is, he did not grasp how greatly the nature of opposition to the government had changed during the intervening years. This would help to explain why Plehve gave short shrift to social reforms and concentrated much of his energy on revamp­ ing the security police system. In any event, having found the Police Depart­ ment in highly unsatisfactory condition, Plehve resolved to replace much of the existing police leadership with new men.13 In mid-April, only days after his appointment, Plehve met repeatedly with Zu­ batov both in Moscow and at the Holy Trinity Monastery, to which Plehve had re­ paired for religious observances between Good Friday and Easter Sunday. (He claimed to be fully conscious that he would be murdered.)14 During their discus­ sions the two men elaborated a plan to create a network of security bureaus in eighteen localities and conferred about possible appointments to those posts. They also discussed Zubatov’s trade-union scheme, but here the interior minister was more skeptical. Zubatov later wrote that he expected to win his support of the scheme. In any event, one supposes Plehve to have been impressed when, two weeks later, Zubatov managed to thwart organizers of May Day demonstrations in Moscow, while red flags were unfurled in St. Petersburg.15

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From Moscow Plehve traveled to Khar’kov to inquire into the causes and extent of the recent agrarian disorders and the measures taken to quell them. He met with Aleksei Lopukhin, the chief prosecutor at the Khar’kov Judicial Tribunal and chose him to replace Zvolianskii as Police Department director. Bom in 1864, Aleksei Aleksandrovich Lopukhin descended from an illustri­ ous old noble clan but possessed no landed property and stood to inherit very little. He graduated with a law degree from Moscow University, where he had associated with notable liberals, including S. N. Trubetskoi, who later became a well-known philosopher. Lopukhin joined the Justice Ministry in 1886 at age twenty-two. N. V. Davydov, who worked with Lopukhin in the late 1880s, described him as kind and nonconfrontational, a devoted family man and a brilliant speaker. He was committed to legality but also ready to com­ promise, and he had the ability to grasp complex issues quickly. In the late 1890s, as a prosecutor at the circuit court in Moscow, he oversaw inquests into state-crime cases. Zubatov initiated him into the secrets of his profession, permitting him even to visit the security bureau’s conspiratorial apartments. Similarly, Aleksandr Gerasimov had found Lopukhin, as chief prosecutor in Khar’kov, to be more sympathetic to the needs of the security police than the majority of prosecutors in the provinces. When Plehve met with him, Lopukhin was already a supporter of Zubatov.16 Lopukhin was reputed to be a “liberal,” and he himself later claimed that he had accepted PlehVe’s offer only because he had promised to champion the rule of law and to undertake comprehensive reforms, including major im­ provements in police organization and procedure and the abolition of the se­ curity bureaus.17 Yet Plehve’s outlook and character could, after their discus­ sions, scarcely have been a secret for Lopukhin. It seems likely, therefore, that ambition more than a desire to reform the police motivated Lopukhin’s decision to take the position. Whatever his reasons, he presided over the largest expansion of the security police system since the creation of the Third Section and the Gendarme Corps in the 1820s or the creation of the provin­ cial gendarme stations in 1867. He also involved himself in the sordid details of security policing, as when, later in the year, he personally advocated the reestablishment of a mail interception bureau (a “black office”) in Vilnius.18 Unlike Plehve, Lopukhin was inexperienced in police matters. Most im­ portant, he admitted several years later to having considered himself unfit to oversee the security police system.19 By contrast with Lopukhin, Zvolianskii had spent his entire professional life since 1883 within the Police Depart­ ment, successively as secretary to the director, division chief, and assistant di­ rector, before becoming police director in 1897. He also appears to have been quite competent. He may not have been to Plehve’s liking, but he certainly had more experience in police administration than did Lopukhin.20 Two weeks after his appointment, Lopukhin received from Russia’s sec­ ond most important security police official, Petr Rachkovskii, a long memo­ randum independently advocating essentially the same program as Zubatov. Rachkovskii complained that, while the opposition groups had grown more

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sophisticated and their new conspiratorial approach had proved extremely ef­ fective, most gendarme officers remained poorly trained. Many, he wrote, cannot distinguish Socialist-Revolutionaries from Social Democrats, or Bundists from street rebels (buntuiushchie na ulitse).21 Perhaps this criticism was unduly harsh, since the revolutionaries’ close cooperation at the time pre­ sented legitimate obstacles to telling them apart. Still, his main point was un­ doubtedly correct, that the ordinary gendarme officers had become an inade­ quate counterforce in the regime’s increasingly complex and difficult conflict with its organized opponents. In order to redress the balance, he recom­ mended revoking the Moscow Security Bureau’s special status, concentrating security police authority in St. Petersburg, and creating a network of security bureaus in provincial trouble spots.22 Rachkovskii grasped that the police needed to concern themselves not only with “professional revolutionaries” but also with left-wing liberals and with agitation in the military and among national minorities and students. This was the key danger facing the Imperial regime—a broad oppositional coalition. On 5 June 1902 Rataev submitted to Lopukhin a memorandum whose contents suggest that he did not expect to remain at his post for long. The text denounced the government’s lenience in prosecuting antigovemment ac­ tivists and warned that continued permissiveness would gravely threaten the state. Most alarming, he wrote, was the likelihood that the committee on ad­ ministrative punishments at its next sitting would free G. A. Fal’bork and V. I. Chamoluskii from administrative probation and would lift the ban on re­ siding in St. Petersburg for Pavel Miliukov, V. A. Miakotin, M. Gol’dshtein, N. E. Mikhailovskii-Garin, V. and M. Berenshtam, A. Liapunov, and A. Kararik. All these men were vigorous opponents of the regime. Miakotin and Gol’dshtein were deeply involved with illegal Socialist-Revolutionary publi­ cations. Fal’bork and Chamoluskii, whom Miliukov described as a man with the “air of a perpetual conspirator,” played a leading role in the Union of Unions in 1905. Rataev may not have been entirely wrong when he wrote that keeping such activists out of St. Petersburg rendered them “nearly harm­ less.” Shmuel Galai attributed much of the success of the famous “banquet campaign” in late fall 1904 to the return of Miakotin (and N. F. Annenskii, whom Rataev did not mention) to the capital a few months before. Rataev was undoubtedly exaggerating, however, when he added that the efforts of Fal’bork and Chamoluskii alone had “done more to make revolution thrive than ten Balmashevs [the assassin of Sipiagin] and Lekerts [G. D. Lekukh, a Socialist-Revolutionary terrorist who shot Vilnius Governor V. V. von Wahl on 15 May 1902] could have done.”23 One may agree with Rataev that in the long run written and verbal propaganda may be more dangerous than “pro­ paganda of deed” (terrorism), but nothing so captures governments’ attention as violent attacks against their own. It is also possible that political terrorism weakened the regime’s authority in general and made broad segments of the population more receptive to radical propaganda. Anyway, to argue that a few propagandists were more dangerous than ten terrorists was hyperbolic

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and was apt to diminish the credibility of the entire memorandum. Rataev was on firmer ground when, arguing that the government continu­ ously vacillated between severity and leniency, he denounced the custom of senior government officials to petition for the release of political prisoners, whom they scarcely knew, on behalf of well-known or well-connected peo­ ple. (The practice was indeed widespread. One deputy interior minister, for example, repeatedly secured the release of people on behalf of I. V. Gessen.) To do so, according to Rataev, both demoralized the security service and left the public with the impression that the prisoners could not have been very dangerous in the first place. Symptomatic of government vacillation was Deputy Interior Minister Petr Sviatopolk-Mirskii’s trip all the way to Siberia in mid-August 1902 to speak with the students exiled in the spring and to evaluate the justification for their punishment. Most of them received him un­ civilly. Many did not even bother to meet with him, yet all benefited from an amnesty. One of the students wrote in a letter (intercepted by the police) that, although Mirskii had received a “fitting slap in the face,” he had nevertheless recommended granting all of the students clemency. The student correspon­ dent attributed this illogical action to the “gathering dawn of the liberation [movement].”24 Rataev was undoubtedly right that such policies were woe­ fully inconsistent. Yet his criticism could be applied not only to individual of­ ficials but also to the entire government, whose diverse institutions had long been divided. To remedy this problem would have required the government not merely to reform the security police system or even the Police Depart­ ment but also to transform the whole bureaucracy. In any event, Rataev’s recommendations fell on deaf ears. In August 1902 he lost his position at the Special Section, and in September or October he was sent to Paris to replace Rachkovskii. Rataev later admitted that he felt himself a complete novice in his new position, which necessarily resulted in weakening that vital link in the security system. He and A. M. Garting, the head of Russian security police operations in Berlin and an ally of Rachkovskii, immediately became rivals.25 Meanwhile, on 2 September Zubatov was appointed Special Section chief. This was a major demotion for Rachkovskii and a minor one for Rataev, but it was a significant advancement for Zubatov, who moved into an apartment above the chancellery of the Inte­ rior Ministry on Panteleimonovskaia Street.26 Plehve, it seems, nursed rancor against Rachkovskii, who in 1883 had warned him against trusting Degaev—advice that Plehve had foolishly disre­ garded. Two events permitted Plehve to cause Rachkovskii’s fall from grace. First, in 1902 Rachkovskii had provoked the ire of the Imperial couple by of­ ficially denouncing as a charlatan a French hypnotist and spiritist named Philippe who enjoyed their support.27 Second, he had overstepped his author­ ity in early 1902 by creating, without informing the Interior Ministry, a League for the Salvation of the Russian Fatherland, whose goal was to strengthen relations between Russia and France. This was a publicity cam­ paign similar to earlier ones orchestrated by Rachkovskii, but Plehve (who

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soon launched a like campaign of his own) was able to argue that a police of­ ficial should not dabble in international politics. Nicholas agreed and de­ manded that such activity cease.28 Rachkovskii’s stellar career ended (save for a brief interlude in 1905 and 1906), and the Paris bureau fell into far less competent hands.

A Network of Security Bureaus The Police Department on 12 August 1902 announced the creation of new police institutions designed to combat revolutionary sedition in those parts of the empire where it was most prominent. Although the directive establishing the institutions bore the signatures of Lopukhin and Rataev, its authors were Zubatov and G. M. Trutkov, a Special Section official.29 The new institutions, initially called “investigatory bureaus” (rozysknye otdeleniia) but soon re­ named security bureaus, occupied an ambiguous position within the Imperial bureaucracy. In matters affecting “state security,” they were authoritative. The directive of 12 August and a second one, of 21 October 1902, specified the new security chiefs’ rights and responsibilities, which were similar to those of the already existing security chiefs in St. Petersburg, Moscow, and Warsaw.30 This was the first time that such a “job description” had been spelled out in comprehensive, mutually reinforcing documents. For this reason, it is worth citing a few of the directives’ major provisions. The security chiefs were expected to collect “information of a political na­ ture” from the local governors, gendarme station chiefs, and prosecutors. Their own primary responsibility was the recruitment and guidance of infor­ mants, the principal targets of which were radical activists and politically ac­ tive students and industrial workers. In order to guide their informants effec­ tively and, in general, to combat sedition better, the bureau chiefs were to familiarize themselves with the history, literature, and current state of the rev­ olutionary movements. Copies of illegal revolutionary literature obtained in searches, from informants, or by means of perlustration were to be studied and then sent to the Special Section for its burgeoning collection of such ma­ terials. The directives defined the bureaus’ jurisdiction to include all those towns, within a given province, where revolutionary propaganda was deemed most manifest. This provision impinged directly on the bailiwicks of the gen­ darme stations and was bound to strain relations between the two institutions. “In extreme circumstances,” the security bureau chiefs were authorized to launch searches or arrests outside their provinces without contacting the gov­ ernor, the gendarme station chief, or even the Police Department. In principle, this provision made each security chief a sort of minor Zubatov. While defin­ ing security chiefs’ powers broadly, the directives narrowed the competence of the gendarme station chiefs, for example, by obliging them to request the local security chief’s permission to undertake searches and arrests. General Novitskii later pointed out that this provision contradicted the security law of 1881, which authorized local police authorities and provincial gendarme

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chiefs to arrest anyone suspected of involvement with state crime. Neverthe­ less, the gendarme officers employed in the new security bureaus had an in­ terest in maintaining cordial relations with their colleagues at the gendarme stations who, among other things, administered their salaries.31 One may wonder why the Police Department did not attempt, in the con­ text of this reform, to make the new bureaus entirely independent of all provincial authorities. Actually, it almost surely would have been impossible to do so. Even the major security bureaus, for want of sufficient funding, had to be attached to an established institution. In St. Petersburg, Moscow, and Warsaw, they operated out of the city governor’s offices. Formally subordi­ nated to the city governors, in fact they were almost wholly autonomous. In the provincial towns, the local regular police institutions presumably lacked the space or resources to permit them to house the newly created bureaus. There was no alternative, therefore, to placing them in a relationship of for­ mal subordination to the provincial gendarme stations, although in many cases the bureaus retained considerable autonomy.32 Security officers achieving notable success in combating the revolutionary forces could expect to enjoy almost meteoric advancement and to wield greater power in a given rank than did their provincial and railroad gendarme counterparts. On this basis, for instance, Spiridovich was promoted from cap­ tain to lieutenant colonel in the six months from December 1902 to June 1903, although military regulations required a captain to serve for six years, or three in extraordinary circumstances (vne pravil), before promotion to lieu­ tenant colonel.33 Although most gendarme officers involved with security policing, such as Aleksandr Martynov, advanced through the ranks in the nor­ mal fashion, the example of the few stars doubtless spurred on the others and served to irk the mass of ordinary gendarme officers.34 The reform also lowered the status of ordinary gendarme officers in the se­ curity police system by substituting political investigation, or domestic intel­ ligence-gathering by security officers, for formal gendarme investigation of state crimes as the primary method of struggle against the revolutionaries. The change certainly made sense from the point of view of security policing. As the opposition movements grew larger, preventing seditious activities nec­ essarily became more important than merely investigating them. It is not sur­ prising, however, that as a result of the change the provincial gendarme sta­ tions lost prestige in the eyes of the local administration.35 Although the establishment of semiautonomous security bureaus repre­ sented a diminution of the gendarme stations’ authority, the Police Depart­ ment presented it to the gendarmes as a means of liberating them from bur­ dens unconnected with conducting formal investigations, their main function. Few gendarmes relished “spying,” and most probably heaved a sigh of relief when a portion of this duty was lifted from them. At the same time, however, the gendarme chiefs were asked to render every assistance to the new bu­ reaus, surely an unwelcome request. General Novitskii complained that the Police Department “ceased entirely to communicate with the gendarme

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chiefs.”36 This assertion was false, since nearly all the directives sent by the Police Department to the security chiefs were expedited simultaneously to their provincial gendarme counterparts. Nevertheless, the Police Depart­ ment’s favor fell more bounteously on the security chiefs, as evidenced by their greater relative authority, status, and remuneration. What could have been more irksome to venerable old defenders of the Imperial regime such as Novitskii? Lopukhin, on behalf of the Interior Ministry, also entreated each governor to cooperate fully with the new security chiefs and to order his regu­ lar police agents to defer to them in matters of state security. It seems that some but not all of the powerful governors heeded Lopukhin’s request.37 Security bureaus were immediately instituted by administrative fiat in Vil­ nius, Ekaterinoslav, Kazan’, Kiev, Odessa, Saratov, Tiflis, and Khar’kov. Oth­ ers were established in the following months in Simferopol, Nizhni Nov­ gorod, Perm, Rostov-na-Donu, Poltava, Kishinev, Zhitomir, Vyborg, Ufa, Tomsk, Irkutsk, and Krasnoiarsk—totaling twenty by June 1903.38 Financial restraints prevented the establishment of security bureaus in every locality plagued by revolutionary activism (although specially trained gendarme offi­ cers were occasionally sent to improve security policing in other localities).39 A few security bureaus were launched in later years, but in 1904 seven of the original twenty were shut down, presumably for want of funds.40 These new institutions, whose creation received no public mention, would have their work cut out for them, since organized opposition to the regime was developing at a rapid pace. They also created more work for the Special Section. Already in July 1902 Rataev had warned that an unmanageable amount of information on opposition groups was beginning to pour into the Special Section, not just from Russia’s heartland but from the remotest back­ waters of European and Siberian Russia.41 Obviously, the twenty new security bureaus added to that flood of documentation. Before discussing some practical effects and implications stemming from the bureaus’ creation, it is well to assess their cost in relation to that of the security system as a whole. The expenses directly related to security policing totaled just under 900,000 rubles in 1902 and 1,000,000 rubles in 1904. Most components of the system cost more in 1904 than in 1902. The expen­ ditures rose from 112,000 to 120,000 rubles for the Moscow bureau; from 246.000 to 284,000 rubles for the St. Petersburg bureau; from 100,000 to 107.000 rubles for the Paris bureau; and from 300,000 to 410,000 rubles for the network of smaller security bureaus. The cost of the bureau in Warsaw remained stable at 87,000 rubles. There were also 35,000 rubles in miscella­ neous expenses in 1904.42 Indirect expenses are harder to calculate. For ex­ ample, one should include a portion of the cost of the Gendarme Corps, but which portion? Outlays for the upkeep of the corps totaled 4,893,000 rubles in 1902 and 5,217,000 rubles in 1904. Since most of the roughly 10,000 gen­ darmes bore responsibility for regular police duties, it seems that only a frac­ tion of those sums, certainly no more than 1,000,000 rubles, funded security police operations. Similarly, the regular police supported the work of the

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security service. The Interior Ministry disbursed 23,364,000 rubles in 1902 and 29,440,000 rubles in 1904 to maintain its regular police forces. Yet one suspects that the proportion of these amounts that must be included in the category of security police expenses was very slight. To these expenses one would probably also add the costs borne by the municipal governments in Warsaw, St. Petersburg, and Moscow, which provided rent-free apartments and other kinds of support to the security bureaus. In view of the foregoing, it seems likely that the total cost of the security police system after the turn of the century was between 3,000,000 and 6,000,000 rubles per year. This sum was, in any case, a small portion of the Interior Ministry budget, which engulfed over 93,000,000 rubles in 1902 and more than 107,000,000 rubles in 1904.43 Zubatov brought with him to St. Petersburg several of his most trusted as­ sistants, including the invaluable Mednikov, whom he appointed to oversee the system of external surveillance across the empire. B. A. Gerardi, whom Zubatov considered “peerless in security policing,” took a position at the St. Petersburg Security Bureau. Zubatov sought to place other protégés at the head of each new security bureau. In time, some of them won high positions in the police hierarchy. Most notably, Spiridovich, Gerardi, and V. V. Ratko later took charge of court and palace security. The immediate effect of this personnel shake-up was the creation of a security network in harmony with its leadership. It also, however, augmented the potential for tension between that network and the provincial gendarme officers—and the potential for lay­ ing it open to eventual conflict and dysfunction in the absence of the charis­ matic leader. At this point, however, the only problem was that Zubatov had too few protégés to fill all the available positions in the new security bureaus, and he worried about appointing unknown officers.44 As his own replacement in Moscow, Zubatov selected Ratko, whom Menshchikov described as an intelligent man but a foppish dresser with an “artis­ tic” nature. He may have had certain aesthetic sensibilities, but he continued to strike blow after blow against revolutionary organizations. One such blow involved the arrest on 28 November and 8 December 1902 of the Social De­ mocratic Party’s Moscow committee, its Iskra representatives, and other op­ eratives. As usual, one major Social Democratic figure, in this case M. V. Manasevich, was purposely left at liberty, and her movements permitted Ratko to watch closely the newly constituted Social Democratic circles by February 1903. Thirty-one Social Democratic activists were then arrested. As a result of repeated arrests, the Social Democratic committee in Moscow could not hold elections for delegates to the third Social Democratic con­ gress. As Ratko’s assistant, Menshchikov helped him to achieve much of this success until his own transfer to the Special Section in June 1903 45 There­ after, Ratko seems to have relied for advice and assistance on Anna Serebri­ akova, whom Zubatov called “an experienced teacher in the security policing business [v okhrannom dele].” Although Bauman warned S. I. Mitskevich in late 1903 that Serebriakova’s apartment was watched very closely by the po-

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lice, she remained a valuable informant for six more years.46 Lesser staff were also sent out from Moscow to some of the provincial bu­ reaus, which helped Zubatov to keep tabs on security chiefs not well known to him.47 More important, he provided the new security chiefs with expert surveillants by dividing among them most of the seventy-eight surveillants of the mobile brigade. (The Police Department preserved a twenty-man mobile surveillance brigade under Mednikov’s direction.) The most experienced of these agents took charge of external surveillance in the new bureaus and in some cases, being more skilled and qualified than the actual directors, virtu­ ally dominated them. They, as much as the new security officers, instituted Zubatov’s methods throughout the security system. To facilitate the training of new surveillants, who previously had received instruction at Mednikov’s “school for surveillants,” Zubatov issued a directive on external surveillance to all security chiefs.48 For Zubatov, Mednikov, and their agents, this was a great triumph. Their system and methods of operation were being adopted at the Imperial level, while they themselves rose to the highest leadership posi­ tions within the security system. This could not but increase its efficiency and striking power.49 Beginning in 1880, the Police Department had prepared yearly surveys of the revolutionary movement, which were distributed to all gendarme stations. Appearing only once each year, the surveys were anything but timely. When news about an important event in the life of the revolutionary opposition fi­ nally appeared, it was usually very old. This may have satisfied the oldfashioned gendarme chiefs, but Zubatov’s activist security chiefs needed in­ formation on which to base immediate action. The Special Section, therefore, began to prepare at one- to two-week intervals bulletins concerning the latest trends, incidents, and developments that directly affected political investiga­ tion. These bulletins (not to be confused with those prepared for the emperor) circulated, in envelopes marked “confidential,” almost exclusively among the new security chiefs, who thus gained another advantage over their provincial gendarme counterparts. In the opinion of the highly critical anonymous editor of a selection of the bulletins from 1903 to 1905, they concerned nearly “every event in the revolutionary or even opposition milieus.”50 These reports, which drew upon data furnished by perlustration, external and internal sur­ veillance, interrogations, and a careful reading of published materials, demonstrated that very little in the way of seditious activity escaped the watchful eye of the Imperial security service. Officials of the Special Section also began to prepare more exhaustive studies, for training and informational purposes, of the characteristics, ideology, and methods of the revolutionary organizations.51 One Police Department official called the period from fall 1902 to Septem­ ber 1903 “the most brilliant year in the history of political investigation.” The security bureaus in Kiev, Khar’kov, Vilnius, and perhaps also in Odessa and Ekaterinoslav seem to have become exemplary centers of counterrevolution­ ary operations rather quickly. Mednikov wrote in January 1903, “[I]f the

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security bureaus continue to stride forward in this manner . . . what will re­ main for the Special Section to do?” Mednikov’s rejoicing stemmed in part from the Kiev bureau’s arrest of M. M. Mel’nikov, an assistant to Gershuni, the head of the Socialist-Revolutionary combat organization. This catch won for Spiridovich, who had been stationed in Kiev specifically to crush the Socialist-Revolutionary terrorist organization there, an Imperial decoration and 2,000 rubles to divide among his men. To encourage further successes in this vein, in February the emperor himself promised “a very large pension” to the captor of terrorist leader Gershuni. When May Day demonstrations in 1903 were averted across nearly the entire empire (except in the Caucasus re­ gion), police and Interior Ministry authorities exulted. Even the skeptical Deputy Minister of Interior V. V. von Wahl hailed the new institutions and called for their multiplication. Mednikov seems to have associated the secu­ rity service’s triumphs with broad feelings of popular unity with the monar­ chy. During Nicholas’s visit to Moscow in spring 1903, when masses of peo­ ple, including students, knelt before the tsar and some kissed the tsar’s hands, Mednikov experienced an intense moment of ecstasy. One can imagine the rapture that swept through officialdom on 13 May 1903 when Spiridovich’s bureau captured the dread terrorist Gershuni, who had masterminded the as­ sassinations of Sipiagin and of I. M. Obolenskii and N. M. Bogdanovich, the governors of Khar’kov and Ufa Provinces. Gershuni’s ensnarement—which occurred largely but* not exclusively thanks to his own negligence—brought Spiridovich a flood of honors, including twenty-two congratulatory telegrams and letters, a major promotion, and another 2,000 rubles.52 What few knew, however, was that Gershuni’s arrest paved the way for his replacement by Azef—who had lent no assistance in the entrapment of Ger­ shuni.53 Plehve, who undoubtedly feared lest Sipiagin’s fate befall him, sup­ ported Azef’s promotion in the terrorist ranks. Zubatov, if he was indeed in­ formed of this matter, would surely have disapproved, for he strongly suspected that Azef was concealing important information from the police. Lopukhin, although he later claimed not to have known about Azef’s ad­ vancement in the terrorist organization, almost certainly supported it at the time.54 After his promotion, Azef had even less reason to divulge all he knew. First, the combat organization’s treasury was a source of money far richer than the already impressive monthly salary of 500 rubles that the Police De­ partment doled out to him. Second, and even more important, Azef, hereto­ fore Gershuni’s most trusted assistant, suddenly bore the unenviable responsi­ bility for leading Russia’s major terrorist organization. This burden seems to have weighed heavily on him. Probably because of this and because his new case officer, Rataev, was a weak man, Azef furnished almost no significant re­ ports until late 1903.55 Despite the security bureaus’ successes, relations remained somewhat tense between security officers and the majority of ordinary gendarme offi­ cers. Some gendarme officers welcomed the new bureaus, for they saw in them a chance for advancement. Many provincial gendarme chiefs sought to

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take up the challenge and to compete with the security officers. They often found, however, that they lacked the training and the resources to combat the revolutionary movements. The fact that the gendarme chief in Novgorod had to inquire whether all people being investigated for state crimes should be counted as Socialist-Revolutionaries speaks for itself. A recent study indi­ cates that in 1903 several gendarme stations in the Ural Mountains were prac­ tically unable to conduct security policing at a reasonable level of efficiency. The Viatka Gendarme Station, for example, could not keep track of people on administrative probation within seven districts of the province, in large mea­ sure because those districts entirely lacked a gendarme presence. Perhaps most important, very few of these provincial gendarme officers used secret in­ formants.56 It seems likely that the capabilities of most provincial gendarme stations throughout the empire did not rise greatly above those manifested in Novgorod and the Urals. Most older officers, for their part, viewed the creation of the new bureaus as a personal affront. Novitskii, for example, had served in Kiev with what many senior officials considered distinction for twenty-five years, and sud­ denly he and most other gendarme chiefs found themselves shunted to the pe­ riphery and cast in the role of stumbling blocks to progress and reform. After enduring harsh criticism from Plehve, who vehemently defended Zubatov’s security police reform, Novitskii submitted his resignation on 1 June 1903 and left the service on 13 October 1903. Here was a case of a young Turk displac­ ing an established official. Novitskii, a major-general, was four whole ranks superior to Zubatov, a mere kollezhskii asessor.57 Even those gendarme offi­ cers who shunned domestic intelligence-gathering must have cringed at giving up the attendant power and funding. The Gendarme Directorate certainly per­ ceived the new institutions as a threat to its institutional role, for their mere existence augmented the Police Department’s authority and influence.58 The reform of the security system was a time of both promise and danger. Zubatov, Imperial Russia’s most talented security official, was now extending his methods of operation, which had been crowned with success time and again in the struggle against the revolutionary opposition, throughout the em­ pire. The prospect of twenty security bureaus staffed by highly sophisticated okhranniki seemed to portend a vast change in that struggle. Yet there were also great dangers inherent in completely reorganizing a system whose suc­ cesses had depended so much on the specific talents of individuals such as Zubatov. Rataev, who had efficiently organized masses of documentation in the Special Section, felt himself ill-equipped to handle the new challenges in Paris. Zubatov, the premier security bureau director, was now managing a chancellery, overseeing security bureaus, cut off from the day-to-day interac­ tion with informants. Ratko could not quite fill his shoes in Moscow, and in any event every time a case officer departed a portion of his informants ceased to inform. Mednikov, the premier manager of surveillants, was now learning how to manage their managers. The mobile surveillance brigade may have grown inadequate, yet it had served an extremely useful purpose within

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the security system. Now it was reduced to one-third of its former strength, and Mednikov had far less time to direct its movements.59 The reform promised to single out the most energetic and gifted gendarme officers, yet they could not become experienced okhranniki all at once. In the meantime, relations between them and the senior provincial gendarme officers would re­ main tense. The key ingredient necessary to ensure the success of the reform was time.

The Challenge of Popular Discontent With Zubatov concentrating his energy on running the security police sys­ tem, his government-sponsored labor program began to lose momentum. In Moscow, it continued to function and for a time even enjoyed considerable support among employers. By late 1903, however, it was being used by Trepov and Ratko merely as a means to control workers and to deter labor unrest. In Kiev, Spiridovich persuaded Zubatov to allow him first to crush the revolu­ tionaries, whose presence at that time was strong in Kiev, and only then to undertake labor reform projects. The program failed in St. Petersburg, too. Revolutionary agitators denounced it vociferously and such powerful officials as Witte and City Governor N. V. Kleigels, who claimed to have first learned about the labor program in the newspapers, staunchly opposed it. Zubatovism fared best in Minsk and Odessa. By 4 April 1903, gendarme chief Vasil’ev re­ ported that the independents were “swallowing up the SDs and [other] revolu­ tionaries and the mass of workers . . . [were] joining the Economists.” In Odessa, K. Shaevich, who possessed imposing oratorical gifts and willingly supported limited strikes, won broad support for Zubatovism. It remained a question whether such strikes could be controlled in a city where the security police were far more weakly established than in Moscow.60 Despite the security police’s successes against conspirators and propagan­ dists, the opposition movements continued to grow. Already in October 1902, Plehve and Witte had agreed that Russia was “on the eve of a great [social] upheaval, which [would] shake the foundations of the state.” Numerous events in the first half of 1903 could only reinforce their fears. In mid-March strikes and demonstrations broke out at a state armaments factory in Zlatoust in Ufa Province. Governor N. M. Bogdanovich felt compelled, having failed in his attempts to restore order by peaceful means, to command the available troops to open fire on a crowd of strikers. Forty-five people were killed. Soci­ ety expressed outrage, and Bogdanovich was deeply troubled.61 In less than one month, on 6 and 7 April, anti-Jewish violence broke out in Kishinev, the capital of Bessarabia. The biggest and most savage pogrom yet seen in Rus­ sia, it took forty-five lives, injured over four hundred people, and left hun­ dreds of shops and homes in ruin. Righteous indignation waxed militant in western Europe when it was revealed that local authorities might have halted the carnage in a brief time span if only armed force had been deployed quickly. What sort of government would gun down protesting workers in Zla-

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toust yet refuse to shoot at a convulsive mob in Kishinev? Plehve’s supposed anti-Semitism reinforced the perception of official complicity in the tragedy.62 Recent scholarship has placed blame for the pogrom less on Plehve than on Governor K. S. von Raaben, who failed to undertake decisive measures to stop it. Von Raaben was soon dismissed from government service, and later in the year Plehve advised General A. N. Kuropatkin not to offer him a military commission. Plehve also expressed outrage about the disorders to the new Kishinev Security Bureau chief, P. P. Zavarzin, and explicitly directed him to protect the entire local population from violence. Then on 28 April 1903, Ple­ hve warned all governors that the emperor would hold each of them responsi­ ble for both preventing and halting violence against anyone. V. I. Gurko rightly pointed out that anti-Jewish pogroms also took place in fall 1904 un­ der Plehve’s liberal successor, Petr Sviatopolk-Mirskii, certainly no abettor of pogromists.63 Contemporaries generally failed to recognize that Plehve was concerned foremost with preventing the outbreak of disorders of any kind, and most educated people heaped condemnation on him.64 Many Russian Jews were especially outraged—the more so when he issued a directive on 24 June 1903 prohibiting Zionism in Russia. In an act of protest on 3 July 1903 in Minsk, the Independent Jewish Workers’ Party was disbanded.65 Cooperation between police and public during this period became more and more difficult. The celebrated trial lawyer N. P. Karabchevskii, who helped to argue the plaintiffs’ side in the Kishinev civil trial, demanded Zavarzin’s removal from the courtroom. (He did not, however, scruple to re­ quest Zavarzin’s protection against supporters of the pogromists who had sent him anonymous threatening letters.) Back in St. Petersburg, Karabchevskii was asked to report on the trial at a private meeting. Lopukhin warned him that he ought not to speak in public about a trial that was closed to the public. Lopukhin added that the meeting’s high-priced tickets would provide funds to administrative exiles. For Karabchevskii, however, that precisely was the best justification for speaking at the event, since such exiles were not convicted criminals. He also brushed off Lopukhin’s threat that Plehve meant to have him exiled. Although Lopukhin managed to have the meeting canceled, the police’s ability to control the activities of defiant public figures continued to diminish over the course of the next two years.66 The empire’s most violent revolutionaries, meanwhile, kept up their as­ sault on the regime. On 6 May 1903 two Socialist-Revolutionary terrorists murdered N. M. Bogdanovich, the ill-famed governor of Ufa. On 27 May an­ other terrorist, F. M. Frumkina, lunged at General Novitskii with her dagger drawn and wounded him.67 Amid a growing breakdown of order and authority, Plehve hoped to re­ store calm in the country and confidence in the regime. To enlist “the best ele­ ments” of society in the struggle against the revolutionary movement, he en­ deavored nothing more concrete than to propose to reestablish the church’s influence over the people.68 His plan for strengthening law and order in the countryside was perhaps more likely to yield fruit, although not immediately.

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A law of 5 May 1903 created a rural police force (strazha) to replace the un­ paid, untrained, elected village “police” called “hundreders” (sotskie). It was projected that this force would over five years replace the 67,500 “hundred­ ers” with roughly 50,000 rural guards (strazhniki), that is, one per 2,500 rural inhabitants. Also at this time, the number of rural police sergeants was in­ creased to one per township. Since there were 10,496 townships in European Russia, and 15,840 throughout the empire, this meant only slightly more than 15,000 sergeants in all. For a rural population of well over 100 million spread over a vast territory, 65,000 was not a large number of police. It would also take several years to train and to outfit them.69

Zubatov’s Fall The final act in the Zubatovist drama, Zubatov’s fall from grace, began with the Odessa general strike. The strike broke out among Odessa railway workers on 1 July 1903, then quickly spread to other trades and swept across the Black Sea littoral, down to the Caucasus, and up to Kiev. By mid-July the entire city of Odessa was paralyzed, although the idled crowds remained dis­ ciplined and peaceable, and their demands remained entirely economic. Shaevich’s Independents (now officially disbanded) worked hard to focus the ma­ jority of strikers on economic issues, while radical activists strove to transform the strike Into a political manifestation. Lopukhin, Zubatov, and the local police authorities all favored continued restraint and further attempts at a negotiated settlement. On Friday, 18 July, however, heavy military interven­ tion, mandated by Plehve, crushed the strike movement. Similar action pro­ duced like results throughout the south, although the strike movement ended fully only by mid-August. The harshness of Plehve’s repression repelled Zu­ batov and turned him against his superior. Officials who had opposed Zubatovism presumably saw the confirmation of their worst fears in the Odessa general strike. For revolutionaries, naturally, it represented the revival of hope for popular revolutionary activity.70 For Plehve it constituted grounds for dismissing Zubatov, who had more­ over apparently been a party to intrigues orchestrated during the summer by Witte against Plehve. Zubatov now had three bitter and formidable enemies: von Wahl, Witte, and Plehve. Von Wahl believed that Zubatov had actually become something of a revolutionary, and, as Zubatov’s enemy, he must have revealed his suspicions to Plehve. Von Wahl later asserted that, in reading po­ lice dispatches from Odessa, he had discovered Zubatov’s “double game,” by which he seems to have meant an allegiance to both the government and the revolutionary movement. A few witnesses alleged further that Iakov Sazonov and A. S. Skandrakov also turned against Zubatov at this time.71 On 19 August 1903 Plehve summoned Zubatov to his summer residence and berated him for the Odessa fiasco. Zubatov, who, according to Spiridovich, “by nature had never been a bureaucrat, answered Plehve just as harshly that the experiments with [labor-union] legalization in Odessa had

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been conducted with his [Plehve’s] permission.” Zubatov then left the office quickly, slamming the glass door so hard that he nearly shattered it. Plehve ordered Zubatov to take two months’ vacation and to depart from St. Peters­ burg city and province no later than the following evening. In Moscow, Zuba­ tov was forbidden to contact anyone employed in security policing. On 17 October he was dismissed from the service and banished from the major cities of the empire—like so many revolutionaries against whom he had matched wits.72 Zubatov chose to settle in Vladimir. Deprived of his passport and placed under strict surveillance by the local gendarme chief, he could not leave town without express permission. Grand Duke Sergei’s intercession won for Zuba­ tov an annual pension of 3,000 rubles, which would be revoked, presumably on Plehve’s insistence, if ever he fled from his place of exile or undertook any “activities harmful to state interests.” On 30 November 1904 Zubatov was par­ doned and his pension was increased to 5,000 rubles, but he was instructed never to interfere in security police matters. Sviatopolk-Mirskii, Trepov, and Witte, each acting independently, urged Zubatov to return to service beginning in fall 1904— as the opposition forces were growing more menacing.73 Zuba­ tov declined the offers for three reasons. He feared for his son’s and his own safety, he still felt deeply offended by the treatment he had received at Pleh­ ve’s hands, and he did not wish to be placed under the unavoidable obligation to apply massive repression in the face of expanding revolutionary and liberal oppositionist movements. “I would have either continued in torment,” he wrote, “or would have fallen victim to a Browning.” In May 1910 he returned to Moscow, where he settled on Piatnitskaia Street in the Zamoskvorech’e. Still a committed monarchist, Zubatov did meet with a fatal bullet—released by his own Anger at the news of the emperor’s abdication on 2 March 1917.74 Savva Morozov, the wealthy industrialist, had presciently discerned the key weakness in Zubatovism. After a long conversation in 1902, he told Zu­ batov, “[Your] Moscow labor program bears a distinct touch of your personal­ ity: your archmonarchist beliefs, your unusual economic views, your passion­ ate hopes for an activist, benevolent, wise, and strong [government] authority, your enthusiastic approach. There is a serious flaw in the way the whole sys­ tem is organized: it will not work without you.” The experiment indeed foundered without Zubatov’s leadership, but it was not without a number of significant consequences. As Fedor Dan later wrote, “more than a few tens of thousands of workers, now loyal members of the Social Democratic Party, at­ tended the school of Zubatovism, which aroused them more or less to con­ scious life.” In other words, Zubatov objectively may have served the inter­ ests of the Social Democratic movement by accustoming industrial workers to joining together in labor organizations. It was perhaps from this point of view that some conservative Russians came to conceive of Zubatov as a radi­ cal or, in the words of Polovtsov, “a socialist, anarchist.” 75 As if to confirm that conviction, immediately following the Odessa strike many members of the Independent Jewish Workers’ Party joined the socialist Workers’ Zion

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Party.76 Fr. Georgii Gapon, as a disciple of Zubatov, founded his own work­ ers’ organization in St. Petersburg after Zubatov’s dismissal—with the fateful denouement of 9 January 1905. One may argue that Zubatovism rendered in­ dustrial workers more bold, and the regime more vulnerable, than they might otherwise have been. In 1929 Professor Ozerov met a few workers who told him, “The first tempering [zakalka] or ABC of what we are experiencing to­ day we received back then in your lectures.”77 It is necessary to add, however, that Zubatov’s failure in this enterprise stemmed from his strength as an innovator in the Imperial bureaucracy. His experiments with the methods of security policing bore much fruit. He appar­ ently could not help attempting to turn his creative talent to the empire’s so­ cial problems of which his professional vigilance gave him such a clear per­ spective. Of course, no innovator can expect all his proposed remedies to succeed. If Zubatov failed to win the permanent support of a large minority of workers for his labor program, his primary rivals, the Social Democrats, fared even worse, at least in the short term. Bauman had to admit to the second So­ cial Democratic congress in mid-1903 that the party had been positively bowled over by Zubatovism.78 (The congress itself was well infiltrated by po­ lice informants.)79

The Security Police System in Decline The entire security system entered a period of decline after Zubatov’s dis­ missal. Morozov’s insight applied to some extent here as well. Zubatov had transformed the Moscow Security Bureau into the nemesis of the revolution­ ary camp. His next task, begun in August 1902, was to replicate his methods across the empire. His efforts immediately yielded positive results, but to complete the task would have required more time than fate allotted him. The network of security bureaus remained, as did written instructions on applying his methods. Yet, at a time when the forces of opposition were coalescing and gaining in strength, no security official of Zubatov’s caliber was left either at the center or in the field. In September 1903 Ratko earned justified reproofs from Iakov Sazonov, the interim director of the Special Section, for his clumsy handling of a large printers’ strike in Moscow. Sazonov charged that Ratko had devoted inade­ quate attention to the crisis, had not kept the Police Department informed about frequent secret meetings and radical ferment among the workers, had not advised employers to negotiate earnestly with their workers, and had been slow to take repressive measures once the strike had begun. Sazonov added most presciently that such a massive display of popular discontent, under less favorable conditions, could spread from Moscow to other provinces, resulting in empirewide disorders.80 In November Sazonov was replaced by N. A. Makarov, who had been an assistant prosecutor in Moscow. Although he was apparently talented and

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hardworking, Makarov’s previous position had not sufficiently prepared him to assume the responsibility of overseeing the entire Imperial security system, especially at such an unquiet time. Spiridovich, in fact, considered him igno­ rant of security policing methods.81 Worse, the St. Petersburg Security Bureau was taken over in November 1903 by L. N. Kremenetskii, an incompetent se­ curity police officer. Kremenetskii seems to have had almost no reliable infor­ mants and apparently resorted to provocation, as he had previously done in Ekaterinoslav. Mednikov observed these changes with horror, desperately hoping that Spiridovich might take Kremenetskii’s place.82 Mednikov found even more troubling two broad deficiencies in the secu­ rity system. First, neither of the two major security bureaus was training fu­ ture security officers. It is true that on 5 January a cadre of thirty-five gen­ darme “officers of the reserve” had been created to specialize in security policing. Yet this was a tiny number in view of the rapid growth of the oppo­ sition movements. Mednikov also lamented that few of the 350 security offi­ cers spread across the empire displayed that “spirit of sacrifice and dedica­ tion” that he and Zubatov had sought to instill in them. Second, he decried the system’s lack of unity. In order to try to correct this problem, in November 1904 he helped to draft a directive recommending the appointment of civil­ ians as security bureau chiefs.83 This attempt to subordinate those gendarmes engaged in security policing more fully to the Police Department came to naught. The situation in Paris under Rataev was just as parlous. Rataev had com­ plained to Zubatov in March 1903 that someone was seeking to turn Lopukhin against him (this was probably Zubatov himself), but he boasted that he possessed incriminating information about everyone in the security service. “These are mere trifles,” he warned, “little, still-smoldering bits of coal, but from which, if necessary, I can loose a tolerably decent firework.” One assumes that Zubatov’s fall from grace to some extent slaked Rataev’s thirst for revenge, but it seems unlikely that he had, in the meantime, risen to any great height of efficiency at the Paris bureau. Most dangerous of all, Rataev was not in control of Azef, who was then trying to serve two masters: both the government and the Socialist-Revolutionary terrorist wing.84 To make matters worse, the Special Section expected a large number of Socialist-Revolutionaries to be freed from administrative exile in fall and winter 1903. Furthermore, reconstruction work at the Main Post Office in St. Petersburg during the second half of 1903 practically shut down the system of perlustration. For six months, intercepted mail came in only from the provin­ cial perlustration centers. This temporary incapacity apparently prompted the Police Department to issue an ultra-secret document (the so-called otkrytyi list) that, beginning in May 1903, empowered each security chief to inspect the mail in his local post office.85 Even a couple of the officers most devoted to security policing began to lose heart. Spiridovich expressed a wish to retire in early 1904, since he felt little support from the Police Department. Mednikov, as director of external

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surveillance for the Special Section, tried to keep the security system on an even keel, but by November 1904 he too began to contemplate retirement. The system that he had worked so hard to build up was now crumbling before his eyes. In the words of Rataev, by the end of 1903, the Imperial security po­ lice system was "like an army that was re-arming itself and training new draftees under a barrage of artillery fire.” 86 The Police Department’s prerogatives, meanwhile, were under attack by gendarme and judicial authorities. In 1903, prosecutors and gendarme chiefs demanded permission to use surveillants’ testimony in hearings and inquests. Security bureau directors, wishing to conceal the identity and methods of their surveillants, naturally balked. The Police Department grudgingly agreed in spring 1903 to allow external surveillants to testify in court if securing a major conviction depended on it, and some security officers, such as Spiridovich, reported to prosecutors out of courtesy even on cases they planned to deal with administratively. This was, however, as far as the security service would go. In July 1904 the Police Department categorically rejected the re­ quest of a gendarme station chief to interrogate a secret informant. Under no circumstances were informants to appear before any body for questioning.87 Of course, while security officers were justifiably hesitant to expose their external surveillance (let alone informant) network to public gaze, no court worth its salt was likely to convict merely on the basis of police officials’ as­ surances of a defendant’s guilt. Yet revolutionary activists, especially the "professionals,” hewed so closely to their rules of secrecy that search opera­ tions often yielded little incriminating evidence. To reinforce this tendency, delegates to the Social Democratic Party’s second congress in mid-1903 urged party members to admit absolutely nothing during interrogation by gendarme officers.88 It thus became more and more difficult to convict dedi­ cated revolutionary activists in court. Ironically, the government during precisely this period was laying the groundwork for dealing with most state-crimes cases in the courts. A new criminal code (Ugolovnoe ulozhenie), which was promulgated on 22 March 1903, made it theoretically easier for the regular courts to punish the instiga­ tors of politically oriented public disorders. Most important, it defined as criminal such manifestations of collective violence as pogroms, major strikes, and violent demonstrations. (Only the code’s state-crime provisions actually acquired legal force.) The code, brought into harmony with the judi­ cial statutes of 1864 by a law of 7 June 1904, revoked the justice minister’s authority to recommend the administrative resolution of state-crime cases, thus ending the emperor’s direct involvement with administrative punish­ ments (although it did not rescind the similar provisions of the security law of 1881). It seemed to many observers at the time that henceforth court sen­ tencing would become the normal method of dealing with state crime.89 This development promised to bring Russia more into line with its western Euro­ pean counterparts. In the short run, however, the regular courts continued to play a minor role

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in the government’s efforts to quell radical activism. With the support of Po­ lice Department Director Lopukhin, the courts tried only twenty-one alleged political criminals in 1903 and eighty-four in 1904. The number for 1904 would have been higher but for a major amnesty in August. The courts, in any event, were unlikely to become pliant tools of the administration for two rea­ sons. First, the law of 7 June 1904 made it harder to persuade potential wit­ nesses to testify against revolutionaries by stipulating that state-crime cases should be tried openly: who could say what activists ready to shed the blood of officials might do to a witness who spoke openly in court? Second, the judges in the regular courts tended to issue lenient sentences, especially to people accused of committing state crimes, in part because of an influx of radicals into the bar. The military courts played an even more modest role in the government’s antisedition campaign. They tried only forty-three political defendants in 1903 and eighteen in 1904.90 Administrative punishment remained the favored method for dealing with radical activism throughout this period (with the possible exception of 1905), and Plehve’s administration also sought to make life more difficult for politi­ cal exiles by ordering stricter surveillance over them and by increasing the proportion of them sent to Yakutsk, from 45 in 1902, to 170 in 1903, to 215 in 1904. Even so, in 1904 the lot of political dissidents improved markedly. First, as noted above, the imposition of administrative exile by Imperial order was abolished. Second, the war with Japan obliged the government to curtail shipping exiles to most of eastern Siberia. As a result, Arkhangelsk Province became the most frequent destination for political exiles; 646 such exiles resided there in mid-1904. Third, a major amnesty of August 1904 reduced the number of political exiles (in Arkhangelsk, for example, 121 were freed).91 At a time when more and more public activists were castigating the regime as a “police state,” when revolutionary conspirators were growing more numerous and bold, and when a relatively broad-based coalition of edu­ cated opponents of absolutism was maturing, a relatively modest number of people were being punished for political activism. Security police officers in the context of increased sedition and compara­ tively diminishing levels of repression began to feel less sure of themselves. Some attributed the rising tide of organized opposition and their own grow­ ing sense of impotence to a weakening of leadership from senior govern­ ment officials. A gendarme officer at the Odessa Security Bureau, for exam­ ple, lamented to an acquaintance in a letter of June 1903, “In Petersburg, everyone in the highest spheres has gone either mad or blind.” Even a few senior officials entertained similar thoughts. V. I. Gurko admitted that, by the end of 1903, “it seemed that the government was suspended in midair and that its sole support was the administrative and police apparatus—an apparatus which seemed to function without spirit. It worked automatically more or less in accordance with the orders and directions of the govern­ ment, but even members of the government in ever increasing numbers re­ fused to accept these orders as correct and to share in the program of state

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policy. The state apparatus was becoming devoid of strength.”92 Plehve’s gravest mistake, besides firing Zubatov, was perhaps his heavyhanded treatment of the nonrevolutionary opposition. When moderate zem­ stvo activists held a congress in D. N. Shipov’s apartment on 8 September 1903, Plehve arranged for each participant to receive a reprimand from the emperor. Plehve also singled out for harassment prominent public activists such as Struve, Miliukov, Petrunkevich, I. V. Gessen, and other future leaders of the Kadet and Octobrist Parties. To oppose them, he argued, was his duty.93 (In this light, he might have been happier with Rataev than with Zubatov as Special Section chief.) Plehve knew that police intelligence in late 1902 and early 1903 predicted continued terrorist attacks, and he knew that many pub­ lic activists refused to condemn revolutionary terror because they hoped it would drive the government to make concessions.94 Yet whatever the interior minister’s concerns, he drove even relatively moderate zemstvo activists into the Union of Liberation. Plehve’s harassment of the well-connected leaders of the nonrevolutionary opposition did little to curb their activity. Illustrative of this impotence was an episode related by I. V. Gessen, a liberal journalist and attorney, as well as an editor of Pravo. In 1904, Gessen appealed to Plehve on behalf of two clients, both Jewish merchants expelled from Moscow- by order of the Moscow gov­ ernor general. (Appeals to the Senate, noted Gessen, usually dragged on for years.) Plehve said to Gessen, “Do not forget that his highness [Grand Duke Sergei] is the governor general in Moscow.” To this Gessen replied, “I know, your excellency, but my clients cannot on this basis give up their rights.” Ac­ cording to Gessen, Plehve reacted as if he had just been caught revealing the Achilles’ heel of the Imperial regime. Plehve went on to warn his interlocutor that he had his eye on the journal Pravo, which he called “a branch of [the il­ legal newspaper] Osvobozhdenie.” Gessen retorted that he had no grounds for asserting this, to which Plehve answered that he had “certitude only, but no evidence.” At that moment, Gessen “sensed very well that the regime was helpless, and [he] left the building on Fontanka [Quay] with the feeling of a victor.” Miliukov described a similar encounter with Plehve in late 1902.95 Gessen, Miliukov, and other political activists similar to them were able to nip at the regime’s Achilles’ heel by making appeals to powerful individuals in order to circumvent institutional and legal structures and by taking advan­ tage of the government’s rudimentary respect for legality. It seems, therefore, that Plehve’s bark (like that of the entire government) was often far worse than his bite. As a result, according to Gurko, “the Russ­ ian government was hated but not feared. The government thunder rolled in­ cessantly; but there was no lightning. Plehve had the Tsar’s complete confi­ dence and could have passed any measures. . . . On the one hand, no one could be sure that some innocent action not prohibited by the government would not set one en route, as Pushkin said, ‘straight, straight to the east’; on the other, the conviction grew that any order of the government could be para­ lyzed by a display of determined opposition.”96

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Indeed, most of the leaders of the Union of Liberation and its newspaper, Osvobozhdenie, remained outside the police’s reach. Thus, when the Imperial government finally persuaded the Germans to search Struve’s apartment in December 1903, it provoked a major scandal in Germany and generated good publicity for the new organization. One month later, some fifty activists from all over the empire met in St. Petersburg to found the Union of Liberation. The simultaneous congregation of a few thousand radical intellectuals in the capital for a congress of doctors and a congress of technical educators shielded the smaller gathering from police detection. One marvels that a gov­ ernment considered so repressive should have permitted mass assemblages of activists in principle opposed to the existing form of government. For one thing, the liberation movement seemed proof against the insinuation of infor­ mants in their midst. Richard Pipes attributes its impermeability to the move­ ment’s loose organization and lack of a precise program, but above all to the probity of its members.97 One might add that the union’s leaders were all fi­ nancially comfortable, which surely made it harder to recruit informants from among them. Equally important perhaps was the manner in which members conceived their mission. Whereas for Struve and other left-liberals struggle against the Imperial regime was primarily a means to obtain specific political concessions, for many revolutionaries it took on a life of its own and became the very essence of their activity. An organization of “professional revolution­ aries” or “professional conspirators” was more likely to attract the species of mercenary adventurer susceptible to betray it for pecuniary gain. The empire was not quiet at its edges either. As Plehve’s biographer has argued, his “nationalities policies caused considerably more harm than they did good. Troops were required to keep order in Finland and to restore order in the Caucasus. The government’s monetary gain in expropriating Armenian Church property was more than offset by the revenues lost on account of the resulting unrest. And the repression of the Jews only perpetuated a fatal cycle: government restrictions, justified by the active participation of many Jews in radical activities, led more and more young Jews to join the revolutionary movement.” 98 Unrest in the Baltic region prompted Nicholas II on 25 August 1903 to authorize the governor general of Vilnius, Kovno, and Grodno Provinces, Petr Sviatopolk-Mirskii, to issue binding administrative orders on matters concerning state security. This was a way to endow an official with one of the most important powers conferred under a state of reinforced secu­ rity without actually imposing it in his jurisdiction. On 29 January 1904 the Committee of Ministers reconfirmed Sviatopolk-Mirskii’s right to issue such binding orders. Over the next several years this power was granted to many more governors and governors general.99 When the Russo-Japanese War began in late January 1904, much of east­ ern Siberia, the Far East, and parts of the Trans-Siberian Railroad fell under a state of martial law. In June and August a few strategic localities in European Russia (such as Sevastopol and Kurland) followed suit. Martial law was the harshest form of emergency legislation in Imperial Russia. It subordinated

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civilians to military authorities and empowered the latter to take any mea­ sures deemed necessary for the preservation of the state order, a prerogative far exceeding even those conferred by the provisions of extraordinary secu­ rity.100 Thus, for the first time since the adoption of the security law in 1881, the territory placed under a state of emergency increased substantially. Patri­ otic sentiment waxed at the outbreak of war with Japan but waned thanks to Russia’s weak showing in the war and Plehve’s unpopular policies.101 The terrorist campaign continued unabated. Terrorists murdered Finnish Governor General G. I. Bobrikov on 3 June 1904 and Vice Governor Andreev of ElizavetapoF Province on 6 July. It is not surprising, under the circum­ stances, that Plehve chose to reside inside the Interior Ministry building at 16 Fontanka Quay or that he surrounded himself with an eight-man bodyguard under the leadership of A. S. Skandrakov. The first chief of the Moscow Secu­ rity Bureau and a close associate of Sudeikin and Plehve in the early 1880s, Skandrakov was an expert in security policing who made use of police reports and intercepted mail in his efforts to keep the minister safe.102With this exper­ tise close to home and Azef at the head of the Socialist-Revolutionary combat organization, what had Plehve to fear? The head of Plehve’s chancellery, Liu­ bimov, later recalled that neither the Police Department nor Skandrakov seemed concerned for Plehve’s safety, despite the fact that the SocialistRevolutionary Party central committee had publicly announced its intention to murder him. Greatly reassuring to senior officials was Azef’s report, submit­ ted on 19 June 1904 to Rataev in Paris, that the combat organization had for the immediate future suspended its plan to assassinate the minister.103 What police officials did not realize was that Azef was not the loyal infor­ mant they took him to be. Although Azef seemed to have repudiated his Jew­ ish heritage from the religious point of view, he was not at all indifferent to the plight of Russia’s Jews as an ethnic group. According to P. S. Ivanovskaia, Azef “never passed by a barefoot street vendor—the Jewish children who swarmed in the streets of those cities [Warsaw and Vilnius]—without buying something from them for a half-kopek or two.” As did many people, Azef ap­ parently considered Plehve responsible for the Kishinev pogrom. Zubatov later described to Rataev how Azef had literally shaken with fury and hatred when the name Plehve had come up in this connection.104 Also important in weakening Azef’s loyalty to the Police Department was a series of events in spring 1904 that placed him in jeopardy. The radical publicist N. A. Rubakin, having unaccountably suspected Azef of being a police spy, shared his suspi­ cions with M. R. Gots. This information reached Azef, which naturally placed him on his guard. Around the same time, Azef gave the police information on a Socialist-Revolutionary terrorist named S. Klitchoglu, who was in direct competition with Azef’s combat organization. Intrigues within the security service, pitting St. Petersburg Security Chief Kremenetskii against Rataev, precipitated Klitchoglu’s arrest immediately after she had met with Azef. The informant was doubtless worried that this coincidence could arouse the suspi­ cions of his revolutionary colleagues.

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Rataev believed that all these events combined to cause Azef’s “final break with the Police Department, which he now began to betray regularly.” As was argued above, Rataev became a plaything in the dexterous hands of the clever Azef. True, Azef continued to divulge bits of important informa­ tion to Rataev, and in early April 1904 he gave details to Lopukhin about a plan to assassinate Plehve (though he substituted Lopukhin's name for Plehve’s). Yet after two failed attempts on Plehve’s life (on 18 and 25 March 1904) and the accidental suicide of A. D. Pokotilov, who inadvertently blew himself up on 14 April, members of the Socialist-Revolutionary combat or­ ganization got cold feet and began to mutiny against Azef. With his leader­ ship of the organization on the line, and reasonably convinced that Rataev was unable to control his actions, Azef now returned his troops to discipline by energetically insisting that they carry through the plan to murder Plehve. It seems that he organized Plehve’s murder with the utmost seriousness that summer.105 On 15 July 1904, E. S. Sazonov heaved a bomb at Plehve’s carriage, with its iron-lined window shades, and the tremendous explosion killed the states­ man instantly.106 A conference of the Socialist-Revolutionary Party, then meeting in Geneva, celebrated the news. One member, breaking a glass on the floor and gritting his teeth, snarled, “That’s for Kishinev.” The result was ex­ tremely favorable to Azef. It removed from high office a man he apparently held responsible for anti-Jewish violence. It also immediately raised Azef’s prestige among the terrorists. For example, the Socialist-Revolutionary leader E. K. Breshko-Breshkovskaia despised Azef, but upon seeing him after the deed she bowed down before him all the way to the floor in traditional Russ­ ian style.107 Yet the assassination raised no suspicions about Azef’s loyalty within the Police Department. The responsibility for this error in judgment surely lay with Rataev. Soon after the assassination, Lopukhin summoned him to the Police Department to discuss the matter. Rataev consulted with Azef before departing from Paris, although it is not known what the two men said to each other. In St. Petersburg, Rataev claimed that Azef’s contacts in the SocialistRevolutionary Party had grown more cautious in the preceding months and that Azef had simply been uninformed about their assassination plans. Nikolaevskii has argued, however, that had Rataev been more competent he could easily have deduced Azef’s involvement in the assassination. His failure to do so naturally encouraged the informant to take him even less seriously as a case officer.108 It seems that few people in Russia or abroad grieved the news of Plehve’s murder. Struve declared of Plehve that he had “thought that it was possible to have an autocracy which introduced the police into everything—an autocracy which transformed legislation, administration, scholarship, church, school, and family into police [organs].” This was typical of the exaggerated claims of some opponents of the regime. More to the point was the terrorist B. V. Savinkov’s judgment that in Plehve’s death “the autocracy lost not only a

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most faithful servant; it lost its terrible mystique of power.”109 One might add that Plehve, by fulminating against sedition without vigorously rooting it out, had himself eroded much of that mystique. Nicholas, who had considered Plehve a friend, was shaken by the loss. Who knows what steely successor he might have appointed if only two weeks later (on 30 July) his long-awaited male heir had not been bom. Suddenly the emperor was filled with joy and gratitude. These feelings prompted him to ban the last vestiges of corporal punishment (save in penal exile); to cancel all arrears on peasants’ redemp­ tion payments; to amnesty political prisoners; and to order that Plehve’s as­ sassin, Sazonov, be tried in a regular court, which sentenced him to life im­ prisonment.110 Nicholas appointed as interior minister the moderate Prince P. D. Sviatopolk-Mirskii and charged him with improving relations between govern­ ment and society. Mirskii’s appointment was greeted skeptically by many offi­ cials in the ministry, who considered him weak willed, sickly, and lacking in administrative experience. Finance Minister V. N. Kokovtsov later described him as easily influenced by others, indecisive, and completely unfit for com­ bating the revolutionaries. Mirskii immediately divested himself of direct con­ trol over his ministry’s police apparatus by creating a position of deputy inte­ rior minister for police affairs on 22 September 1904. The first such deputy was K. N. Rydzevskii, who admitted that he felt unfamiliar with police mat­ ters.111 Indeed, as the former director of the chancellery of the Ministry of the Imperial Court, he had no experience in policing or crime fighting. Mirskii set about laying the groundwork for reforms and making overtures to the educated public. He loosened Plehve’s strict censorship rules, fired hard-line Interior Ministry officials such as von Wahl, mended fences with the zemstvo leaders, and in general adopted a conciliatory attitude. He rejected the argument of S. E. Kryzhanovskii, a senior Interior Ministry official, that any relaxation of the rules on public activity had to be accompanied by a strengthening of government authority. Instead, as he asserted to the emperor, the government had to cease to appear to oppose society; if it persisted, he commented, “Russia will be divided between those who are under surveil­ lance and those conducting surveillance, and then what?” He even dared to warn Nicholas that Moscow, under the administration of Sergei Aleksan­ drovich, was “outside the law, a hotbed of arbitrary government \proizyol\r Mirskii’s concessions further eroded what remained of the government’s mystique of power. Many public activists, filled with animosity toward the government, girded themselves for battle against it and chose to greet the concessions as a sign of weakness and as tokens of a willingness to yield more. On 2 October 1904, in Osvobozhdenie, Miliukov warned Mirskii not to count on any public support for his new course: “We will not give you a sin­ gle man, not any credit, any respite, until you accept our complete agenda.” 112 As Russia’s fortunes continued to sag in the Far East, public militancy in­ creased to a feverish pitch. A conference of leaders of left-liberal, radical, and revolutionary organiza-

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tions (but not any Social Democratic leaders) met in Paris from 17 to 25 Sep­ tember 1904 and pledged on behalf of their organizations to fight, each in its own manner, for the overthrow of absolutism. Their joint statement declared, “[T]he absolutist regime is the decisive impediment to the progress and im­ provement of the situation of the Russian and other peoples of the empire.” The fact that rumors were then widespread of Japanese financial support for the conference indicates the level of radicalization of its participants. Then in St. Petersburg from 6 to 9 November 1904 there convened a zemstvo con­ gress that some contemporaries likened to the French Estates-General of 1789.113 Sviatopolk-Mirskii advised organizers of the congress, which was dominated by members of the Union of Liberation, not to meet in St. Peters­ burg. He further advised them to meet privately. They ignored Mirskii’s first request, and in the event, uniformed police helped the delegates to find the several meeting places in private homes. For the remainder of November and into January the Union of Liberation organized a campaign of at least thirtyeight ostensibly private banquets, whose attendees pronounced antigovemment, proconstitutionalist speeches. (During the same period, no fewer than fifty-four political meetings also took place.)114 The extent of the govern­ ment’s permissiveness stunned most contemporaries. Indeed, the Police De­ partment did not direct governors to prevent the banquets from occurring un­ til 16 December 1904.115 Middle-level officials and the public alike must have assumed that the government had been forced to tolerate the gatherings. Amid the festivities, on 28 November 1904 large student demonstrations took place along Nevskii Prospect and were dispersed forcibly by mounted gendarmes. In Moscow, the Socialist-Revolutionaries prepared street demon­ strations for 5 and 6 December, issuing a proclamation that threatened City Governor Trepov and Grand Duke Sergei with murder should the demonstra­ tions meet with police repression. V. V. Ratko was beside himself with worry. In a letter of 3 December he pleaded with Zubatov to rush from Vladimir to Moscow to help him deal with the imminent disorder.116 (Zubatov presum­ ably could not legally comply with the request.) Trepov disregarded the threat against his life, and when the radical activists took to the streets many were beaten by regular policemen. Sviatopolk-Mirskii rebuked Trepov for his dis­ play of “military prowess” on the streets of Moscow, and he arranged for him to serve under General Kuropatkin in the Far East. Socialist-Revolutionary terrorists declared that they would not let Trepov leave Moscow alive, but their efforts to assassinate him proved fruitless.117 In response to the banquet campaign and other political manifestations, on 12 December 1904 the emperor issued a decree promising significant reforms in government policy, including respect for the rule of law by officialdom, a diminished recourse to emergency legislation, and a softening of the rules on censorship. The decree, because it contained no promise of a representative assembly and was accompanied by an order reconfirming the illegality of unauthorized public meetings, angered much of the educated public, as well as Sviatopolk-Mirskii himself. It also probably sowed further confusion in the

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minds of the regime’s defenders. Finance Minister Kokovtsov later wrote that by the end of 1904 the “central government authority was terribly weakened. . . . the Interior Ministry literally did not know what to do. Witte was pushing the interior minister to begin experiments without Witte himself understand­ ing where he wanted to g o .. . . Trepov vacillated from one side to the other.” As Spiridovich phrased it, the Interior Ministry was “undertaking a revolution from above but offered no guidance” to local officials.118 In the meantime, the next misfortune in the history of Nicholas’s ill-starred reign occurred on 20 December 1904—the fall of Port Arthur. In these bleak circumstances, Police Department Director Lopukhin sub­ jected the Imperial police institutions to severe criticism. Why he did so at this time is unclear. Although he later claimed to have learned in fall 1904 about Azef’s leading role in the Socialist-Revolutionary Party, he had in fact approved the informant’s advancement toward the party center and had also been aware for some time of his duplicity. A likely explanation is that the in­ creasingly strident liberal criticism had undermined his confidence in the regime. Whatever his motives, on 6 December 1904, in a memorandum pre­ pared for the emperor, he warned that revolutionary propaganda had contin­ ued to make heavy inroads into the countryside and that police repression de­ signed to root out sedition was driving a wedge between the educated layers of society and the government. Lopukhin admitted that many educated people had begun to turn a blind eye to—if not actually to condone—revolutionary terrorism. Worst of all, the regular and security police forces had not halted the growth of the opposition movement, despite incessant activity and a num­ ber of successes achieved in their effort to do so. “For the past three years,” he wrote, “six terrorist plots have been exposed, approximately seventy un­ derground presses have been seized, numerous antigovemment circles have been smashed, yet the movement itself and its most dangerous, terrorist ele­ ment continue to grow intensively.” In this context, he wrote, it was impossi­ ble for him “not to tremble at the awareness of the unexpected ease with which a popular revolt can erupt and spread in Russia.” About such a revolt, he commented, “[I]t will be impossible to stifle it without a bloodbath.” Some courtiers and senior officials began, according to Lopukhin, to consider him something of a “revolutionary.”119 On 28 December 1904 Lopukhin submitted to the Committee of Ministers a detailed, scathing critique of the security law of 1881, which he claimed was ineffective, pointless, even counterproductive. First, the law authorized trying state-crime cases in military courts, which, unlike the regular courts, could issue death sentences. In practice, however, between 1890 and 1904 only five people had been sentenced to death, and three of the sentences had been commuted to terms of hard labor.120 So why transfer cases to military courts, asked Lopukhin, when regular courts would have sentenced those criminals to hard labor anyway? Second, the police and gendarmes were em­ powered to arrest and to maintain surveillance over opponents of the regime, but they feared, according to Lopukhin, to importune the well-connected and

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reputable leaders of the opposition (for example, Miliukov) and therefore spent their time harassing relatively unthreatening people, such as university students. Lopukhin also denounced the passport system (not a feature of the security law, of course), for it too annoyed ordinary, law-abiding subjects of the emperor without impeding the activities of dedicated revolutionaries. For example, noted Lopukhin, P. V. Karpovich had resided in St. Petersburg under his own name for three days before murdering N. P. Bogolepov in February 1901, although legally he had been banned from residing there. Finally, Lopukhin repeated the familiar allegation that exiling agitators across the em­ pire tended to accelerate the spread of revolutionary propaganda.121 At a meeting of the Committee of Ministers in January Witte denounced Lopukhin’s memoranda. Brandishing the second document, he exclaimed that “the imminence of revolution is not surprising when the Police Department is headed by a man who permits himself such criticism of [Imperial Russia’s] laws.” Almost as if to discount in deeds the police director’s criticism, on 31 December 1904 the Committee of Ministers extended to the governors of the provinces of Saratov, Mogilev, Lifland, Nizhegorod, and Tomsk the right to issue and to enforce binding administrative orders for the regulation of mat­ ters affecting public tranquillity and the state order.122 Here was a fitting illus­ tration of the divisions and even confusion then reigning in the Imperial bu­ reaucracy and, more specifically, within its police institutions.

C H A P T E R

S I X

Police and Administration in the Revolution of 1905

S

^ ^ ince late 1904, vacillation at the highest level of government had been weakening the resolve of administrators in the field. Such vacillation further undermined the regime’s authority and emboldened the opposition. These problems were compounded by the fact that the Imperial government had always accorded senior provincial officials broad latitude and had relied on their common sense rather than on training programs or detailed instruc­ tions. Few such officials, however well they acquitted themselves of their du­ ties in ordinary times, were equipped to deal with major social crises. Imper­ ial Russia’s relatively small security service specialized in matching wits with small-scale conspiratorial organizations. It was unprepared and unable to con­ trol the mighty phalanx of broad-based opposition movements—all spear­ headed by socially prominent radical public activists—that emerged in the fateful year of 1905.

The First Act On 3 January 1905, 13,000 workers went on strike at St. Petersburg’s giant Putilov plant. The walkout, which quickly spread to other factories, was linked to an attempt in late December by the factory administration to weaken Fr. Georgii Gapon’s Assembly of Russian Factory and Mill Workers, which enjoyed the support of senior police officials. Yet unlike Zubatov, who had been a full-fledged civil servant, Gapon was a freelance agent of the Police Department. Gapon later boasted that he had duped both Zubatov and Plehve. In addition, he deceived City Governor I. A. Fullon, a kindly but ineffectual official, when he convinced him that he would keep the workers in line. In fact, Gapon and other assembly leaders were planning to stage a major politi­ cal demonstration.1

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By 7 January 1905, a Friday, 100,000 industrial laborers (two-thirds of the city’s workforce) were on strike. Fullon summoned Gapon; he declined to present himself. Late that night, the press received copies of a radical petition that Gapon planned to present to the emperor during a large procession on Sunday. Senior government officials conferred on the evening of 8 January and agreed to prevent the demonstration. They were hopeful that this aim could be achieved. Every available police and military unit was placed in readiness, although martial law, briefly considered, was not declared. A ban on public assemblies was issued. Fullon ordered Gapon’s arrest, but he was surrounded by loyal, militant workers, and to lay hands on him would have cost the lives of several policemen, according to Deputy Interior Minister Rydzevskii.2 As is well known, Gapon’s procession on 9 January met with gun­ fire, which killed up to 200 demonstrators and seriously wounded 800 more. The following day, 160,000 industrial workers went on strike, and thousands of students joined them. The police in St. Petersburg undertook massive ar­ rests, filling the available prison space. On Tuesday Nicholas appointed D. F. Trepov St. Petersburg governor gen­ eral, a position that had not been filled for several years. The emperor subor­ dinated all civil and gendarme authorities in the capital to Trepov and con­ ferred on him such powers as the right to issue binding administrative orders on any matter and to demand military assistance at any time. Trepov also en­ joyed the right to report directly to the emperor, just like a minister. Many contemporaries were displeased. The radical bibliographer-historian S. R. Mintslov denounced the appointment as “an insult and an affront to all of St. Petersburg,” and the courtier R. A. Radtsig called Trepov “brutish and stu­ pid.” Some police officials, in contrast, were heartened. Mednikov, who still headed the external surveillance department of the Special Section, believed that Trepov would put an end to the “liberal hubbub.” In any event, the day af­ ter his appointment St. Petersburg returned to relatively normal life: even mil­ itary patrols were removed from the streets.3 A purge of administrative and police officials ensued but in the short run failed to strengthen the police apparatus. Trepov fired Security Bureau Chief Kremenetskii (V. F. Modi’ and Mikhail Gurovich temporarily shared his du­ ties) and arranged for a military commander, V. A. Dediulin, to replace Fullon as city governor on 15 January. Three days later, Nicholas accepted Mirskii’s resignation and replaced him with A. G. Bulygin, another moderate. Like Mirskii, Bulygin was uninterested in police matters. With the words, “I have no heart for police work,” he had previously refused to become the city gov­ ernor in Moscow, and now, again like Mirskii, Bulygin yielded the responsi­ bility for policing the empire to his deputy, Rydzevskii.4 As educated society expanded and the opposition movements grew in number and scope, the security system was ever more hard-pressed to main­ tain surveillance over them. The Special Section simply could not keep up with the immense volume of information flooding in from the network of se­ curity bureaus and other institutions across the empire, a volume that had more than quintupled since 1898 while the number of personnel had only

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quadrupled (to sixty-four). This expanding burden of documentation, behind which lay a qualitative intensification of the social dangers facing the regime, hit provincial security police institutions too, including the provincial gen­ darme stations.5 Given the security police’s almost ruinous misreading of the Gaponist movement, one might have expected senior police officials to move quickly to reform and to strengthen the security system. Yet beyond a minor reshuffling of security chiefs—and endless hand-wringing in the corridors of the Police Department over the failure to prevent the tragedy—nothing of the sort occurred.6 The rising tide of popular unrest, especially in the borderlands, prompted the government to expand the power of some administrative officials. On 10 February 1905 a state of reinforced security was declared in Warsaw and in Poland’s “Manchester” and second city, Lödz, whence a general strike had spread to the rest of Poland beginning in late January. Then from February through May reinforced security was imposed in several localities in the Cau­ casus region, in other parts of the Kingdom of Poland, in the Baltic provinces, and in Yalta city and district.7 These declarations were like blunt instruments. They permitted regular police officials to deal with unrest that had already broken out but did not enhance the ability of the security service to forestall new threats to the regime. This distinction was clearly perceived by many se­ nior government officials. The Committee o f Ministers, after a thorough study of the existing excep­ tional legislation, called it “not very effective” and “even sometimes counter­ productive”—a clear echo of Lopukhin’s criticisms of December. Witte pro­ claimed, “[A] whole generation has grown up with the security law [of 1881] and knows of Russian laws only through books.” Governors tended, accord­ ing to the committee, to react to disorders as they occurred instead of seeking to remove their causes. They exiled masses of people, some politically “unre­ liable” and others merely reprobate, all of whom converged on a few places, mostly in western Siberia, where they gave rise to a variety of social ills. Even the hard-line Deputy Interior Minister Petr Nikolaevich Dumovo rec­ ommended strictly limiting the use of, if not completely abolishing, adminis­ trative exile. The committee also decried the overuse of administrative search and arrest, as well as the application of binding orders and fines to activities unrelated to sedition. The committee concluded that administrative officials had to have at their disposal extraordinary powers in special circumstances but that these powers had to be strictly delimited both geographically and chronologically to a given crisis. To guide the drafting of a new law on excep­ tional legislation, a special commission was created under the direction of A. P. Ignat’ev. Civil unrest over the next several months brought the commis­ sion’s labors to naught.8 Directly instrumental in undermining the arguments in favor of the rule of law were the disparate terrorist groups whose bloody deeds punctuated that unquiet year with growing frequency. On 4 February 1905 a member of the Socialist-Revolutionary combat organization, I. P. Kaliaev, murdered Grand

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Duke Sergei, until January the governor general of Moscow province. As the grand duke’s carriage approached the Kremlin’s Nikol’skie Gates, which open onto Red Square, Kaliaev, dressed in peasant garb, suddenly appeared and threw a parcel beneath the carriage. In an instant a thunderous explosion smote the vehicle. People across the river to the south supposed that an earth­ quake had struck.9 This was a terrible blow to the emperor, the slain man’s fond nephew, for it constituted the first successful attack on a member of the Imperial family since 1881. The conservative press took the assassination as a sign of the ineffectiveness of the security police. Much of the liberal press sought the cause of the crime in the lack of cooperation between state and so­ ciety. Some opposition figures greeted the death with levity.10 A. A. Kozlov replaced the grand duke as governor general. Having been city governor successively in Moscow and St. Petersburg in the 1870s and 1880s, he was chosen more for past gloiy than for present vigor. Petrunkevich described him as a “very gentle governor general.” He remained in office only until July.11 Sviatopolk-Mirskii’s wife recorded in her diary that many people had be­ come inured to assassinations. Indeed, the violence just intensified. Although no further members of the Imperial family met their deaths at the hands of revolutionaries until 1918, with the grand duke’s murder began a veritable epidemic of violent attacks on Russian officialdom. Between February 1905 and May 1906 terrorists, both with and without party affiliations, killed as many as 1,068 government officials, including 706 low-ranking regular po­ licemen and 204 middle- and senior-level officials. To the government offi­ cials must be added innocent bystanders, of whom terrorists killed 233 and wounded 358 during the course of 1905.12 Notably, on 28 April 1905 A. L. Nikiforov, of the Socialist-Revolutionary combat organization, murdered Nizhni Novgorod Security Chief Greshner, and on 30 April Petr Rudenko, an erstwhile informant, shot and wounded Spiridovich in Kiev. Spiridovich, a valuable security chief, was suddenly out of commission for several months at a critical time in Russian history. (Spiridovich’s wife died from complica­ tions resulting from shock.)13 The government did not immediately emulate the revolutionary terrorists; it did not exact an eye for an eye. During the entire year of 1905 only ten people, all of whom had committed or had attempted to commit murder, were put to death by regular or military court sentence.14 It is not entirely clear what kept officials from reacting more forcefully to seditious activity. Among the most likely reasons were concern for public opinion and uncer­ tainty about how best to ensure the regime’s survival. The most conspicuous and formidable locus of educated public opinion was the liberation move­ ment, which was now more united and in a far stronger position politically than it had been one year earlier. The hesitancy of senior government offi­ cials to act more resolutely in repressing sedition may also have stemmed from a fear that harshly repressive measures could provoke further popular unrest. With a big contingent of military personnel still in the Far East, it was

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legitimate to doubt the government’s ability to quell large-scale disorders. Two weeks after the grand duke’s assassination, Nicholas issued three con­ tradictory decrees on the same day (18 February). One exhorted the public to oppose the instigators of disorder, the second charged Bulygin with drafting a plan for an elective legislative institution, and the third granted individuals and institutions the right to petition the emperor with reform proposals and grievances. Left-liberal and radical activists disregarded the appeal for order and put little stock in the government’s promise to create a representative in­ stitution, but they took the third decree as an authorization of freedom of speech and assembly and immediately launched a petition campaign in which much of Russia took part. Between February and July 1905 zemstvos, town dumas, and professional societies submitted hundreds of petitions, and peas­ ants flooded the capital with sixty thousand of them. Abraham Ascher called this campaign “the catalyst that mobilized masses of people who had not pre­ viously dared to express opinions on political issues,” and Gurko argued that it marked a turning point at which the public had to choose sides. Spiridovich was probably right that the decree promoted further terrorism by suggesting that successful assassinations would wring further concessions from the gov­ ernment.15 On 17 February Aleksandr Gerasimov arrived from Khar’kov as the new director of the St. Petersburg Security Bureau. He had been reticent about taking up the responsibility for combating popular opposition in the capital, the more so since he scarcely knew the city. He had entered Trepov’s office two weeks before intending to decline the post but had been unable to do so. He probably deeply regretted his failure of nerve when he arrived and found the Police Department in a state of confusion, the security bureau teaming with people. He entered one room at the bureau and discovered a secret infor­ mant meeting with a gendarme officer, who told the astonished Gerasimov that he was an insignificant agent who lied all the time anyway. In the end, Gerasimov fired all the informants but one. On Trepov’s insistence, Rachkovskii became Gerasimov’s assistant, indeed his coequal. Fortunately for Gerasimov, who considered him incompetent as a security police official, Rachkovskii spent most of his time at the Police Department. During his first night in the capital, Gerasimov sat in despair at an empty desk. For three weeks thereafter, he wrote, “All I could tell senior officials [was] . . . if you cherish your lives, do not leave your homes.” 16 The assassination of the grand duke precipitated Lopukhin’s resignation from the Police Department, and on 7 March 1905 he departed to his new post as governor to Estland Province. Although he had been hoping for a transfer, his enemies in the police bureaucracy, including Rachkovskii, Gurovich, and Sergei Zvolianskii, had accelerated the process. To add insult to injury, Zvolianskii, now a senator, was commissioned in May to investigate Lopukhin’s failure to oversee his subordinates properly. Lopukhin’s succes­ sor, S. G. Kovalenskii, had previously been a prosecutor at the Warsaw Judi­ cial Tribunal and, like Lopukhin, had no experience in managing police insti-

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tutions. Unlike Lopukhin, however, he apparently never took his responsibili­ ties seriously. It is not surprising that Rachkovskii, Trepov’s favorite, quietly extended his control over the security police system.17 Rachkovskii, as in the past, devoted much attention to ventures relating to foreign policy and propaganda. In a memorandum of 19 April 1905 he advo­ cated creating a semiofficial “press bureau” to furnish “reliable information regarding the internal affairs of Russia” to the foreign press and to prepare brochures defending the government’s point of view. “Mere repression is not enough,” argued Rachkovskii, who continued, “we need to help to cultivate public opinion toward Russia.” After all, the revolutionaries were engaged in a massive propaganda campaign, and many foreign powers circulated “antiRussian propaganda.”18 It seems that the bureau was never created, although funds were fimneled through the security bureau in Paris to selected journal­ ists and newspapers. In general, though, these voices had trouble competing with the more voluminous press opposed to the Russian government and the propagandists efforts of hundreds of Russian radicals living in European cities. Without the support of a significant portion of the most vocal elites, it was not possible for the Imperial government to win the war of words, and this support could only have been secured with major political concessions. The Police Department under Rachkovskii and Kovalenskii dabbled also in military intelligence-gathering. In April Rataev refused the Police Depart­ ment’s request that he use his contacts within the German police to investi­ gate leaks of official information from Russia to the German government. To do so, he wrote, would jeopardize those contacts. Other efforts at counterin­ telligence were being conducted in an amateurish manner by a temporary, se­ cret office in the Special Section. The office guided special agents and infor­ mants of the Police Department, such as I. F. Manasevich-Manuilov and A. M. Garting. Some of their work had domestic security implications. From April to June Manuilov reported that the Japanese government was attempt­ ing to funnel large sums of money to Russian revolutionaries to help them smuggle arms into Russia for a revolutionary offensive. Oddly, neither Ko­ valenskii nor Rachkovskii took these well-founded reports seriously, and on 24 August 1905, after the war with Japan had ended, the temporary office was disbanded.19 The Police Department’s meager attempt at counterespionage syphoned badly needed funds away from security policing and was, appar­ ently, not very efficient.

Government Vacillates, Opposition Grows Discontent burst forth even from official quarters at the start of this trou­ bled year. In early February in Moscow, for example, a group of prison guards threatened anonymously to strike and to release their prisoners unless they received a pay raise.20 More important, General Novitskii submitted to the emperor sometime after 4 March a detailed diatribe against the Imperial security service. Ostensibly a contribution to the Ignat’ev Commission’s work

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on reforming Russia’s exceptional legislation, Novitskii scarcely mentioned the issue in the long memorandum. Instead, he denounced the creation of the Police Department in 1880 and decried the subordination of the Gendarme Corps to the Interior Ministry, arguing that an independent Gendarme Corps would have been better able to preserve Russia from the dangers facing it in 1905. Novitskii reserved his sharpest reproofs for Zubatov, whom he called “a most wicked antigovemment activist, a social-revolutionary, and certainly a terrorist who organized the political murder” of such officials as Sipiagin and Bogdanovich and “prepared, organized, and perpetrated” popular disor­ ders and strikes throughout the empire from 1901 to 1903. One cannot but agree with Rataev: if the best of the old-school gendarme officers actually be­ lieved such nonsense, then what could one expect from the least?21 As oppositional movements pullulated, so-called patriotic groups also be­ gan to develop. A Police Department directive of 15 April 1905 warned local police officials to consider them “secret, illegal organizations, as dangerous as antigovemment [groups].” From the point of view of the government, the danger lay in their tendency to provoke social divisiveness. As any potential source of disorder, this phenomenon could not be tolerated. At the same time, however, the directive urged caution in dealing with the organizations be­ cause, it claimed, some “may sincerely wish to support the government’s ef­ forts to hinder the work of revolutionary propagandists.” It was probably hoped that militant rightists could spread progovemment leaflets, argue with revolutionaries in factories and in the streets, and tear radical posters off walls, among other activities. If they engaged in these efforts without promot­ ing social dissention, perhaps they would prove useful. In fact, however, the rightists did increase the incidence of social disorder by participating in fiftyseven anti-Jewish pogroms throughout the empire between February and midOctober 1905.22 The stridency of oppositional activists bespoke their confidence that the regime was weak. Student agitation in institutions of higher learning reached such a pitch of intensity that the government shut them down empirewide in mid-March; they remained closed until late August. Professional workers, in­ cluding doctors, lawyers, and journalists, formed unions beginning in March in contravention of Imperial law. The second zemstvo congress met in Moscow on April 22, against express orders from the amiable city governor, P. P. Shuvalov, who had replaced E. N. Volkov after the assassination of Grand Duke Sergei. The majority of delegates at the zemstvo congress ham­ mered out a platform centering on the demand for the convocation of a con­ stituent assembly.23 The vigor of the revolutionary parties was more mixed. Bloody Sunday had found the Social Democratic and Socialist-Revolutinary Parties divided, disorganized, and unpopular. Despite millions of hours of propaganda work, revolutionary agitators had won scant active support in the factories.24 Lenin’s attempts to win control of the Social Democratic Party had driven its main factions further apart. The arrest of nine of the eleven members of the party’s

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anti-Leninist central committee in Moscow on 9 February strengthened Lenin's hand and resulted in the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks in April holding separate congresses, both of which were well infiltrated by police informants. The labor movement itself remained quite vigorous, and it managed in midApril to pressure the Interior Ministry to rescind the rules of 12 August 1897, which prescribed the administrative exile of strike instigators. Yet, Moscow, St. Petersburg, Kiev, and Warsaw witnessed no May Day demonstrations or strikes—a clear sign of the Social Democrats’ feebleness.25 The Socialist-Revolutionary Party’s combat organization was not at the forefront of political terrorism during much of 1905. One key member, M. Shveitser, blew himself up on 26 February while preparing a bomb at the Bristol Hotel in St. Petersburg. The security bureau immediately established close external surveillance over all the people who had been in contact with the deceased. The police informant N. Iu. Tatarov, who since February had been reporting on the Socialist-Revolutionary terrorist network, facilitated this work, and the investigation resulted in the arrest of seventeen SocialistRevolutionary terrorists on 16 and 17 March 1905 in St. Petersburg and Moscow. The conservative newspaper Moskovskie viedomosti called this op­ eration the “Mukden [a crushing military defeat in February] of the Russian revolution.” Thereafter, as Boris Savinkov admitted, the combat organization never again rose to its former level of strength or importance.26 A bigger source of worry for officialdom were efforts of agitators to incite peasants against the regime. The Moscow Security Bureau dealt an important blow to these efforts on 2 April 1905 by arresting M. E. Sokolov and his group of Socialist-Revolutionary agrarian activists in Kursk. Yet in his report on this case Mikhail Gurovich warned that in the countryside the semiautonomous peasant unions posed a greater threat than the Socialist-Revolution­ ary Party itself. As a result of this report, the Police Department on 30 April urged gendarme and security officers to obstruct any attempts by peasant unions in their jurisdiction to foment agrarian disorders. Scott Seregny has corroborated Gurovich’s assessment of the unions’ importance while offering a different interpretation of their significance. Their threat to the existing state order, he argues, stemmed less from their perpetration of acts of violence than from their amalgamation of a large portion of the peasant population into a cohesive political force.27 Of course, from the point of view of the govern­ ment the unions’ inevitable demand for the total expropriation of private and state land in favor of the peasantry appeared as incendiary as the SocialistRevolutionaries’ call for an armed insurrection. To help coordinate a decisive assault on the regime, on 8 and 9 May 1905 leaders of the Union of Liberation brought together delegates from several professional unions and created a Union of Unions, which, according to Richard Pipes, “virtually set the course of the Russian Revolution” over the next few months. In June, having been forbidden by Trepov to meet in St. Pe­ tersburg, the union leaders gathered in Finland, whence they issued an appeal to use “all forces, any means to achieve the immediate removal of the robber

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band [razboinich’ia shaika] that has seized power, and to replace it with a constituent assembly.” By “any means” was implied political terror and a general strike. During the summer, radicals in the liberation movement began to join revolutionary activists in inciting industrial workers to rebel. Their purpose was to harness worker discontent in the broader antigovemment cause.28 Given the public opposition movement’s greater dynamism at this time, it is fitting that the Special Section paid far more attention to it than to the revolutionary parties.29 Probably at least partly in response to the creation of the Union of Unions, the emperor concentrated broad police authority in the hands of one trusted man. On 21 May 1905 he appointed Trepov deputy interior minister for po­ lice affairs but retained him as governor general of St. Petersburg. Trepov was authorized to shut down congresses, even those approved by the interior minister or other officials, if he considered their activities harmful to public security and tranquillity. He could also close any association or union for up to one year for the same reasons. Given the central role played by profes­ sional associations and unions in the revolutionary events of 1905, this pre­ rogative might have been decisive in limiting their scope. In practice, how­ ever, Trepov seldom resorted to it, probably because he and the entire government strove to avoid alienating public opinion. It is unclear whether this attitude stemmed mostly from a spirit of compromise or from a fear of provoking further social unrest. V. I. Gurko deplored Trepov’s “erratic” course, which he viewed as neither repressive nor conciliatory, but admitted that it was perhaps the only viable one at the time. The government’s prestige was so low, argued Gurko, that only massively harsh repression could have slowed the oppositional juggernaut; genuine concessions “would merely have increased the demands and the pressure on the government of all opposition forces.”30 The opposition movements took fuller and fuller advantage of the govern­ ment’s waffling. The censorship laws were not abolished officially until No­ vember, yet they were enforced less and less. Vast quantities of seditious liter­ ature were produced and distributed. Press coverage of social disturbances became more and more inflammatory. Highly placed officials and bureaucrats leaked sensitive materials to the opposition press. Beginning in late spring 1905 such “unreliable” writers as P. E. Shchegolev, V. I. Semevskii, and M. K. Lemke obtained access to the archives of the Third Section.31 The political activism of educated elites might not have so disquieted offi­ cialdom had it not been accompanied by major popular unrest. There had been only seventeen disorders in the countryside in January. From February through April, however, the monthly tally exceeded one hundred. The highest levels of agrarian unrest were reached in June and especially in November and December, with five hundred or more disturbances occurring in each of these months. In the Baltic and Caucasian provinces, peasants attacked gov­ ernment authorities and, in the rest of European Russia, stole or destroyed vast amounts of private and state property. Heightening the fears and sense of

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injustice among administrative officials were the obvious liberal public sup­ port for peasant radicalism and the failure of much of the press to depict the horror of the rebellions.32 To the regime’s benefit, the crests of agrarian and industrial worker unrest did not fully coincide either geographically or chronologically, although May, June, July, and especially November and December were all plagued to some extent by simultaneous labor and agrarian disturbances. Still, the situation could have been worse. For example, although labor unrest waxed most mili­ tant in June in Ivanovo-Voznesensk, agrarian disturbances, which attained a high level in June in various places, only moderately affected Vladimir province.33 In November a Police Department report blamed the agrarian disturbances on two factors: massive revolutionary propaganda conducted by outside agita­ tors and real economic concerns voiced by peasants. In addition to demands for more grazing land, peasants were expressing anger with the importation of nonlocal wage laborers, frustration that landowners had unlawfully seized portions of peasant holdings, vexation at allegedly unfair estate managers, and disappointment with efforts being made by the government on behalf of the peasantry. Although recent scholarship indicates that the peasants’ stan­ dard of living was actually improving between 1880 and 1905,34 peasants’ perceptions of land scarcity and arbitrary treatment by estate managers and their belief in the illegitimacy of the large estates made them vulnerable to in­ citement by radical propagandists. At the very least, one can agree with Liu­ bimov that the government should have done more to address peasant con­ cerns after the huge agrarian revolts in spring 1902.35 The empire’s periphery was hardest hit by disorders during the early stages of the first Russian revolution. On 7 May 1905 a state of reinforced se­ curity was imposed in four cities: Vilnius, Smorgon’, Grodno, and Melitopol*. The Polish Kingdom was seized by dramatic waves of nationalistic unrest. Beginning in February security police officials were aware of the large-scale smuggling of arms and explosives into the Polish Kingdom from western Eu­ rope. A terrorist offensive began in March and continued throughout the rest of the year. Barricades went up in Lödf, and insurgents and authorities clashed from 10 to 13 June. Labor violence was even greater there than in Warsaw, but both cities witnessed some of the worst violence of the entire revolution. Simultaneously, on 12 June a general strike was declared in Odessa. The crew of the battleship Potemkin mutinied two days later and did not surrender until 24 June. Although order was restored, could the military still be trusted to defend the regime against internal enemies?36 One could ask the same question of the police forces, which grew less and less effective. They often failed to deal effectively with unrest in part because senior police officials neglected, at the very least until late summer, to pro­ vide them with precise directives for riot and crowd control. Moreover, as po­ litical unrest increased, so did regular crime. The police ceased to operate at all in some towns; order broke down most fully in the Polish Kingdom.

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Throughout the empire, ordinary people began to take the law into their own hands, spawning a rash of vigilantism. Businessmen began to provide for their own defense. Public activists, decrying police passivity, called for local control of police forces and the creation of local militias.37 In accordance with the provisions of the criminal code of 1903, the gov­ ernment began to rely more heavily than previously on the courts to deal with seditious activity. The number of political cases presented to the regular courts jumped from 84 in 1904 to 498 in 1905. Likewise, the military courts passed judgment on 308 people accused of state crimes in 1905, up from 18 in 1904.38 The committee on administrative punishments also handled numer­ ous such cases in 1905, though their number was apparently down from the previous year. In November and December, for example, the committee voted to exile only 115 people.39 This shift toward dealing with state crime in the courts represented an effort to strengthen the rule of law (a trend reversed be­ ginning in early 1906). It also doubtless undermined the resolve of adminis­ trative and police officials. Although the security law of 1881 conferred broad discretionary authority on all governors and governors general, especially those in provinces and lo­ calities in a state of reinforced security, most of them were utterly unprepared to deal with the torrents of popular discontent that they confronted in 1905. “Despite their image as satraps and their reputation for arbitrariness,” writes Richard Robbins, “governors in the late nineteenth century ruled their guber­ nias more by persuasion and compromise than by compulsion.” People knew that the governors could usually back up their “persuasion” by the application of force, yet they were also aware that governors previously had been able to “persuade” relatively peacefully. In 1905, in the face of massive social unrest and without resolute guidance from St. Petersburg or sufficient military rein­ forcements at their disposal, many senior provincial officials simply floun­ dered. For example, Moscow Governor General A. A. Kozlov first banned a meeting of delegates from town dumas and zemstvos on 6 July, then failed to enforce the ban (he was soon replaced by Petr Pavlovich Dumovo, a hero of the Crimean War). The police captain assigned to report on the congress felt intimidated by some of the eminent delegates, including V. D. Kuz’minKaravaev with his general’s uniform. Petrunkevich found that Kozlov’s inde­ cision infected his entire administrative hierarchy. The police, wrote Petrunk­ evich, seemed unsure whether or not to act decisively. Who could tell, he asked, “who would be in charge next week”? A concrete example of this con­ cern was provided by a little-educated member of the Social Democratic un­ derground, I. K. Mikhailov. He and his associates found it rather easy to dis­ concert regular policemen during the revolutionary period by shouting, ‘Take note of their badge numbers!” The policemen, he wrote, immediately hid them for fear of becoming targets of terrorist violence.40 This sentiment undoubtedly pervaded much of officialdom during the sec­ ond half of 1905, but its greatest impact was surely felt among police surveil­ lants and informants, whose positions were highly precarious even in more

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placid times. Informants shuttled back and forth between their case officers and revolutionary activists, whose growing sentiment of impending triumph probably eroded many informants’ willingness to continue to play their dan­ gerous game. It seems likely that at least a few of them got cold feet and jumped ship in this unquiet time. Of course, the idealistic ones remained loyal. Zinaida Gemgross-Zhuchenko, for example, bravely returned to Moscow in September as a member of the Socialist-Revolutionary central committee. Surveillants, who did not enjoy permanent civil-service status, were vulnera­ ble to exposure and brutal treatment at the hands of alert revolutionaries. As civil violence escalated during the year, their position grew more perilous. In late June Mednikov lamented that the violent attacks against government offi­ cials had frazzled the nerves of surveillants, especially those in Kiev, Nizhni Novgorod, and Odessa. Soon, he wrote, “it will be impossible to hire good surveillants for any amount of money and only the bad ones will remain.”41 The uncoordinated, disjointed nature of the civil administration contin­ ued to facilitate revolutionary action throughout 1905. Osip Ermanskii re­ called, for example, that he had been able to work actively in the Menshevik underground in St. Petersburg thanks to a forged Czech passport. He found it comical that the department of the city governor’s chancellery that annu­ ally renewed his permit to stay in Russia had no idea that another office reg­ ularly granted him permission to give lectures. On 28 June a member of the Socialist-Revolutionary combat organization named Kulikovskii murdered City Governor Shuvalov in Moscow. The assailant had been arrested on 11 June during a police raid in Moscow that had yielded fifty-five revolvers, but he had managed to escape from police custody.42 Expecting further bouts of popular unrest, on 28 June 1905 the Police De­ partment advised governors and gendarme chiefs to quell disorders as quickly and as resolutely as possible. Most pertinent, the directive warned that neither police nor troops should ever make empty threats to use force of arms. Each policeman, gendarme officer, or soldier was given to understand that “the ap­ plication of the force of arms, when careful consideration indicates to him its necessity, cannot be held against him so much as will be an indecisive and compromising attitude toward violators of established order.” The directive stated, in other words, when in doubt, shoot. Finally, it promised generous re­ wards for the successful prevention and interdiction of civil unrest.43 One might assume that the Police Department was serious about prevent­ ing disorder in the empire. In fact, however, these directives must have seemed almost meaningless to the officials to whom they were addressed. Vi­ olent outrages occurred one after the other, yet few stem measures were taken against terrorism. Public assemblies of political activists had become com­ monplace, as had appeals to the population and to various social groups to or­ ganize themselves in opposition to the regime. In mid-June Trepov asked V. I. Gurko whether the public assemblies could be legally stopped. Gurko replied that unauthorized public gatherings were in fact illegal. He added, however, that, having lost its prestige in the eyes of its people, the government “could

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not by partial measures force the people to observe the law.” He continued, “As for bringing the participants in congresses to trial, especially with our slow-moving court procedure, such a measure would be less likely to stop the congresses than to make the arrested members popular heroes and martyrs. The thing to be done was for the government to re-establish its prestige by a display of firmness and resolution.”44 No such display was forthcoming. In midsummer the Police Department carried out an internal reorganiza­ tion, presumably on Trepov’s initiative. On 19 July 1905 N. P. Garin replaced Kovalenskii as Police Department director. Garin, having spent the previous twelve years drafting revisions to the Digest of Laws (Svod zakonov) in the State Council, was far from qualified for the job. (Vice director N. P. Zuev, a long-serving police official who managed the department’s nonpolitical af­ fairs, provided much-needed continuity.) Indeed, he was perhaps chosen for his inexperience. Rachkovskii was the real power broker in the Police Depart­ ment. Already in June he had begun reshuffling its personnel. Gurovich and a few others were transferred from the Special Section to the Caucasus region; security officers were relocated; gendarme officers were promoted. Yet Rachkovskii was not a jurist by training and therefore could not, in keeping with the institutional tradition established by Loris-Melikov, be appointed its director. The same had been true in the early 1880s of Sudeikin, in whose hands broad responsibility for the security police system was concentrated by Plehve. On 27 July’1905 Trepov conferred on Rachkovskii special control over the key security police institutions within the Police Department. The Special Section as well as the Police Department’s fifth and seventh divisions, which oversaw, respectively, the investigation of political crimes and the ap­ plication of administrative punishments, were gathered together into a sepa­ rate political division (politicheskaia chast’). This new command center over­ saw the entire security system, including the work of the security bureaus, gendarme inquests into political crime, and the implementation of administra­ tive penalties 45 Unlike Sudeikin, however, Rachkovskii lacked skill and ex­ perience in domestic counterintelligence operations. He had spent almost his entire career heading the security outpost in Paris and was therefore unfamil­ iar with the details of security policing inside the empire. On 1 August 1905, in one of his first acts as political director, Rachkovskii substituted A. M. Garting for his old enemy Rataev as Paris Security Bureau director. Garting had been an informant for Sudeikin in 1883 and had been unmasked by revolutionaries in 1884. Thereafter, under various aliases he had continued to inform on the remnants of the People’s Will in Russia, Switzerland, and France. From 1901 to 1905, he had been security chief in Berlin, continuously vying with Rataev for control of the Russian security police abroad. With his appointment as director, he had won the fight. The effectiveness of the security bureau in Paris must have diminished for a cru­ cial month or two while Garting accustomed himself to his new responsibili­ ties. Even so, his replacement of Rataev yielded an important benefit almost immediately, when Azef came under the direct supervision of Rachkovskii.

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The latter was much better placed, given his control of the empire’s external surveillance system, and much more able, thanks to his talent and skill, to control Azef than Rataev had been. Rachkovskii and Azef met for the first time on 21 August in St. Petersburg. Azef divulged important information, including leads about Boris Savinkov, a key member of the Socialist-Revolu­ tionary combat organization. He also promised to betray E. K. BreshkoBreshkovskaia, a prominent agitator for agrarian terror and rebellion. Al­ though both Savinkov and Breshko-Breshkovskaia managed to elude police detection, A zef’s revelations led to raids on a few bomb factories. Rachkovskii acceded to Azef’s demand to raise his salary to six hundred rubles per month.46 This minor triumph must be placed in its broader context. Although the ability to foil a few terrorist plots was extremely welcome to police officials, the greatest threat to the regime by late summer remained large-scale associa­ tions of prominent public figures, such as those allied in the Union of Unions. Coping with the deep social tensions that this organization reflected was a task for which senior government officials, far more than the Police Depart­ ment, were suited. Yet the government’s senior leadership, increasingly un­ sure of how to handle this problem, had begun to exhibit signs of weakness. The obvious lack of resolve by the leadership strongly influenced officials throughout the administrative hierarchy, leading to its gradual deterioration. By late summer the interior minister’s administrative secretary, Liubimov, considered his ministry to be in a state of “complete disorganization \razvfl/].”47 The security service appears to have been in a somewhat similar state. On 24 August 1905 August Rachkovskii issued two directives in an effort to reinvigorate the security system. In the first directive, he ordered security bureau and gendarme station chiefs to report on every political arrest within twenty-four hours, which generally meant by telegraph. (On 8 October this order was countermanded for all save the most important cases; it had proved too costly.) A second directive, echoing and amplifying the directive of 28 June mentioned above, urged the security police to study the theory and tactics of the revolutionary movements (“the first duty of gendarme offi­ cers”). Henceforth, each gendarme and security chief was required to submit semiannual reports (on 1 October and 1 April) detailing the current state, plans, activities, publications, interrelations, and outlook of local revolution­ ary and oppositional organizations, as well as measures taken to hinder their activities. A. N. Timofeev, appointed director of the Special Section in Sep­ tember, found that Rachkovskii’s innovations had only increased the paper­ work. Indeed, he found the Special Section in a state of chaos, with thirty thousand unprocessed documents.48 Rachkovskii’s directives, and indeed the creation on his behalf of the political division, represented another failed at­ tempt to exert more central control over security institutions in the field and to improve the security service’s capacity for surveillance. Part of the failure stemmed from the nature of sodal unrest at the time. Once sufficiently massive popular dissatisfaction and unrest had emerged, the

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government had only three options. It could undertake severe repression, car­ ried out by soldiers and the füll range of regular police forces; it could create a forum for the expression of popular sentiment; or it could opt for both, as indeed it did later in the year. Although troops were summoned 2,699 times in the first ten months of 1905 (as compared to 29 times in 1900), a large num­ ber of the most reliable troops remained in the Far East during those months. Moreover, Russia’s rulers wished to avoid bloodshed and had hopefully an­ nounced on 6 August the establishment of a representative, consultative as­ sembly, the Bulygin Duma.49 The moderate wing of the Union of Liberation welcomed the announce­ ment with the hope of transforming the consultative assembly into a fullfledged legislative assembly and out of fear that the growing militancy of the antigovemment forces might endanger “the whole fabric of civilized Russian society.”50 Miliukov immediately began to organize the moderates, but the very next day the security police arrested him. As early as 2 July 1905 gen­ darme and security chiefs had received orders to prevent members of the Union of Unions from organizing meetings, yet in practice they had scarcely lifted a finger against them because the government was afraid of further alienating public opinion. Gerasimov had for weeks requested permission to break up the numerous “private” meetings of the Union of Unions in the capi­ tal. He was authorized to conduct arrests the day after the announcement of the Bulygin Duma, presumably because senior government officials realized that the announcement would divide the opposition. Thus, on 7 August Gerasimov arrested a dozen leaders of the Union of Unions—Miliukov and his moderate supporters. Had Gerasimov’s informant network extended to the leadership of the Union of Unions, he would have known that he had laid hands on the wrong people. After one month’s detention, Trepov decided to release them, disregarding Gerasimov’s advice.51 By then, however, it was too late, because the government had already opened the floodgates to further revolutionary agitation with its fateful decision on university autonomy.

The Revolution Takes Hold Against the opposition of Education Minister V. G. Glazov, Trepov con­ vinced the emperor to restore the autonomy and rights stripped from institu­ tions of higher learning in 1884. Public enthusiasm for the proposed Bulygin Duma and for the peace treaty signed on 23 August 1905 may have served to justify the move. The universities and higher academies reopened on 27 Au­ gust for the first time since March. Activist students at St. Petersburg Univer­ sity voted 1,702 to 243 for a Social Democratic resolution to use the universi­ ties as a forum for radical activism. Students at other institutions of higher learning adopted similar resolutions. The doors of these institutions were im­ mediately flung open to revolutionary agitators, labor organizers, and radical orators demanding the overthrow of the regime. Witte later called this the “first breach through which the revolution, having matured underground,

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emerged into public life [vystupila naruzhu].” Trepov soon argued for ban­ ning political demonstrations in the universities, while Rachkovskii claimed that the concentration of political activists in one place made it easier to keep them under surveillance.52 In response to violence and radicalism on the left, “patriotic” organizations continued to spring up and to seek official sanction. Government officials were divided over how to react. On 1 September 1905 the governor of Tùla requested direction from Trepov on whether to permit rightist associations to hold public assemblies. The governor worried that to do so would justify claims of government partiality in the prospective electoral campaign. Trepov wrote in the margin of the governor’s report, “The government is obligated to support friends and not to encourage the enemies of the government.” It is un­ clear whether a response to this effect was expedited to Tula, but a general di­ rective of 21 September urged governors to encourage conservative elements in society to voice their support for the autocracy. It does seem likely, though, that most governors avoided taking sides in political battles between right and left, at least until late October, especially as the government seemed to favor concessions toward liberal public opinion. For example, a directive of 3 Sep­ tember advised local officials to call for military reinforcements only in ex­ treme need.53 Despite the growth of a monarchist movement, it remained far less dy­ namic than the movement of radical leftists in St. Petersburg and Moscow. As student protest meetings reached epidemic proportions in mid-September, in­ dustrial workers grew more restive, and at times the two groups joined forces in street demonstrations.54 The government, for its part, often adopted a pas­ sive attitude. An inadequate supply of firearms may have shaken the resolve of civilian officials in Moscow, but so undoubtedly did the refusal of the Moscow military authorities to deploy Cossacks to guard Manezh Square,55 as well as the unavoidable impression that the forces arrayed against the regime would be difficult to overpower. It seems likely that large numbers of administrative officials began to question whether their defense of the abso­ lutist system could still be justified. The weakness of the government and the apparent resolve and might of the opposition forces inspired a prominent security police official to lend assis­ tance to the Socialist-Revolutionary leadership, against which he had hurled blow after blow for over eighteen years. On 8 September 1905, in an anony­ mous letter to the party’s central committee, Leonid Menshchikov denounced N. Iu. Tatarov and Evno Azef as police informants. The party’s leaders were naturally skeptical. Was it not likely that security police officials had sent this letter to deflect attention from their true spies? The party established surveil­ lance over Tatarov and, because of his indiscretions, concluded that he was indeed a spy. He was killed in Warsaw on 4 April 1906. Unlike Tatarov, Azef became privy to Menshchikov’s charge immediately and was able to take pre­ cautions. Finding no reason to suspect Azef’s loyalty» the party leaders con­ cluded that the police had deliberately sacrificed Tatarov in order to cast

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suspicion on a loyal party leader. As one might expect, this crisis unnerved Azef. For several months thereafter he passed on only trivial information to the Police Department.56 Menshchikov, who four years later defected to the revolutionary camp, thus seriously undermined the ability of the security ser­ vice to fathom the internal life of the Socialist-Revolutionary Party. Gradually, the various elements of the opposition movements—students, industrial workers, revolutionaries, and radical activists from the liberal pro­ fessions—joined forces. By mid-September Trepov, paraphrasing Witte, ad­ mitted that “the revolutionary forces have consolidated and organized them­ selves and are moving forward successfully and quickly.” He continued, “Undoubtedly, we must expect a bloody cataclysm, against which purely po­ lice measures, of course, cannot avail.” Simultaneously the empire’s border­ land provinces grew more restive, and on 1 October the Baltic province of Kovno and the Trans-Caspian region were placed in a state of reinforced se­ curity. October saw the largest strikes in Imperial Russian history. Seminari­ ans went on strike in Khar’kov on the fourth, in Kiev on the sixth, and in Vladimir on the seventh; printers followed suit in Tula and in St. Petersburg on the fifth; and railroad workers in Moscow launched a strike on the sixth that spread during the following days to several more cities.57 The repression of popular unrest and revolutionary activism nevertheless remained mild. Although a soldier was put to death on 6 October 1905 for at­ tempting to kill an officer, the first execution of the year, this was still not the beginning of a crackdown. On 9 October Trepov advocated extreme measures but was overruled by Witte, who offered the emperor two choices: either polit­ ical concessions or dictatorship. Nicholas, wavering, on 12 October placed Trepov in charge of all military units in the capital. Trepov immediately or­ dered governors to take decisive measures, including force of arms, to repress disorders, especially those threatening to cut off postal and telegraph service. That day, the Kadet Party was founded in Moscow; the next day the St. Peters­ burg Soviet sprang up and began to publish an information bulletin (Izvestiia). Membership rose in all the opposition parties, and militants feverishly agitated among workers, students, and soldiers. Still the monarch vacillated, and strikes spread from trade to trade. Trepov’s notorious order of 14 October 1905 to re­ press mercilessly street disorders produced no results whatsoever. At this point it seems as if the dissatisfied public could not be cowed into submission; in­ deed, few police authorities even tried. For example, when a police captain in St. Petersburg sought to end a public meeting, M. M. Vinaver, then speaking, refused to yield the floor to him and the police officer acquiesced.58 By 16 Oc­ tober as many as 1.5 million workers were idle, which all but shut down the normal activity in the major cities.59 Finally, on 17 October 1905 Nicholas issued his celebrated October Mani­ festo. The Council of Ministers, which had not met since 1881, was trans­ formed on 19 October into a quasi-cabinet, with Witte as chairman. He im­ mediately made overtures to respected public activists, entreating several of them to accept ministerial portfolios. But the leadership of the Union of

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Unions and of the Kadet Party remained suspicious of—even hostile toward—the government. Only the convocation of a constituent assembly would have satisfied most of them.60 The manifesto’s publication caught most administrative officials off guard and further disrupted public order. According to one official, “most governors learned about it in the newspapers.” P. G. Kurlov, then governor of Minsk, lamented that the revolutionary organizations kept their comrades in the provinces better informed than the Interior Ministry did its governors. Even the finance minister, V. N. Kokovtsov, learned about the manifesto only at the moment of its publication. The case of Moscow is instructive. City Governor G. P. Medem (Shuvalov’s replacement) reported that the city had grown calmer on 16 October but that “on 18 October, unexpectedly for the Moscow administration and for most inhabitants, newspapers published the Imperial manifesto [which] shattered the normal rhythms of life and permitted the rev­ olutionary parties impudently to draw attention to themselves.” He wrote, “They removed the national flags from the governor general’s residence and replaced them with red flags with revolutionary inscriptions. Then these anar­ chists demanded of both the governor general and the chief prosecutor the immediate release of all political prisoners, which demand was complied with in such haste that many nonpolitical prisoners also received their freedom.” Yet despite their obvious threat to order. Governor General Petr Pavlovich Dumovo forbade City Governor Medem to use force to disperse the crowds.61 If the police and administrative officials had previously held back from ex­ ercising their repressive powers, now they very nearly forgot they had ever had them. According to Aleksandr Martynov, the gendarmes in St. Petersburg essentially quit working. At the security bureau, Gerasimov’s assistant Modi’ unthinkingly yielded to the demand of representatives of the Soviet to show them around the premises. The police became polite “like English Bobbies,” according to Petrunkevich. The radical bibliographer S. R. Mintslov de­ scribed the police in this period as “completely gallant and ready to please like so many marquises.” Police Captain Iur’ev of the Tverskaia District, lo­ cated northwest of the Kremlin in Moscow, decided not to summon military reinforcements for fear that they would side with right-wing activists. The po­ lice throughout the empire received orders on 20 October not to resort to the provisions of the security law of 1881, which was nonetheless to remain in force until new laws were adopted, except against persons “raising clear sus­ picions of involvement in state crime.” In addition, police were to repress only those social phenomena posing a clear danger to state security.62 These strictures had previously applied, but their reiteration was obviously meant to curb casual recourse to the security law. Since Russian administrative offi­ cials were not accustomed to half-measures, the security law in the short run received little use. In direct response to the October Manifesto, most of Russia’s urban popu­ lation returned to work, yet the overall level of disorder increased. When on 19 October it was announced that the existing censorship laws would remain

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in force until the adoption of new ones, the St. Petersburg Soviet threatened to destroy any printing plant producing materials submitted to the censors for approval. This campaign of intimidation worked. Censorship effectively col­ lapsed. On 27 October the Social Democrats began publishing a daily news­ paper in St. Petersburg, Novaia zhizn’, and the weekly law journal Pravo be­ gan to print a flood of material on police repression. Revolutionary activists immediately began to organize demonstrations and popular disturbances in numerous towns across the empire. These actions often provoked counterdemonstrations by right-wing groups.63 On 21 October 1905 Nicholas II declared a general amnesty of persons ex­ iled or detained under the terms of the security law of 1881. Even those who had fled from their places of exile or detainment took part in the amnesty. All people under administrative probation were also freed. It seemed that admin­ istrative political exile would become obsolete. Witte later called the amnesty an event that “betokened the transition to a new stage of state development, a passage from the old to the new, constitutional era.” In the short run, however, it stimulated violence and led to the release of many regular criminals. On 21 October a violent left-wing crowd attacked the security bureau headquarters in Moscow, breaking windows, brandishing guns, and demanding, in part successfully, the release of political prisoners. Right-wing activists followed suit, as when on 26 October in Moscow a mob clamored for the release of the murderer of the Social Democrat Bauman; the prosecutor complied with their wish.64 Terrible violence broke out in the countryside in late October. During No­ vember and December peasants with near impunity damaged or destroyed ap­ proximately 2,000 estates, causing some 30 million rubles in losses. This was the greatest anti-elite fury in Russia since the Pugachev rebellion of 1773-1775. Sailors at Kronstadt mutinied on 26 and 28 October. Loyal troops squashed the revolt, but 211 more, mostly nonviolent, mutinies occurred through mid-December. In Moscow, according to one newspaper, “10,000 hooligans” wreaked havoc in the city center. In several provinces riots erupted with such violence as to overwhelm the civil administration.65 The October Manifesto did not significantly diminish the militancy of the radicals and revolutionaries. On 25 October the editors of the legal journal Pravo implored revolutionaries and left-liberals to hold fast in union against the regime. Petrunkevich declared at the congress of zemstvo and town duma deputies in Moscow just before mid-November, “I do not fear revolution.. . . To disavow revolution would mean to disavow ourselves.” Leading Social Democrats advocated an assault on the regime. As early as 22 October the Moscow Social Democratic committee called for the “immediate preparation for a new decisive battle.” In St. Petersburg the Soviet outfitted its own police force and on 29 October called for another empirewide general strike. Imme­ diately after the promulgation of the October Manifesto, the SocialistRevolutionaries suspended their program of political terror and immediately launched a propaganda campaign; yet they also organized a committee to im-

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port weapons and bombs and to train people to use them, so as to be ready for a violent assault on the regime. This dual strategy explains both the relative absence of terrorist violence in the immediate post-Manifesto period and the assiduousness of the terrorist campaign of 1906.66 The revolutionaries could make their plans with near impunity in part be­ cause of the security police’s inactivity. The Socialist-Revolutionary activist V. M. Zenzinov later recalled that the police had given up watching him and his comrades. He could go to the offices of the Socialist-Revolutionary news­ paper, Syn otechestva, and find all the party leaders. It would have been easy, he thought, to have arrested them en masse had the police wished to do so.67 War Minister A. F. Roediger was scarcely exaggerating when he wrote that “old laws were presumed defunct, while new ones had not even begun to be worked out, as a result of which total lawlessness and unbelievable chaos broke out over the entire country.” The uncertainty of their position incapaci­ tated many policemen and government officials. Finding that military com­ manders often were not well informed about the political situation in their ju­ risdictions, on 26 October the Police Department ordered gendarme and security chiefs to brief them regularly to this effect. Yet the security police in­ stitutions themselves were practically collapsing, and on 5 November the Po­ lice Department was obliged to deny rumors that the security bureaus and gendarme stations would shut down.68 In St. Petersburg, revolutionaries dis­ covered a security bureau surveillant and killed him. This nearly precipitated a strike of the bureau’s employees. In Moscow, even dvomiki demanded bet­ ter working conditions, and some policemen tried to form a professional union. Rumors of the most inflammatory nature abounded. Police forces grew less and less reliable. The Menshevik Ermanskii provided a graphic illustra­ tion of the apparent unreliability of many lower-level policemen. In late Octo­ ber, while traveling by steamer from Finland to St. Petersburg, he chatted with several enlisted gendarmes, who, now disarmed, reminded him of “so many plucked chickens.” He asked them what use police repression had served, since the revolutionaries had triumphed, to which they replied, “Sir, we are serving-people. There was one government; we served it. If there will be another, we will serve it.”69 Amid the chaos, one resolute man began to stand out, Petr Nikolaevich Dumovo. Having served as the Police Department director from 1884 to 1893, he was no stranger to the business of maintaining order. Prior to the an­ nouncement of the manifesto, he was the deputy interior minister in charge of the postal and telegraph system. When he learned that Interior Minister Buly­ gin had not warned the governors of the imminent publication of the mani­ festo, he sought to do so himself by means of the telegraph system that he controlled. On 23 October Witte had Bulygin removed from office, and Dumovo, as the most senior official in the Interior Ministry, became acting minister. Witte would have preferred to retain Dumovo as deputy minister and to appoint the popular S. D. Urusov as a sort of figurehead minister. Dumovo, however, was too ambitious to play second fiddle, and Urusov agreed to be his

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deputy. Administrative officials such as Kurlov and Gerasimov were heart­ ened, but now not a single public figure would accept a ministerial post. Petrunkevich, for example, called the appointment “tantamount to declaring that Russia remained a police state \politseiskoe gosudarstvo].”10 Witte did not immediately adopt Dumovo’s hard line. When peasant vio­ lence broke out in Chernigov province on 23 October and quickly spread to most of European Russia, Dumovo advocated deploying massive force to quell the unrest, but Witte still favored a conciliatory approach. Funds were provided for a propaganda campaign among the peasantry, and a manifesto of 4 November 1905 accorded peasants the right to acquire land under favorable terms.71 Still, the disorders raged on. From 18 to 21 October 1905 anti-Jewish violence broke out and became a frequent occurrence throughout the western provinces. Right-wing groups at­ tacked students, intellectuals, and the well-to-do and looted their property.72 By mid-October a few local authorities began to lend their full support to the nationalistic elements. During the night of 18 October, for example, D. B. Neidgardt, city governor of Odessa, published an appeal to the inhabitants of the city in which he called attention to a petition allegedly signed by “thirty thousand townspeople.” The petition warned, “[I]f your honor [Neidgardt] does not take the energetic measures [to restore order] for which our dear fa­ ther tsar [tsar’-batiushka] has empowered you, we will go to the university and bum it down, so that our children will no longer learn disobedience to au­ thority.” In his appeal, Neidgardt asserted that he had shown the petition to the rector of the university, who nevertheless had refused to reestablish order in the university. Neidgardt then enumerated the problems afflicting the citi­ zens of Odessa, including strikes, looting, violence against person and prop­ erty, and inflation. He concluded by asking rhetorically, “Who is to blame for all that? It is up to you, well-intentioned people, to decide.” It is not surpris­ ing that a pogrom immediately broke out and that military force was not vig­ orously deployed to crush it.73 Scholars have argued that right-wing antirevolutionary violence resulted from an effort by the government to channel popular discontent against “un­ desirable” elements. Revolutionaries and others alleged, perhaps sometimes only as a pretext for excoriating the regime, that pogroms could not have bro­ ken out all across Russia without a unifying center, which in their minds had to be the government.74 S. A. Stepanov, a recent student of this question, un­ covered no evidence pointing to a single center that might have orchestrated the pogroms. He found that in general the violence developed spontaneously, and agitators tended to arrive only after it had begun. Although many local of­ ficials, including Neidgardt, practiced “deliberate nonintervention” or abetted the pogromists, senior officials consistently opposed such violence. One may add to Stepanov’s findings that at least some provincial officials energetically defended all the people in their jurisdictions from violence. In one case, on 21 October the Moscow city governor exhorted his police officials to deploy all necessary force to halt every effort to harm innocent subjects of the tsar; he

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specifically mentioned Jews and their property. The fact that on 27 October a group of fifty-eight parents in Moscow demanded of the city governor better protection for their children from assaults by right-wing bands suggests that they expected him to be responsive to their appeal.75 I. Michael Aronson’s conclusions about the anti-Jewish pogroms of 1881—that the government was not free to turn the tap of violence on and off at will—was still true for 1905. Russia was far too immense for St. Peters­ burg to oversee the entire system of local administration. The central govern­ ment had always depended more on the common sense and intelligence of lo­ cal administrators than on precise rules of accountability.

Efforts to Save the Regime In response to the wrenching disorders, the government only hesitantly moved toward action. Witte did little more than to try to entice Zubatov in the early days of November to return to security policing. Dumovo was more de­ cisive. On 2 November 1905, by encoded telegram, he ordered provincial and city governors to study carefully the social and economic conditions in their jurisdictions, to coordinate the repressive activities of police and military forces, and to draw up contingency plans for dealing with possible disorders by dividing towns into sectors and by strictly defining lines of authority and communication. Two days later, he urged the governors to act resolutely to protect the public utilities, to prevent demonstrations from taking place, and to arrest all people inciting others to violence and disorder. Dumovo also set a personal example of bravery. I. F. Koshko, a candidate for a vice governor­ ship during this period, marveled at how the minister rode in an open carriage and generally dispensed with security measures against terrorist attacks. It would, however, take more than a few isolated acts of bravery to stiffen the backbone of administrative officials in the field. It is not surprising that some acted decisively, others waveringly.76 On 9 November 1905 Police Director Garin was made a senator and was replaced by E. I. Vuich, previously prosecutor of the St. Petersburg Judicial Tribunal. It is significant that once again senior officials, undoubtedly in the interest of defending the principle of the rule of law, selected a trained jurist instead of a skilled gendarme officer or security chief to head the Police De­ partment. It might have been more prudent from the point of view of defend­ ing the regime, which was on the point of collapse, to appoint as police direc­ tor an experienced governor such as Petr Stolypin, if not a security chief such as Spiridovich. Out in the provinces, governors urgently requested special powers. On 11 November 1905 a state of reinforced security was imposed in Tambov, Chernigov, and parts of Saratov Provinces. Similar declarations occurred in the following days, such as those in Kiev city and district on 20 November and in Lifland Province on 22 November.77 Given the extent of social unrest, one might have expected the government to impose a state of reinforced or

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extraordinary security throughout the entire country. It did not. An Imperial manifesto of 3 November 1905 reduced the redemption pay­ ments of former serfs by half, commencing on 1 January 1906. On 24 Novem­ ber the law on preliminary censorship, which had not been enforced since at least mid-October, was formally repealed. The Council of Ministers beginning in mid-November 1905 did consider strengthening existing police and judicial institutions, but for the moment it undertook few concrete actions.78 At this point, Dumovo may have been the only decisive senior official in the government. A few days after the telegraph and postal service ceased to function on 16 November, he organized ordinary citizens to replace the strik­ ers. Then on 21 November he announced that those postal and telegraph workers who did not return to work the next day would be fired. V. I. Gurko considered this “virtually the central point and peak of the entire revolution,” for Dumovo had showed that the government was now as resolute as the rev­ olutionaries. Most of the telegraph and postal employees returned to work.79 Dumovo’s strike-breaking policy may have marked a turning point on the path to restoring order, but that path remained strewn with huge obstacles. Perhaps most fearsome to administrative officials were the peasants’ fero­ cious attacks on landed estates taking place across the empire. On 23 Novem­ ber 1905 the Interior Ministry warned provincial governors that among the agitators in the countryside the peasant union was the most dangerous be­ cause it enjoyed strong support among peasants and professed, albeit falsely, to be unaffiliated with the revolutionary parties. Recent research seems to bear out this police intelligence. The Interior Ministry also urged governors to undertake a propaganda campaign in order to turn peasants against revolu­ tionary agitators. The campaign was supposed to highlight recent measures enacted on behalf of the peasantry and to denounce radical activists as oppor­ tunists exploiting peasant grievances to further their own goal of overthrow­ ing the existing regime.80 Six days later, the government equipped local officials to move toward re­ pression. A decree of 29 November empowered all governors general and provincial and city governors to declare within their jurisdictions states of re­ inforced and extraordinary security and, if a military officer not below the level of brigade commander were present, even martial law when strikes cut off or threatened to cut off rail, postal, or telegraph links. One burning ques­ tion remained: Was the administrative apparatus still responsive to central commands? This depended to some extent on the resoluteness of leadership in the field and on the reliability of local police officials. It seemed that the Police Department had given up hope on the last score when on 30 November it authorized governors to grant individual policemen a temporary leave of absence in view of the enormous dangers facing them.81 It is unclear how many took advantage of the dispensation. One could not expect officials in the field to act resolutely until officials at the center began to do so. The St. Petersburg Soviet was the regime’s biggest test in this regard. The Soviet had a six-thousand-man armed force at its dis­ posal and was a focal point for radical activists inciting the masses to open re-

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bellion. Ensuring the regime’s survival required at the very least suppressing the Soviet. On 26 November 1905 soldiers and Cossacks arrested several of its leaders, yet most of its members were left untouched. Newly elected lead­ ers, with Leon Trotsky as chairman, immediately called on industrial workers to prepare for a general political strike and an armed uprising. On 2 Decem­ ber they publicly urged the peasantry to cease making redemption payments and in general encouraged Russian subjects to do everything possible to un­ dermine the creditworthiness of the government. This was the last straw. The next day Dumovo had the entire Soviet arrested and shut down half a dozen newspapers. (It was still a criminal offence to incite people to rebellion or treason.) Gerasimov orchestrated extensive arrests on 7 and 8 December, and the genera] strike set for 8 December failed miserably.82 Yet the government still had to face its second greatest test of the year, one requiring the applica­ tion of massive repressive force—the Moscow armed rebellion. In Moscow the administrative and police apparatus had collapsed more fully than in the northern capital. V. F. Dzhunkovskii, the competent acting provincial governor since July, described A. G. Peterson, the security chief since September, as “unsuited for his position.” According to Menshchikov, “When the bombs began to fly [in Moscow in fall 1905], he simply gave up and at the critical moment very nearly closed up shop.” Indeed, during late fall Peterson seems to have suffered a nervous breakdown or at least physical exhaustion. Nearly all of the responsibility for security policing in Moscow fell to Peterson’s assistant, P. A. Fullon, whom Dzhunkovskii described as “inexperienced, tactless, and poorly disciplined.” Rachkovskii arrived on 7 December to supervise security police operations but was dependent on the effectiveness of the local administration.83 Much of the senior administration was in no better hands. On 15 Novem­ ber 1905 Governor General Petr Pavlovich Dumovo—the third governor gen­ eral since February—threatened to resign his post unless he received a dou­ bling of the city’s regular police force and the authority to close down publications printing materials that incited people to violence. It seems un­ likely that he expected compliance with his demands, which would have been quite difficult to fulfill under the circumstances. Dzhunkovskii described Dumovo as “rich, intelligent, not interested in work.” Perhaps Dumovo was looking for an excuse to tender his resignation from a position that ill suited him. City Governor Medem—the fourth city governor since January— petitioned on 16 November to be relieved of his duties because he felt physi­ cally and morally exhausted. The request was rejected, however, and he re­ mained at his post until 11 January 1906.84 On 4 December Admiral F. V. Dubasov arrived in Moscow as the new governor general. Described by Dzhunkovskii as an “honest, iron-willed soldier,” he nevertheless hesitated to act forcefully. Uncertain about the loyalty of the troops at his disposal, he ac­ tually ordered them off the streets. On 5 December he gathered government and public leaders at his residence on Tverskaia Street and urged them to join with him in restoring order. “We must,” he opined, “defeat the reds not only with clubs but also with moral suasion.”85

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Revolutionary leaders in Moscow had for months dreamed of leading an armed uprising against the “enemy citadel” of the Imperial regime and appar­ ently had become intoxicated with their own rhetoric. Agitation within the military during the early days of December seemed to justify their optimism. But military reforms of 6 December 1905, which offered enlisted personnel better pay and food than they had been receiving and a reduced term of ser­ vice, immediately reinforced troop loyalty throughout the empire. On 6 De­ cember Social Democratic and Socialist-Revolutionary leaders called on the people of Moscow to begin a general political strike the next day. Bestirred to action, on 7 December Dubasov placed Moscow in a state of extraordinary security—the first such declaration in the empire. Nevertheless, on 7 Decem­ ber more than 100,000 workers went on strike in Moscow. By the next day the economy in the city had all but shut down.86 The strike turned bitterly violent on 9 December 1905. One hundred revo­ lutionary “militiamen,” joined by five hundred other protesters at the Fiedler School northeast of the Kremlin, refused to surrender their arms to a govern­ ment military detachment surrounding the school. The commanding officer, Rakhmaninov, gave them forty-five minutes, then five minutes more, to give themselves up. When the school’s director, 1.1. Fiedler, attempted to persuade the insurrectionists to heed the demand, they shot him in the leg. The entrance to the school, narrow and well barricaded, would have made a direct assault highly dangerous. Therefore Rakhmaninov resolved to use artillery fire, per­ mission for which soon came from Medem. After three well-spaced trumpet signals, the order was given to launch first one, then another, artillery salvo. The insurgents returned fire. One of them lobbed a bomb from an upper-story window, killing an officer. The attack continued, and soon the revolutionaries raised the white flag. Five of their comrades lay dead.87 Several hours later (3:00 a .m .), Socialist-Revolutionary terrorists hurled two bombs at security bureau headquarters. The explosions badly damaged several rooms and killed one employee. The Socialist-Revolutionaries also planned at­ tacks on bridges and power stations for the next several days, but the authori­ ties were able to avert most of them by posting armed guards at each site. (It is unclear whether their source of intelligence was Zinaida GerngrossZhuchenko, who had arrived in Moscow in September, or Azef, who began sometime in December to report regularly to the Police Department.) During the day of 10 December barricades sprang up in the streets, and a citywide armed uprising began. Clashes between the forces of order and armed revolu­ tionaries took place continuously. On 11 December the combat organization of the Social Democratic Party in Moscow issued instructions on engaging in guerilla warfare.88 That same day officers and soldiers of the gendarme divi­ sion were sent to tear down the banicades near the Hermitage Theater at the end of Petrovka Street. After heavy fighting, which left numerous casualties on both sides, the gendarmes accomplished their mission.89 By 12 December rebels had entrenched themselves in positions to the west, north, and northeast of the Boulevard Ring. The security bureau reported that it had drawn up lists

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of political suspects but was unable to arrest them because the regular police in some parts of the city were no longer responding to orders. Perhaps they simply had taken a collective leave of absence. Who could blame them, given the im­ mense dangers facing them in the streets? That same day, an attempt was made on the life of City Governor Medem. The attack prompted an administrative of­ ficial to ask Governor Dzhunkovskii's permission to form a volunteer militia to make up for the inadequate number of regular police. Dzhunkovskii tentatively agreed but demanded that each volunteer come well recommended.90 By 14 December 1905 the Moscow Soviet had installed itself as a second government in sections 1 and 3 of the Presnia District, located west of the Kremlin. People generally obeyed its decrees and hoped that the new govern­ ment would “be no worse than the old one.”91 On the night of 14 December the chief of Moscow’s criminal investigation bureau, A. I. Voiloshnikov, was seized in his home by a band of armed workers. Voiloshnikov, a very decent man, according to Spiridovich, had previously been employed in a nonpolitical capacity at the Moscow Security Bureau. Nevertheless, the vigilantes tore him away from his wife and children and shot him at the courtyard gates to his home. Had he been an employee of the security bureau or of the gendarme sta­ tion he might well have survived the uprising: most of these employees had moved out of their homes and into either their respective headquarters or rented rooms. Regular policemen such as Voiloshnikov were far more vulnera­ ble and numerous; twenty-five of them were killed by the revolutionaries.92 Fresh troops arrived from St. Petersburg on 15 December. Accompanying the troops was a no-nonsense military man, Colonel G. A. Min, who had or­ ders from the war minister to fire “without mercy” on armed, violent crowds. Min encircled the Presnia District with sixteen guns and then, intermittently firing at the insurgents, engaged for two days in negotiations with the rebel leaders. When Interior Minister Dumovo got wind of this on 17 December, he grew furious and ordered the immediate suppression of the rebellion. Two days later the mission had been accomplished; 424 people, mosdy bystanders, lay dead. In the midst of the attack, the regular police forces began to reconsti­ tute themselves, and City Governor Medem ordered police chiefs to arm vol­ untary patrols to help them restore order. The security bureau could finally proceed to carry out the arrests that had been planned since 12 December.93 A gendarme officer who witnessed the armed uprising wrote, “[0]nly the rebels’ overestimation of our strength saved us.” John Keep’s research sup­ ports that contention. The rebels could have won control of the city if they had launched a “determined assault on the main centers of authority.” Keep adds, though, that “they were as ill prepared for such action as their adver­ saries were to resist it.”94 At the onset of the uprising the two sides were prob­ ably roughly equal in strength. It seems likely that Dumovo’s resolute leader­ ship tipped the scales in favor of the government. While officials in Moscow had been struggling to preserve Imperial au­ thority, the central government had issued a whole series of decrees aimed at strengthening the country’s forces of order. Landowners were authorized on 6

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December 1905 to organize private security forces (strazha) to defend their estates. Although paid for, at least temporarily, by the landowners themselves, the guards were to operate only with the permission and under the supervi­ sion of the Interior Ministry. A decree of 14 December 1905 allowed local of­ ficials to create special committees—consisting of representatives of the rail­ roads, the gendarmes, and the military—for the restoration of order on the railroads, where troops returning from the Far East, incited by striking rail­ road workers, had begun to rebel. On 16 December the Police Department urged governors to root out agitators and unreliable elements from state and public service. Three days later the governor of St. Petersburg Province, A. D. Zinov’ev, banned all political and economic meetings whose organizers failed to obtain from him prior written permission to hold them. On 21 December police and gendarmes throughout the empire received orders to shoot imme­ diately upon encountering armed resistance. Finally, on 29 December Gover­ nor Dzhunkovskii warned the rural population in Moscow Province that all disorders, thefts of wood, illegal pasturage, failure to pay taxes, and other acts of insubordination would be punished to the fullest extent permitted in a state of extraordinary security. This warning was in part a response to efforts by peasant unions to overturn the established order. In one district of Khar’kov, for example, the peasant union set up a “republic” that effectively “assumed administrative functions in the district.”95 Also important in the government’s efforts to restore order was a lengthy tactical directive issued to police officials on 24 December 1905. Local police officials were enjoined to arrest all revolutionary agitators in factories (but also to seek to persuade workers to resist agitation); to disallow demonstra­ tions and processions; to work with railroad gendarmes to dissolve railroad strike committees; to ensure the readiness of troops; to divide cities into sec­ tors so as to facilitate the coordination of repressive action with military au­ thorities; to issue to regular police officers precise instructions for riot con­ trol; and to verify their understanding of them.96 This was an overall strategy both for preventing the outbreak of disorder and for crushing unrest as it oc­ curred. Not only was this directive far more detailed than those of 28 June and 2 November, but the central authorities were ready—and able—to back it up with vigorous support. The government also began to enforce the laws forbidding the publication of seditious writings, such as those inciting military personnel, workers, and students to disorder or insubordination. Publishers had the freedom to put such writings into circulation without presenting them to the censors before publica­ tion, but the censors retained the legal authority to seize them after publication and to impose fines and other punishments on publishers. Since mid-October the government had turned a blind eye to the vast quantities of inflammatory radical publications churned out on the new high-speed printing presses. Once the government resolved to stop the flow of such publications, however, it did so entirely legally.97 The tide was beginning to turn in the regime’s favor.

Conclusion

ull-scale repression of social unrest did not begin until the new year. In the face of protests by lawyers, the criminal justice system had broken down in the last months of 1905. Although Justice Minister M. G. Akimov advised judges on 17 December to resume work, the regular courts remained closed until early 1906. Even administrative exile was scarcely used in those months, despite the magnitude of the civil disorder. In November and Decem­ ber 1905, as already noted, the committee on administrative punishments or­ dered the exile of only 115 people; in 1906 that number reached nearly 8,000. Also important, it took a while for government officials to regain their selfconfidence. According to Gershuni, guards in the Shlissel’burg Fortress treated their prisoners as potential members of a new government in late 1905; only beginning in 1906 did they return to their former cold attitude.1 It was almost as if an entirely different regime greeted the new year. The first sign of the coming sea change was the creation of “punitive expeditions” (karatel’nye ekspeditsii).

These “expeditions” were military detachments sent into the empire’s bor­ derlands to restore order. The immediate cause of their creation was the danger posed by rebellious demobilized troops returning from the Far East by way of the Trans-Siberian Railway. On 13 December two battle-tested senior army generals, R K. Rennenkampf and A. N. Meller-Zakomerskii, received a secret mission from the emperor to prevent the fusion of those troops with revolu­ tionary forces in Siberia and European Russia. This plan had been conceived by Witte without the assistance of Interior Minister Dumovo, who learned about the mission only on 20 December. In other words, by mid-December Witte had become every bit as much a partisan of defending the regime by harsh means as was Dumovo. Other expeditions were deployed in the Baltic and Caucasus regions and in Ukraine. They executed or shot hundreds, if not thousands, of soldiers, peasants, workers, and other insurgents from January

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1906 through early 1907. All forms of government repression may have taken between 3,000 and 5,000 lives from December 1905 to April 1906.2 State-sponsored violence of this magnitude may be seen as terribly cruel, but governments fearing for their very survival are prone to brutal actions. Among contemporary examples are Adolphe Thiers’s efforts to crush the Paris Commune in the final week of May 1871, an operation that cost 20,000 lives. Since France’s population at that time was slightly more than one-third of Russia’s in 1905, it was as if the Russian government had massacred not 5,000 but 60,000 people, and not over many months but in a few weeks. It has been argued that Thiers’s severe repression of the Commune lent strength to the Third Republic by convincing provincial conservatives that republicans too could be staunch defenders of order and by removing from the scene most of the radicals.3 The massacre, in any event, utterly quashed the rebellion and restored order in the country; in Russia, by contrast, the next two years wit­ nessed an explosion of radical activism in the still largely unfettered press, in the streets, and in the newly created quasi-parliament. In view of the freedoms and constitutional guarantees promised in the Oc­ tober Manifesto, which had done so much to slow the revolutionary jugger­ naut, governing the empire was going to require winning the support of a large portion of the educated, politicized vocal elites. This was to be no easy task. Indicative of the gulf separating the government and even left-liberals was Struve’s warning of 15 December 1905, the very day on which Colonel Min began to dislodge the insurgents from the Presnia District. Struve de­ clared, “[A] Russian monarchy which will fail to conclude with the revolu­ tion a mutually honorable peace and instead defeat it by reactionary means will fail to survive not only a second revolution, but also another war like the Russo-Japanese.”4 From the perspective of 1917, these words appear prophetic, but in the context of late 1905 they seem unrealistic, for it is un­ clear what sort of condominium between government and revolutionaries was possible. For such liberals as Struve, nothing short of a constitutional parlia­ mentary government would constitute “mutually honorable terms of peace.” Russia’s rulers, by contrast, considered the Duma, limited in competence as it was, to be already too great a concession. Legitimate fears existed on both sides. Senior officials feared social chaos; many liberal and radical activists worried lest the modest concessions granted in October 1905 be restricted still further, or even abrogated. Meanwhile, rev­ olutionaries continued to dedicate themselves to bringing about social and po­ litical revolution. In retrospect, the burning questions for the future were, Could the government win the support of the moderate opposition while neu­ tralizing the radicals? and, Would the various governing and oppositional elites reach a condominium on the basis of their greater commonality of in­ terests than either shared with the mass of Russians?5 The security service had an important role to play in resolving these issues. As has been argued in the preceding pages. Imperial Russia’s security po­ lice system developed in direct response to the growth of opposition move-

Conclusion

183

ments and organizations in the period following the Great Reforms of the 1860s. The government confronted these new threats, especially the challenge of political terrorism in the late 1870s, by specially granting to administrative officials broad punitive authority and by equipping a small number of special­ ized security policemen to penetrate the defenses of revolutionary conspira­ tors. Both measures may have been necessary, even inevitable, yet only the second unequivocally strengthened the regime. This is because late Imperial Russia’s emergency laws, while enabling the inadequate number of adminis­ trative officials to maintain order in the Russian Empire, promoted the arbi­ trary wielding of power, which further alienated educated Russians and thus helped to swell the ranks of those opposed to autocracy. Of course, govern­ ing, modernizing, and industrializing a vast, multiethnic empire while main­ taining the relatively few landowning gentry in the face of an enormous, landhungry peasantry and containing the rising opposition and revolutionary movements may well have been impossible without recourse to emergency legislation. This was especially true given the weak development of a legal consciousness in most of the population, the administrative officials’ haughti­ ness and jealousy of their prerogatives, and the government’s need to rely on both unsophisticated and undisciplined regular police forces and a cumber­ some and inefficient bureaucracy. Yet to govern a society that with each pass­ ing year grew more complex demanded that the government mobilize public support, or at least acquiescence, either through an elaborate program of pro­ paganda and coercion—something it would have been both unable and un­ willing to do—or by means of important political concessions. The establish­ ment of the State Duma in spring 1906 went a long way to satisfying the desire for political participation. But this meant in turn that a more refined se­ curity service was essential, one that could combat the revolutionary opposi­ tion without further estranging more moderate critics. Russia’s security police system, however, was composed in many respects of two rather distinct elements. On the one hand, the gendarme officers, out­ fitted in dark blue uniforms with plumed helmets, represented vestiges of Nicholas I’s vision of a legion of incorruptible fighters of wrongs all standing above society and the bureaucracy. Few gendarme officers actively combatted sedition, and those who did often acted clumsily and therefore ineffectively. Since the dark blue gendarme uniform for many people epitomized the op­ pression and arbitrariness of the government, it might have been quite sensi­ ble to transfer the gendarmes to civilian authority and to transform them into regular policemen, of whom administrative officialdom had far too few. In one bold stroke, such a reform would have abolished a hated symbol of tyranny and demonstrated a greater commitment on the part of the govern­ ment to protecting private persons and their property. Yet even this change would have left far too few policemen for that task. On the other hand, the specialized security officers discriminated easily between mere partisans of reform and hard-core revolutionaries and generally operated unobtrusively. Indeed, it seems that few members of the public even

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knew that the security bureaus existed. There is ample evidence that the pro­ fessionally sophisticated security officers throughout the period from the mid1890s to 1905 were able to hold at bay a large proportion of Russia’s conspir­ atorial activists. The continuous arrest, exile, and surveillance of such activists helped to divorce their organizations from the popular movements whose development they yearned to direct. Indeed, the popular unrest of 1905 owed little of its strength to the efforts of revolutionary agitators. In this sense, the security police system had done its job extremely well. Ruble for ruble, the specialized security officers were probably among the most costeffective officials of the Imperial bureaucracy. Yet two factors undermined their effectiveness as an antioppositionist force. First, the specialized security officers were only one part of an inter­ locking bureaucratic system whose diverse and often disjointed and uncoor­ dinated elements, such as the gendarmerie just mentioned, regularly acted at cross-purposes. Second, the character of important segments of the political opposition made them proof against a security service constituted to match wits with small-scale, secretive political activists. On the one hand, the secu­ rity police could watch, but they often lacked the authority to arrest or other­ wise to repress the well-connected and socially prominent leaders of the pro­ constitutionalist movement that arose after the.turn of the century and soon began effectively to challenge the government’s right to monopolize political power. On the other «hand, the security service could scarcely be expected to control the mass unrest that broke out in Russia in 1905. It could provide ad­ vance notice of mass demonstrations and other disturbances and could arrest alleged instigators on their eve, but, quite obviously, it could not by itself defuse social tension and assuage popular discontent. When order broke down almost completely in autumn 1905, the security service, which de­ pended on regular policemen to carry out arrests and to conduct surveillance over the broader population, was left nearly powerless. As Brian Chapman has remarked in regard to France in 1789, the key to preventing the revolu­ tion may have depended less on the security police’s ability to thwart plot­ ters than on regular police and military forces “maintaining control of the streets of Paris.”6 Indeed, in some critical respects, security police forces have a limited ca­ pacity to protect regimes. The police under Metternich systematically em­ ployed perlustration, registered all the inhabitants of the Austrian Empire, and oversaw censorship. In practice, the police could search, arrest, and detain nearly anyone without a warrant or trial. Yet the revolutions of 1830 and 1848 caught Metternich utterly off guard.7 Highly developed security police forces may well help governments to cope with social unrest and conspiratorial or­ ganizations, but they seem rarely to have prevented—or even to have pre­ dicted—social upheavals. In fact, police systems in their entirety generally cannot preserve a regime confronted with massive social rebellion. Thus Peter Struve was wrong to argue, even rhetorically, that the Imperial govern­ ment relied for its survival on its police forces, which he considered “omnipo-

Conclusion

185

tent.”8 In 1905, those forces nearly collapsed, and the regime survived thanks only to a combination of important political concessions—in order to main­ tain the support of educated elites—and of the application of military force to quash popular rebellion. Once again Russia was following an oft-repeated continental European pattern.9 The security police forces were just one of the tools at the Imperial Russ­ ian government’s disposal. In the long run, much more depended on the gov­ ernment itself. Yet what kind of government was it? For nearly two centuries, a succession of rulers in Russia had continued to carry forward the Petrine project of Europeanizing Russia while maintaining the absolutist political system that he had bequeathed to them. That system throughout much of its existence was sustained by what Richard Wortman has called Russia’s “Impe­ rial myth,” the key elements of which were majesty and foreignness. Keeping that myth alive required the government to appear both “advanced—humane or progressive in terms of current Western conceptions of monarchy”—and also “unconstrained by local or private interests . . . unlimited.” In the eigh­ teenth century, this representation of Imperial Russian rulership conformed well to the principles of enlightened absolutism then dominant in central Eu­ rope. As the nineteenth century unfolded, however, the Imperial myth’s inner contradictions grew more apparent in a manner not unlike that of enlightened absolutism itself.10 Although Russia had been on the path toward constitutionalism ever since the Great Reforms, many remnants of the country’s autocratic past persisted throughout officialdom. One could still say in 1905, as N. Kh. Bunge had af­ firmed in the early 1890s, that the Imperial government had “two contradic­ tory tendencies: one de jure whereby administrative power is diminished and the other de facto by which administrative officials seek to reestablish their traditional mystique [obaianie].”u The result was a government that pleased almost no one. Russia was no longer governed by an autocracy, given the semi-independent judiciary, the increasingly unfettered press, and the gradu­ ally developing civil society. Nor was it ruled by a bureaucratic despotism, in view of the limited arbitrary power invested in individual officials by the se­ curity law of 1881, the great authority retained by the monarch, and the re­ straints on both exerted by the growing civil society. The late Imperial Russ­ ian government remained semi-absolutist but was tentatively feeling its way toward constitutionalism, sometimes lurching toward harsh threats of repres­ sion, sometimes implementing them haphazardly, but even more often back­ ing into policies of awkward conciliation. During periods of relatively peaceful transition from one political system to another—and not in the midst of popular tumult—a sophisticated security police system can most powerfully influence the course of events and help forestall political degeneration. A staunchly absolutist or autocratic govern­ ment, such as that of Nicholas I, had little need for such a system. While poli­ ties based largely on popular sovereignty may from time to time rely on a se­ curity service for protection against isolated malcontents, their durability does

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not usually depend on such protection. The continued survival of the Imperial Russian system of government beginning in early 1906, by contrast, hinged not only upon the application of repressive measures and an enduring commit­ ment to the promises expressed in the October Manifesto but also upon the ability of the security police system to subdue revolutionary activists while rising to such a level of operational refinement that it might avoid interfering with nonrevolutionary political and social forces. But that is the subject of an­ other book.

Notes

A b b r e v ia tio n s U s e d

ARR ES GARF

GM Gos. Izd.

KA KL KS KSS

M G IA I N IC

Ol Padenie

PSS PSZ R G IA gM

RP Tip. YSP ZA

Arkhiv Russkoi revoliutsii. E dited by I. V. Gessen. 22 vols. Berlin, 1934. Entsiklopedicheskii slovar’. 82 vols. St. Petersburg: E A. B rokgauz i I. A. Efron, 1890-1904. G osudarstvennyi arkhiv Rossiiskoi federatsii. Golos minuvshego (journal). G osudarstvennoe (adjective m eaning “state”). Izdatel’stvo (publisher). Krasnyi arkhiv (journal). Krasnaia letopis ’ (journal). Katorga i ssylka (journal).

Kratkii sistematicheskii svod deistvuiushchikh zakonopolozhenii. C om piled by Colonel Dobriakov. St. Petersburg: Izd. Shtaba O tdel’nogo Korpusa Zhandarm ov, 1903. M oskovskii gosudarstvennyi istoriko-arkhivnyi institut. N icolaevsky Collection, H oover Institution Archives.

Otechestvennaia istoriia: Istoriia Rossii s drevneishikh vremen do 1917 goda: Entsiklopediia. Moscow: B ol’shaia Rossiiskaia entsiklopediia, 1994. Padenie tsarskogo rezhima: Stenograficheskie otchety doprosov i pokazanii dannykh v 1917 g. v Chrezvychainoi Sledstvennoi Komissii Vremennogo PraviteVstva. E d ite d b y P. E . S h c h e g o le v . 7 v o ls. Leningrad and M oscow: Gos. izd., 1925. Lenin, V. I. Polnoe sobranie sochinenii. 5th ed. 55 vols. M oscow: Gos. izd. politicheskoi literatury, 1967-1970. Polnoe sobranie zakonov Rossiiskoi imperii. St. Petersburg: Gos. tip., 1855-1905. R ossiiskii gosudarstvennyi istoricheskii arkhiv goroda M oskvy. Russkie pisateli, 1800-1917: Biograficheskii slovar\ Edited by P. N. Niko­ laev et al. 3 vols, to date. Moscow: Sovetskaia entsiklopediia, 1989-1994. Tipografiia (publisher). Spiridovich Papers, Yale University A rchives. Z agranichnaia agentura. Paris Security B ureau Collection, H oover Insti­ tution Archives.

188

Notes to Pages ix-4

Russian Archival Nomenclature f. op. otd. d. or dd. ch. lit. 1. or 11. ob. t.

fond (collection). o p is’ (catalogue). otdelenie (catalogue subdivision). delo/a (file/s). ch ast’ (file subdivision). litera (further file subdivision). list/y (sheet/s). obratnaia storona (reverse side o f sheet). tom (volume).

Preface 1. D avid H. Bayley, Patterns o f Policing: A Comparative International Analysis (New B runsw ick, N.J.: R utgers U niversity Press, 1985), 189. 2. R onald Hingley, The Russian Secret Police: Muscovite, Imperial Russian, and Soviet Political Security Operations (New York: D orset Press, 1970), chaps. 4 -6 . See also N urit Schleifm an, Undercover Agents in the Russian Revolutionary Move­ ment: The SR Party, 1902-1914 (London: M acm illan, 1988); D. C. B. Lieven, “T he Security Police, C ivil R ights, and the Fate o f the R ussian E m pire, 1855-1917,” in Civil Rights in Imperial Russia, ed. O lg a C risp and L in d a E d m ondson (O xford: C larendon Press, 1989), 2 3 5 -6 2 ; F. M . L u r’e, Politseiskie i provokatory (St. Peters­ burg: C has pik, 1992);* Frederic S. Z uckerm an, The Tsarist Secret Police in Russian Society, 1880-1917 (New York: New York University Press, 1996). 3. M aria Viktorovna Sidorova, “Arkhivy tsentral’nykh organov politicheskogo rozyska Rossii X IX -nachala XX w .: i n Otdelenie s.e.i.v. kantseliarii i Departament politsii M V D” (Kandidat, diss., Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi gum anitam yi universitet, 1993), 152. See also S. V. M ironenko and Gregory L. Freeze, eds., Fondy Gosudarstvennogo arkhiva Rossiiskoi Federatsii po istorii Rossii XIX-nachala XX vv., vol. 1 o f Gosu­ darstvennyi arkhiv Rossiiskoi Federatsii: PutevoditeT (Moscow: Blagovest, 1994). 4. C harles A. Ruud and Sergei Stepanov, Fontanka, 16: Politicheskii sysk pri tsariakh (M oscow: M y si’, 1993).

Introduction 1. D onald E m erson, Metternich and the Political Police: Security and Subver­ sion in the Hapsburg Monarchy (1815-1830) (The Hague: M artinus Nijhoff, 1968), 8. 2. M arc Raeff, “R ussia’s Autocracy and Paradoxes o f M odernization,” in Political Ideas and Institutions in Imperial Russia, ed. M arc R aeff (Boulder, Colo.: W estview Press, 1994), 116-24.; Raeff, “The W ell-Ordered Police State and the D evelopm ent o f M odernity in Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century Europe: An Attem pt at a C om parative Approach,” in Raeff, Political Ideas, 309-21; Raeff, The Well-Ordered Police State: So­

cial and Institutional Change through Law in the Germanies and Russia, 1600-1800 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1983), 2 0 6 ,2 1 5 -1 7 ,2 3 7 ,2 5 0 . 3. Phillip T hurm ond Sm ith, Policing Victorian London: Political Policing, Pub­ lic Order, and the London Metropolitan Police (W estport, Conn.: G reenw ood Press, 1985), 199; B ernard Porter, The Origins o f the Vigilant State: The London Metropoli­ tan Police Special Branch before the First World War (London: W eidenfeld and N icol-

Notes to Pages 4 -9

189

son, 1987), xii, 4, 8 4 - 8 6 ,9 2 ,1 2 1 , 1 4 2 -4 4 ,1 5 7 -5 9 ,1 9 3 . 4 . H o w a rd C . P a y n e , The Police State o f Louis Napoleon Bonaparte, 1851-1860 (Seattle: U niversity o f W ashington Press, 1966), 7; E m erson, Metternich and the Political Police, 33; D ieter Fricke, Bismarcks Prätorianer: Die Berliner poli­ tische Polizei im Kampf gegen die deutsche Arbeiterbewegung (1871-1898) (Berlin: R ütten & L oening, 1962), 55; A lf L üdtke, Police and State in Prussia, 1815-1850, trans. P ete B urgess (Cam bridge: C am bridge U niversity Press, 1989), 82. 5. See, fo r exam ple, E laine G lovka Spencer, Police and the Social Order in German Cities: The Düsseldorf District, 1848-1914 (DeK alb, Dl.: N orthern Illinois U niversity Press, 1992), 126-32; Payne, Police State, 162-67. 6. Fouché, cited by G uy T huillier and Jean Tùlard, U Etat et sa police en France (1789-1914), ed. Jacques A ubert et al. (Geneva: Librairie D roz, 1979), 207. Surveil­ lance is m eant here in its usual, passive m eaning, not as a project “to act on people, to change them ,” as the term is used in Peter H olquist, ‘“ Inform ation Is the A lpha and O m ega o f O ur Work*: B olshevik Surveillance in Its Pan-European Context,” Journal o f Modem History 69 (Septem ber 1997): 41 7 -1 9 . 7. M alcolm L am bert, Medieval Heresy: Popular Movements from Bogomil to Hus (New York: H olm es and M eier, 1977), 130; Bayley, Patterns o f Policing, 201; Jacq u es A ubert, “Introduction,” in A ubert et al., L ’Etat et sa police en France, 6; Jacques G odechot, Les Institutions de la France sous la Révolution et VEmpire, 3d ed. (Paris: Presses U niversitaires de France, 1985), 625; Em erson, Metternich and the Po­ litical Police, 38. 8. L ouis A ndrieux, Souvenirs d fun préfet de police, 16th ed., 2 vols. (Paris: J. R o u ff & C ie., 1885), 2 :1 7 3 ; M ich el L e C lère , “L a p o lic e p o litiq u e sous la IIIe R épublique,” in A ubert et al., UEtat et sa police en France, 103. 9. G endarm e C orps directive, 14 February 1875, in KSS, 2 7 -30. 10. O n criteria o f professionalization for police forces, see Bayley, Patterns o f Policing, 50. 11. F edor I. Rodichev, Vospominaniia i ocherki o russkom liberalizme, ed. Kerm it E. M cK enzie (N ew tonville, M ass.: O riental R esearch Partners, 1983), 10. 12. L au ra E n g elstein , “R evolution and the T h eater o f P u b lic L ife in Im p er­ ial R u ssia,” in Revolution and the Meanings o f Freedom in the Nineteenth Cen­ tury, ed. Iss e r W oloch (S ta n fo rd , C alif.: S ta n fo rd U n iv ersity P ress, 1996), 316, 3 4 6 -4 7 , 356. 13. A. Shapovalov, Po doroge k marksizmu: Vospominaniia rabochego-revoliutsionera, 4 pts. (M oscow: Gos. izd., 1924), 1:31. 14. V. A. M aklakov, Iz vospominanii (New York: Izd. im eni Chekhova, 1954), 3 0 4 -5 ; Shm uel Galai, The Liberation Movement in Russia, 1900-1905 (Cam bridge: C am bridge U niversity Press, 1973), 4 3 -4 4 . 15. Kireev cited in T heodore Taranovski, “T he Politics o f Counter-Reform : A u­ tocracy and B ureaucracy in the R eign o f A lexander HI, 1881-1894” (Ph.D. diss.. H ar­ vard University, 1976), 209; Vospominaniia Borisa Nikolaevicha Chicherina, 4 pts. (M oscow : Sever, 1934), 4 :2 3 6 -4 7 , 275. 16. N . R u b a k in , “ M n o g o li v R o ss ii c h in o v n ik o v ? Iz ‘e tiu d o v o c h is to i publike,’” Vestnik Evropy 45 (January 1910): 116, 119n. 17. Payne, Police State, 15. 18. R ich ard P ip es, Karamzin’s Memoir on Ancient and Modem Russia: A Translation and Analysis (C am bridge, M ass.: Harvard U niversity Press, 1959), 193; A le x is d e T o cq u ev ille, Democracy in America, tran s. H enry R eeve, ed. P h illip s

190

Notes to Pages 9 -14

Bradley, 2 vols. (New York: R andom H ouse, 1945), 1:89-98. 19. B oris M ironov, “T he P easant C om m une after the R eform s o f the 1860s,” in The World o f the Russian Peasant: Post-Emancipation Culture and Society, ed. Ben E k lo f and Stephen P. Frank (Boston: U nw in H ym an, 1990), 13-19. 20. S ee E ngelstein, “R evolution and the T h eater o f P ublic L ife,” 340; P. A. K ropotkin, Zapiski revoliutsionera (M oscow: M oskovskii rabochii, 1988), 282-83. 21. Raeff, “W ell-O rdered Police State,” 309-15. 22. C arlo M. Cipolla, Literacy and Development in the West (B altim ore, Md.: Penguin, 1969), 127-28. 23. Theodore Taranovski, “A lexander III and H is Bureaucracy: T he L im itations o f A u to cratic Pow er,” Canadian Slavonic Papers 26 (1984): 2 0 7 -1 9 ; T aranovski, “ P o l i ti c s o f C o u n te r - R e f o r m ,” 6 5 - 7 2 , 8 8 - 9 1 , 2 9 3 - 3 0 3 , 3 7 2 , 5 6 6 - 7 4 ; J ö rg Baberow ski, Autokratie und Justiz: Zum Verhältnis von Rechsstaatlichkeit und Rück­ ständigkeit im ausgehenden Zarenreich, 1864-1914 (F ran k fu rt am M ain: V ittorio Klosterm ann, 1996), chaps. 7 -8 ; I. V. G essen, “V dvukh vekakh: Z hiznennyi otchet,” in Arkhiv russkoi revoliutsii, ed. I. V. G essen (Berlin, 1937), 22:144. 24. Theodore Taranovski, “The Aborted Counter-Reform: M urav’ev Com m ission and the Judicial Statutes o f 1864,” Jahrbücherfü r Geschichte Osteuropas 29 (1981): 220. 25. V. K. Ikov, “Listopad,” Voprosy istorii 8 (1995): 92.

1. The Origins of a Modern Security Police in Russia 1. On P estel’, see Sidney M onas, The Third Section: Police and Society under Nicholas I (C am bridge, M ass.: H arvard U niversity P ress, 1961), 5 5 -5 6 ; G ennadii G olovkov and Sergei B urin, Kantseliariia nepronitsaemoi t'my: Politicheskii sysk i revoliutsionery (M oscow: M anuskript, 1994), 7 -1 3 . O n the activities o f the T hird Sec­ tion, see R. S. M ulukaev, Politsiia v Rossii (XIX v.-nach. XX v.) (N izhni Novgorod, 1993), 2 9 -3 2 ; I. V. O rzh ek h o v sk ii, Samoderzhavie protiv revoliutsionnoi Rossii (1826-1880) (M oscow: M y si’, 1982), 37 -4 9 ; Bayley, Patterns o f Policing, 41. 2. Eric A. Arnold, Fouché, Napoleon, and the General Police (W ashington, D.C.: University Press o f A m erica, 1979), 4 3 ,5 3 ,1 7 1 ; M ichel Le Clère, Histoire de la police, 3rd ed. (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1964), 55 -6 7 ; Pierre Riberette, “D e la police de N apoléon à la police de la Congrégation,” in A ubert et al., L'Etat et sa police en France, 3 5 -3 7 ; Vincent W right, “Les préfets de police pendant le Second Empire: Personalités et problèm es,” in Aubert et al., L'Etat et sa police en France, 98. 3. See I. T ro tsk ii, “III-e o tdelenie,” in Ill-e otdelenie pri Nikolae I, ed. la. G ordin (Leningrad: Lenizdat, 1990), 6 4 -6 7 ; M onas, Third Section, 105-7. 4. Orzhekhovskii, Samoderzhavie, 59, 62; M onas, Third Section, 112-13; P. S. Squire, The Third Department: The Establishment and Practice o f the Political Police in the Russia o f Nicholas I (Cam bridge: C am bridge U niversity Press, 1968), 50, 75, 8 5 -8 6 , 95, 100-103, 131, 184, 197; V. B ogucharskii, ed., ‘T r e t’e otdelenie sobstvennoi e. i. v. kantseliarii o sebe sam om: N eizdannyi dokum ent,” Vestnik Evropy 2 (M arch 1917): 8 5 -1 2 5 ; A natole Leroy-B eaulieu, L'Empire des tsars et les russes, 4th ed., 3 vols. (Paris: H achette, 1898), 2:143; F. M . L ur’e, Politseiskie i provokatory (St. P eters­ burg: C has pik, 1992), 145; Trotskii, “HI-e otdelenie,” 2 9 -3 0 ,5 3 -5 5 . 5. T ro tsk ii, “ III-e o td e le n ie ,” 16; O rz h e k h o v s k ii, Samoderzhavie, 6 3 - 6 6 , 1 2 0 -2 1 ; R ib erette, “P o lice d e N apoléon,” in A ubert e t al., L'Etat et sa police en France, 53; Payne, Police State, 21. 6. M onas, Third Section, 122.

Notes to Pages 1 4-17

191

7. See T rotskii, “Ill-e otdelenie,” 4 5 -4 6 ; “G linka, S. N.,” in RP, 1:577; “B ul­ garin, F. V.,” in RP, 1:348-50. 8. E m erson, Metternich and the Political Police, 8 -3 3 ; M ervyn M atthew s, The Passport Society: Controlling Movement in Russia and the USSR (B oulder, Colo.: W estview Press, 1993), 1 -1 3 ; “Istoricheskii khod zakonodatel’stva o pasportakh v R ossii,” G A R F, f. 102, op. 261, d. 110, 11. 1 -1 3 ob.; P. P. Z avarzin, Zhandarmy i revoliutsionery (Paris: Izd. avtora, 1929), 39. T he French system operated until the m id-1880s (La grande encyclopédie: Inventaire raisonné des sciences, des lettres et des arts [Paris: H. Lam irault, 1899], 26:57). 9. M onas, Third Section, 13 4 -9 3 ; M ulukaev, Politsiia v Rossii, 31; Squire, Third D epartm ent, 9 4 - 9 5 , 10 0 ; O r z h e k h o v s k ii , Sam oderzhavie, 5 7 , 1 50; B ogucharskii, “T ret’e otdelenie,” 9 4 -9 8 . 10. N icholas V. Riasanovsky, Parting o f the Ways: Government and the Edu­ cated Public in Russia, 1801-1855 (Oxford: O xford University Press, 1976), 249-97. 11. M artin M alia, Alexander Herzen and the Birth o f Russian Socialism (C am ­ bridge, M ass.: H arvard U niversity Press, 1961), 144-48, 21 8 -1 9 , 2 7 8 -79; “G ertsen, A. I.,” RP, 1:544-45; A. I. G ertsen, Byloe i dumy, in Sochineniia v chetyrekh tomakh (M o sco w : P rav d a, 1988), 2 :6 9, 39; I. D. Z ubarev, “T re t’e o td elen ie: O try v o k iz vospom inanii,” Istoricheskii vestnik 38 (1917): 430, 445, 448; Trotskii, “Ill-e otdele­ nie,” 7 0 -7 2 . 12. See O. I. Chistiakov, ed., ZakonodateVstvo pervoi poloviny XIX veka, vol. 6 o f Rossiiskoe zakonodateTstvo X-XX vekov (M oscow: Iuridicheskaia literatura, 1988), 17-19, 163; N. S. Tagantsev, Russkoe ugolovnoe pravo: Lektsii: Chast* obshchaia (St. Petersburg, 1887; M oscow : Nauka, 1994), 1:98-107; M ichelle Perrot, “L’im possible prison,” in UImpossible prison: Recherches sur le système pénitentiaire au XIXe siè­ cle, ed. M ichelle Perrot (Paris: Seuil, 1980), 59; Baberow ski, Autokratie und Justiz, 1 9 9 -2 0 0 , 694; A. F. H eard , “Ju stic e and L aw in R ussia,” Harper's Magazine 76 (1888): 930; M . N. G em et, O. B. G ol’dovskii, and I. N. Sakharov, eds., Protiv smertnoi kazni, 2d ed. (M oscow : Tip. I. D. Sytina, 1907), 394-95. 13. J. H. S ed d o n , “T h e P e trash ev tsy : A R e ap p ra isal,” SR 43 (F all 1984): 4 4 5 -4 7 ; B o g u ch arsk ii, “T re t’e otdelenie,” 10 2 -3 ; M onas, Third Section, 2 3 8 -3 9 ; M alia, Herzen, 334, 3 9 2 -9 3 ; A. V. Nikitenko, Dnevnik v trekh tomakh (M oscow: Gos. izd. khudozhestvennoi literatury, 1955), 1:311-12. 14. L. S lu k h o tsk ii, “ O c h erk d e ia te l’n o sti M in isterstv a iu stitsii v b o r ’b e s politicheskim i prestupleniiam i,” Istoriko-revoliutsionnyi sbomïk 3 (1926): 250. 15. M. N. G em et, Istoriia tsarskoi tiur’my, 5 vols., 3d ed. (M oscow: Gos. izd. iuridicheskoi literatury, 19 6 1 -1 963), 2 :2 5 7 -7 7 ; E. L am pert, Sons Against Fathers: Studies in Russian Radicalism and Revolution (O xford: O xford U niversity Press, 1965), 9 9 -1 0 0 , 127-28. 16. L. I. T iutiunnik, “D epartam ent politsii v bo r’be s revoliutsionnym dvizheniem v R ossii na rubezhe X IX -X X vekov, 1880-1904 gg.” (K andidat, diss., M G IA I, 1986), 2 4 -2 6 . 17. Trotskii, “H l-e otdelenie,” 16-17; B ogucharskii, ‘T r e t’e otdelenie,” 105; B. B ukhshtab, “Posle vystrela Karakozova,” KS 5 (1931): 60. 18. M arc Szeftel, “T he Form o f G overnm ent o f the R ussian E m pire prior to the C onstitutional R eform s o f 1905-1906,” in Essays in Russian and Soviet History in Honor o f Geroid Tanquary Robinson, ed. John Shelton C urtiss (New York: C olum bia U niversity Press, 1963), 114; M arc Szeftel, “Personal Inviolability in the L egislation o f the R ussian A bsolute M onarchy,” American Slavic and East European Review 17

192

Notes to Pages 17-20

(1958): 1 -4 ; Ustav ugolovnogo sudoproizvodstva, in A. F. Volkov and lu. D. Filipov, eds., Svod zakonov Rossiiskoi imperii, 3d ed. (St. P etersburg: O b sh ch e stv en n a ia p o l’za, 1900), vol. 5, pt. 2, arts. 1000, 1030-65; cf. arts. 2 4 9 -3 1 4 ; John L eD onne, “C rim inal Investigation before the G reat Reform s,” Russian History 1 (1974): 102-6; B ogucharskii, ‘T r e t’e otdelenie,” 114. 19. A. V. Dicey, Introduction to the Study o f the Law o f the Constitution, 9th ed. (New York: M acm illan, 1948), 202. 20. Szeftel, “Form o f G overnm ent,” 115; A. Trofimov, O merakh politseiskogo prinuzhdeniia po prusskomu i nashemu zakonodateTstvu (St. Petersburg: Tip. V. S. Balasheva, 1886), 89, 9 6 -9 8 ; R ichard S. W ortm an, The Development o f a Russian Le­ gal Consciousness (Chicago: U niversity o f C hicago Press, 1976), 270; B aberow ski, Autokratie und Justiz, 8, 5 7 -5 8 , 533, 6 1 5 -1 6 , 783-88. 21. W ortm an, Development o f a Russian Legal Consciousness, 270; M arina Sidorova and Feliks L u r’e, eds., “Vzlety i padeniia syshchika Filippeusa,” Novyi zhurnal 1 (1996), 94; V. I. Gurko, Features and Figures o f the Past: Government and Opin­ ion in the Reign o f Nicholas II, trans. L aura M atveev (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford U ni­ versity Press, 1939), 179-80. 22. See W ortm an, Development o f a Russian Legal Consciousness, 7 5 -8 5 , 270; Baberow ski, Autokratie und Justiz, 62 2 -3 4 ; D aniel T. Orlovsky, The Limits o f Reform: The Ministry o f Internal Affairs in Imperial Russia, 1802-1881 (C am bridge, M ass.: Harvard University Press, 1981), 80. 23. The discussion o f Im perial R ussia’s em ergency legislation in this chapter ex­ pands and advances the treatm ent in m y recent article “O n the Significance o f E m er­ gency Legislation in Lafe Im perial Russia,” Slavic Review 54 (Fall 1995): 602-29. 24. V. M. G essen, IskliuchiteVnoe polozhenie (St. Petersburg: Pravo, 1908), 1. 25. V la d im ir B u rtsev , c o m p ., Za sto let (1800-1896): Sbornik po istorii politicheskikh i obshchestvennykh dvizhenii v Rossii (L ondon: R ussian F ree P ress Fund, 1897), 1:85-87; “G raf B ism arck— organizator russkoi politicheskoi agentury za granitsei,” Byloe 2 (1901): 297; F rank Donner, Protectors o f Privilege: Red Squads and Police Repression in Urban America (Berkeley and Los Angeles: U niversity o f C alifornia Press, 1990), 7 -8 . 26. O rzhekhovskii, Samoderzhavie, 9 8 -1 0 7 ; V. G. C hem ukha, Vnutrenniaia politika tsarizma s serediny 50-kh do nachala 80-kh gg. XIX v. (Leningrad: N auka, 1878), 185-88; R eginald E. Zelnik, Labor and Society in Tsarist Russia: The Factory Workers o f St. Petersburg, 1855-1870 (Stanford, C alif.: S tanford U niversity Press, 1971), 2 5 8 -5 9 ; R obert J. A bbott, “Crim e, Police, and Society in St. Petersburg, R us­ sia, 1866-1878,” The Historian 40 (N ovem ber 1977): 7 1 ,7 7 . 27. O rzh ek h o v sk ii, Samoderzhavie, 99, 13 5 -4 8 ; V. I. K u z ’m ina, “S .-P eterburgskoe okhrannoe otdelenie v 1880-1904 gg.” (Dipl, rabota, MGLAI, 1986), 27; S.~

Peterburgskaia stolichnaia politsiia i gradonachaTstvo: Kratkii istoricheskii ocherk (St. Petersburg: R. G olin and A. V il’borg, 1903), 182-83 (Trepov and his reform s); Zelnik, Labor and Society, 2 5 8 -59; Abbott, “Crim e, Police, and Society,” 7 2 -7 4 (reg­ ular crim e); PSZ, ser. 2, vol. 41, pt. 1, no. 43501 (22 July 1866); penal code o f 1845, in Volkov and Filipov, Svod zakonov, vol. 15, arts. 34 7 -4 9 ; PSZ, ser. 2, vol. 42, pt. 1, no. 44402 (27 M arch 1867). 28. PSZ, ser. 2, vol. 42, pt. 2, no. 44956 (9 Septem ber 1867); Squire, Third De­ partment, 8 8 -8 9 ; O rzhekhovskii, Samoderzhavie, 125, 149-66; P. A. Z aionchkovskii, Krizis samoderzhaviia na rubezhe, 1870-1880-kh godov (M oscow : Izd. M oskovskogo u n iv ersiteta, 1964), 173; R om anov, V. V. “P o litic h esk aia p o litsiia v P o v o lz h ’e v

Notes to Pages 2 0 -2 4

193

1905-1907 gg.” (K andidat, diss., K azan University, 1992), 159-60. 29. P. A. Z aionchkovskii, ed., “Z apiska K. D. K avelina o nigilizm e,” Istoricheskii arkhiv 5 (1950): 3 2 8 -4 1 ; N ikitenko, Dnevnik, 3:90. 30. Franco Venturi, Roots o f Revolution: A History o f the Populist and Socialist Movements in Nineteenth-Century Russia, trans. Francis H askell (New York: Knopf, 1960), 3 6 4 -6 8 ; Burtsev, com p., Za sto let, 1:92-95. 3 1 . B a b e ro w s k i, Autokratie und Justiz, 6 4 7 - 5 6 ; S lu k h o ts k ii, “ O c h e rk deiateF nosti M inisterstva iustitsii,” 253. 32. PSZ, ser. 2, vol. 46, pt. 1, no. 49615 (19 M ay 1871); Slukhotskii, “O cherk d eiatel’nosti M inisterstva iustitsii,” 2 5 5 -5 6 ; A. A. L opukhin, Iz itogov sluzhebnogo opyta: Nastoiashchee i budushchee russkoi politsii (M oscow : Tip. V. M . Sablina, 1907), 15; S. M. Kazantsev, “Prokurorskii nadzor i sledstviia po politicheskim delam v R ossii vo vtoroi polovine X IX veka,” in Gosudarstvennyi stroi i politiko-pravovye idei Rossii vtoroi poloviny XIX stoletiia (Voronezh: Izd. Voronezhskogo universiteta, 1987), 115-20. 33. Slukhotskii, “O cherk deiateF nosti M inisterstva iustitsii,” 256, 260; G em et, Istoriia tsarskoi tiur’my, 3:99. O n earlier law s governing adm inistrative exile, see Z aionchkovskii, Krizis samoderzhaviia, 183-84. 34. Slukhotskii, “O cherk deiateFnosti M inisterstva iustitsii,” 258; PSZ, ser. 2, vol. 47, pt. 1, no. 50956 (7 July 1872), and vol. 53, pt. 1, no. 58489 (9 M ay 1878); Orlovsky, Limits o f Reform, 167; Engelstein, “Revolution and the Theater o f Public Life,” 335. 35. V. D. N o v itsk ii, Iz vospominanii zhandarma (L eningrad: P riboi, 1929), 7 7 -8 1 ; N. A. Troitskii, Tsarskie sudy protiv revoliutsionnoi Rossii: Politicheskie protsessy, 1871-1880 gg. (Saratov: Izd. Saratovskogo universiteta, 1976), 159; Burtsev, com p., Za sto let, 2 :8 9 -9 2 . 36. M. G. Sedov, Geroicheskii period revoliutsionnogo narodnichestva: Iz istorii politicheskoi bor’by (M oscow: M ysF, 1966), 6 2 -6 3 ; Vera Figner, Zapechatlennyi trud: Vospominaniia v dvukh tomakh (M oscow: M ysF, 1964), 1:148. 37. C hem ukha, Vnutrenniaia politika, 113-14; Orzhekhovskii, Samoderzhavie, 159; PSZ, ser. 2, vol. 49, pt. 1, no. 53606 (4 July 1874); G endarm e D irectorate to gen­ darm e ch iefs, 14 F ebruary 1875, in KSS, 2 6 -3 1 ; B ogucharskii, “T ret’e otdelenie,” 94 -1 1 0 . 38. See Lev Tikhomirov, Zagovorshchiki i politsiia (Moscow: M olodaia gvardiia, 1928), 5 2 -6 3 ; Daniel Field, “Peasants and Propagandists in the Russian M ovem ent to the People o f 1874,” Journal o f Modem History 59 (Septem ber 1987): 4 1 6 -1 7 ,4 2 2 -2 3 , 4 3 6 -3 8 ; Lev D eich, Za polveka, intro, by E zra M endelsohn, 2 vols. (Berlin: Grani, 1923; C am bridge: O riental R esearch Partners, 1975), 2:71; Z aionchkovskii, Krizis samoderzhaviia, 5 8 -7 3 ; Orzhekhovskii, Samoderzhavie, 172-76. 39. Burtsev, com p., Za sto let, 1:137-40; Venturi, Roots, 6 0 0 -607; B. I. Iur’ev, “KovaFskii, I. M .” in 01, 2:609; PSZ, ser. 2, vol. 53, pt. 1, no. 58488 (9 M ay 1878). 40. Iu r’ev, “KovaFskii,” in Ol, 2:609; V. Ia. B ogucharskii, Iz istorii politicheskoi

bor'by v 70-kh i 80-kh gg. XIX veka: Partiia “Nanodnaia volia”, ee proiskhozhdenie, sud’by i gibel* (M oscow: R usskaia m ysF, 1912), 22; V. M. Andreev, “C h islen n o sf i sostav politicheskikh ssyFnykh v vostochnoi Sibiri v 70-9 0 -k h godakh X IX veka,” in

SsyVnye revoliutsionery v Sibiri (XIX v.-fevraV 1917 g.), vol. 5 (Irkutsk: Irkutskii gos. universitet, 1980), 54; Z aionchkovskii, Krizis samoderzhaviia, 80 -8 1 ; PSZ, ser. 2, vol. 53, pt. 2, no. 58778 (9 A ugust 1878); N. I. Faleev, “R ossiia pod okhranoi: Istoricheskii ocherk,” Byloe 2 (1907): 5. 41. Z aionchkovskii, Krizis samoderzhaviia, 7 6 -78.

194

Notes to Pages 2 4 -2 8

42. “Iz arkhiva L. Tikhom irova,” KA 6 (1924): 155; Trotskii, “III-e otdelenie,” 17; Em erson, Metternich and the Political Police, 3 8 -4 7 , 5 0 -5 3 , 137-50; P. N. M il­ iukov, Vospominaniia (M oscow: Izd. politicheskoi literatury, 1991), 79. 43. See A. E. Skripilev, “R eorganizatsiia upravleniia politsiei v R ossii v nachale 8 0 -k h g o d o v X IX sto letiia ,” in Gosudarstvennyi stroi, 1 0 7 -8 ; L ev T ikhom irov, Konstitutsionalisty v epokhu 1881 goda (M oscow: U niversitetskaia tip., 1895), 25; Se­ dov, Geroicheskii period, 100; Fricke, Bismarcks Prätorianer, 4 1 -4 3 , 50; Vernon L. Lidtke, The Outlawed Party: Social Democracy in Germany, 1878-1890 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1966), 7 9 -83. 44. “D oklady gen.-leit. Seliverstova i gen.-ad. D renteF na A leksandru II,” KA 49 (1 9 3 1 ): 1 1 5 - 1 6 , 1 1 9 , 1 3 7 ; Z a io n c h k o v s k ii, K rizis sam oderzhaviia, 7 3 - 7 4 ; O rzhekhovskii, Samoderzhavie, 110, 121,157. 45. Tikhom irov, Konstitutsionalisty, 23; “D oklady gen.-leit. Seliverstova,” 124; Ivan Il’ich Petrunkevich, “Iz zapisok obshchestvennogo deiatelia: Vospominaniia,” ed. A. A. Kizevetter, in ARR, ed. I. V. G essen (Berlin, 1934), 21:98. 46. PSZ, ser. 2, vol. 54, pt. 1, no. 59476 (2 April), no. 59491 (8 A pril), and no. 59531 (23 April); V ladim ir Korolenko, Istoriia moego sovremennika, 4 vols. (M oscow and Berlin: Vozrozhdenie, 1922), 3:141; Zaionchkovskii, Krizis samoderzhaviia, 87n, 9 1 -9 8 ,1 1 3 ,1 2 4 . 4 7. G e rn et e t al., Protiv smertnoi kazni, 3 96; B urtsev, c o m p ., Za sto let, 1:151-54; A. V. Iakim ova, “Partiia ‘N arodnaia volia,’” in 1 marta 1881 (1881-1931): Stat'i i vospominaniia uchastnikov i sovremennikov (M oscow : Izd. P olitkatorzhan, 1931), 5; A. A. Kornilov, Obshchestvennoe dvizhenie pri Aleksandre II (1855-1881): Istoricheskie ocherki (M oscow : Tip. A. I. M am ontova, 1909), 235; Venturi, Roots, 6 3 7 -3 9 ; Sedov, Geroicheskii period, 210-17. 48. V. S. A ntonov, “K voprosu o so tsia l’nom sostave i chislennosti revoliutsio n ero v 7 0 -k h godov,” in Obshchestvennoe dvizhenie v poreformennoi Rossii: Sbomik statei k 80-letiiu so dhia rozhdeniia B. P. Koz’mina (M oscow: N auka, 1965), 342; Skripilev, “R eorganizatsiia upravleniia politsiei,” in Gosudarstvennyi stroi, 110; Burtsev, com p., Za sto let, 2:103; PSZ, ser. 2, vol. 54, pt. 2, no. 60492 (12 February). 49. L u r’e, Politseiskie i provokatory, 84. 50. Zaionchkovskii, Krizis samoderzhaviia, 221; PSZ, ser. 2, vol. 55, pt. 1, no. 61279 (6 August); Loris-M elikov, cited in P. A. Valuev, Dnevnik (1877-1884), ed. V. Ia. Iakovlev-B ogucharskii and P. E. Shchegolev (Petrograd: B yloe, 1919), 106. 51. “Gr. L oris-M elikov i im perator A leksandr II o polozhenii R ossii v sentiabre 1880 goda,” Byloe 4 (1 9 1 7 ): 54. O n the origins o f M oscow ’s Security B ureau, see D e­ partm ent o f State Police report, GARF, f. 109, 3-aia ekspeditsiia, 1880, d. 718,11. 1-4, 7 -1 9 ; lu. F. O vchenko, “M oskovskaia ‘O khranka’ na rubezhe vekov,” Otechestvennaia istoriia, 1993, no. 3 :195-96. 52. See Leroy-B eaulieu, UEmpire des tsars et les russes, 2:150; [S.] Savitskii,

Sistematicheskii sbomik tsirkuliarov Departamenta Politsii i Shtaba OtdeVnogo Korpusa Zhandarmov, otnosiashchikhsia k obiazannostiam chinov korpusa po proizvodstvu doznanii (St. Petersburg: Tip. Shtaba O tdel’nogo Korpusa Zhandarm ov, 1908), 9; Skripilev, “R eorganizatsiia upravleniia politsiei,” in Gosudarstvennyi stroi, 112-13; Z aionchkovskii, Krizis samoderzhaviia, 247. 53. D. I. Shindzhikashvili, Ministerstvo vnutrennikh del tsarskoi Rossii v periodo imperializma (O m sk, 1974), 16-32; Orlovsky, Limits o f Reform, 145. 54. See Shindzhikashvili, Ministerstvo, 3 5 -4 9 ; “Istoricheskii ocherk organizatsii i deiatel’nosti D epartam enta politsii, 1880-1900 gg.,” GARF, f. 102, op. 302, d.

Notes to Pages 2 8 -3 2

195

707, 5 -2 2 ob.; “R aspred elen ie zaniatii po D epartam entu politsii,” 14 M arch 1883, GARF, f. 102, op. 316, 1915, d. 367,11. 273-75. 55. Petnm kevich, “Iz zapisok,” 326; W right, “Préfets de police,” in Aubert et al., U Etat et sa police en France, 87; E rik Amburger, Geschichte der Behördenorganisation Russlands von Peter dem Grossen bis 1917 (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1966), 136-37,142. 56. S ee e sp ecially T iutiunnik, “D epartam ent politsii,” 4 6 -5 3 , 2 6 0 -6 7 ; Z. I. P ereg u d o v a, “D ep artam en t p o litsii v b o r’b e s revoliutsionnym dvizheniem : G ody reaktsii i revoliutsionnogo pod”em a” (Kandidat, diss., M G IA I, 1988), 18-20, 174-76; Sidorova, “Arkhivy,” 118-28. 57. R aym ond Fosdick, European Police Systems (New York: Century, 1915), 153; T iu tiu n n ik , “D e p artam en t po litsii,” 6 4 -6 5 , 2 7 4 -7 8 ; “D ep artam en t politsii v 1892-1908 gg.,” Byloe 5 - 6 (1917): 2 7 -2 8 ; Spisok chinov Ministerstva vnutrennikh del (St. P etersburg: T ip. M in isterstva v n utrennikh del, 1895), 1 :2 21-30; A lek san d r P. M arty n o v , Moia sluzhba v OtdeVnom korpuse zhandarmov: Vospominaniia, ed. R ichard W raga (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford U niversity Press, 1973), 4 7 -4 9 ,6 0 . 58. See “Vospom inaniia Kafafova,” GARF, f. 5881, op. 2, d. 390,11. 102; M ar­ ty n o v , Moia sluzhba, 5 4 , 6 0 ; T iu tiu n n ik , “ D e p a rta m e n t p o lits ii,” 6 3 - 6 5 ; P. A. Z aionchkovskii, Rossiiskoe samoderzhavie v kontse XIX stoletiia (Politicheskaia reaktsiia 80-kh—nachala 90-kh godov) (M oscow: M y si’, 1970), 162-63. 59. L. Rataev, “Z apiska dlia pam iati,” 11 February 1902, GARF, f. 102, OO, 1902, d. 1791, 1. 3 ob.; Taranovski, “Politics o f C ounter-Reform ,” 155-75, 314-39; Taranovski, “A lexander II and H is Bureaucracy,” 20 7 -1 9 ; Heidi W. W helan, Alexan­

der III and the State Council: Bureaucracy and Counter-Reform in Late Imperial Rus­ sia (New B runsw ick, N.J.: R utgers U niversity Press, 1982), 1 - 1 1 ,4 7 -4 8 ,1 9 8 -2 0 2 . 60. Z aionchkovskii, Krizis samoderzhaviia, 298; V. P. Leikina and N. L. Pivovarskaia, eds., Arkhiv “Zemli i voli” i uNarodnoi voli” (M oscow: Izd. Politkatorzhan, 1930), 21, 2 5 -2 6 , 160-234; O rzhekhovskii, Samoderzhavie, 122; A. I. Popov, “Aresty pered 1 m arta 1881 g. i arest S. L. Perovskoi,” in 1 marta 1881 g., ed. A. V. Iakim ovaD ik o v sk aia et al. (M oscow : Izd. P olitkatorzhan, 1933), 54; T ikhom irov, Zagovorshchiki i politsiia, 1 8 6 -2 0 4 ; A . P. P rib y le v a -K o rb a , “ N e s k o l’k o stro k o K le tochnikove,” in “Narodnaia volia” i “Chemyi peredel”: Vospominaniia uchastnikov revoliutsionnogo dvizheniia v Peterburge v 1879-1882 gg. (L eningrad: L enizdat, 1989), 2 4 6 -5 7 , 351n; N. A. Troitskii, “Kletochnikov, N. V .” in 01, 2:591. 61. Delo provokatora Okladskogo: Tridtsad' sem’ let v Okhranke (Leningrad: R abochii sud, 1925), 6, 11-12; P. Shchegolev, “K delu 1 m arta 1881 goda: N eizdannye d o k lad y g rafa L o risa-M elik o v a, V. K. Pleve, A. V. K om arova,” Byloe 3 2 -3 3 (1 9 1 8 ): 13; N . I. S h e b e k o , Khronika sotsialisticheskogo dvizheniia v Rossii, 1878-1887: OfitsiaVnyi otchet (M oscow : Izd. V. M . S ablina, 1906), 146, 176-80; Shchegolev, in 40 let provokatsii (Okladskii-Petrovskii): Sbomik (B erlin and M oscow: M ezhrabpom , 1925), 53; Golovkov and Burin, Kantseliariia, 44. 62. Z aionchkovskii, Krizis samoderzhaviia, 2 8 3 -9 1 ; O rzhekhovskii, Samod­ erzhavie, 173; H an s H eilb ro n n er, “A le x an d e r III an d the R efo rm P lan o f L o risM e lik o v ,” Journal o f Modern History 33 (D e c e m b e r 1961): 3 8 5 -8 6 ; S h eb ek o , Khronika, 144. 63. “D elo 1 m arta 1881 goda: Protsess Z heliabova, Perovskoi i drugikh,” in “Narodnaia volia” pered tsarskim sudom, 2 vols., ed. A. V. Iakim ova-D ikovskaia et al. (M oscow : Izd. Politkatorzhan, 1930), 1:55; “Protsess 17-ti narodovol’tsev v 1883 godu,” Byloe 9 (1906): 207; Tikhom irov, Konstitutsionalistyl 7 8-84. 64. B ogucharskii, Iz istorii politicheskoi bor’by, 188; P. A. Zaionchkovskii, ed.,

196

Notes to Pages 3 2 -3 6

Dnevnik D. A. Miliutina, 4 vols. (M oscow : G os. b ib lio tek a im eni L enina, 1950), 4 :2 5 -2 6 ; Z aionchkovskii, Krizis samoderzJtaviia, 28 4 -8 5 , 291; Kireev, cited in Krizis samoderzhaviia, 148n. 65. See N. V. Nabrekov, “Vokrag 1 m arta: Iz gazetnoi khroniki,” in Narodovol’tsy posle 1-go marta 1881 goda, ed. A. V. Iakim ova-D ikovskaia et al. (M oscow: Izd. Politkatorzhan, 1933): 6 0 -6 1 ; D. O lsu f’ev, “T sareubiistvo 1-go m arta i M oskva: Iz v o sp o m in a n ii o b u c h e n ic h e s k ik h g o d a k h ,” Vozrozhdenie (1 4 M a rc h 1931); A leksandr B enua, Moi vospominaniia, 2 vols. (M oscow: Nauka, 1990), 1:387. 66. G olovnin, cited in Zaionchkovskii, Krizis samoderzhaviia, 382; W itte, cited in L. T. Senchakova, ‘“ S viashchennaia druzhina’ i ee sostav,” Vestnik Moskovskogo universiteta, ser. 9: History, 2 (1967): 68; Shebeko, Khronika, 189; Stephen L ukashe­ vich, “T he H oly B rotherhood: 1881-1883,” American Slavic and East European Re­ view 18 (D ecem ber 1959): 4 9 8 -503. 67. Senchakova, “ ‘Sviashchennaia d ru z h in a /” 6 3 -8 3 ; Tikhom irov, Konstitutsionalisty, 1 09-10; Lukashevich, “Holy B rotherhood,” 491, 5 0 5 -9 ; Zaionchkovskii, Krizis samoderzhaviia, 3 9 8 -9 9 ; Sedov, Geroicheskii period, 307. 68. S ee H eilbronner, “R eform Plan,” 3 8 6 -9 7 , esp. 3 9 1 -9 2 ; Z aionchkovskii, Krizis samoderzhaviia, 384; P. V. A kul’shin and S. L. Chernov, “Ignat’ev, N. P .” in OI, 2:32 0 -2 1 . 69. PSZ, ser. 3, vol. 1, no. 350 (14 August). 7 0 . Sobranie uzakonenii i rasporiazhenii praviteVstva, izdavaemoe pri PraviteVstvuiushchem senate (St. Petersburg: Senatskâia tip., 1881), no. 94, art. 616. 71. U ntil 1885, the French police could arrest anyone w ithout a warrant: Louis A ndrieux, Souvenirs d ’im préfet de police, 16th ed., 2 vols. (Paris: J. R ouff & Cie., 1885), 1:112. 72. Police D epartm ent directive, 5 Septem ber 1881, RG IA gM , f. 46, op. 1, d. 1374.11. 127-33 ob. (from a typed copy furnished to the author by lu. F. O vchenko). 73. Dokladnaia zapiska direktora departamenta politsii Lopukhina, rassmotrennaia v Komitete Ministrov . . . ianvaria 1905 g., pref. N. L enin (G eneva: V pered, 1906), 3. 74. R ichard Pipes, The Russian Revolution (New York: Vintage Books, 1991), 75; M ulukaev, Politsiia v Rossii, 4 6 -4 7 ; T iutiunnik, “D epartam ent politsii,” 51. 75. Police D epartm ent directive, 5 Septem ber 1881, R G IA gM , f. 46, op. 1, d. 1374.11. 132-33; M ulukaev, Politsiia v Rossii, 46 (exile decision o f 27 January 1897); A. K. D rezen, ed., Tsarism v bor’be s revoliutsiei 1905-1907 g.: Sbomik dokumentov (M oscow: Gos. so tsial’no-ekonom icheskoe izd., 1936), 35; Volker Rabe, Der Wider­

spruch von Rechtsstaatlichkeit und strafender Verwaltung in Russland, 1881-1917: Motive, Handhabung und Auswirkungen der administrativen Verbannung von Revolu­ tionären, W issenschaftliche B eiträge K arlsruhe, no. 14 (K arlsruhe: Verlag M. W ahl, 1985), 145. 76. K. M avrodi, “K ratkii ocherk revoliutsionnogo dvizheniia v Rossii,” GARF, f. 102, op. 253, d. 9 8 ,1 . 67; Slukhotskii, “O cherk deiatel’nosti M inisterstva iustitsii,” 2 7 7 -7 8 . 77. M ikhail G ubskii, “Ssylka,” ES, 31:384; A. D. M argolis, Tiur'ma i ssylka v imperatorskoi Rossii: Issledovaniia i arkhivnye nakhodki (M oscow : L anterna and V ita, 1995), 21. O n p easan t co m m u n es’ ex ilin g th eir m em bers, see R abe, Wider­ spruch, 4 5 -4 7 . 78. Zaionchkovskii, Rossiiskoe samoderzhavie, 158; “O bzor d eiatel’nosti D e­ partam enta p o lits ii. . . ” GARF, f. 102, op. 253, d. 98,1. 7; P olice D epartm ent report.

Notes to Pages 36-41

197

27 S eptem ber 1898, GARF, f. 542, op. 1, d. 334,11. 1-10. 79. Dokladnaia zapiska . . . Lopukhina, 7. For m ore exam ples o f binding orders regulating nonsecurity m atters, see G essen, IskliuchiteVnoe polozhenie, 2 1 8 -32; Peter W a ld ro n , “ S ta te s o f E m e rg e n c y : A u to c ra c y a n d E x tr a o r d in a r y L e g is la tio n , 1881-1917,” Revolutionary Russia 8 (June 1995), 9 -1 1 . 80. See Fosdick, European Police Systems, 20-33. 81. W illiam C. Fuller, Jr., “C ivilians in R ussian M ilitary C ourts, 1881-1904,” Russian Review 41 (July 1982): 293, 2 9 7 -3 0 5 ; “O bzor deiatelnosti D epartam enta p o lits ii. . . ” GARF, f. 102, op. 253, d. 9 8 ,1 .4 1 ; Szeftel, “Personal Inviolability,” 19n. 82. Andreev, “C hislennost’ i sostav,” 5 5 -5 6 ; K. la. Z agorskii, “V 1881-1882 gg.: V ospom inaniia,” KS 76 (1931): 177; R abe, Widerspruch 7 3 -7 4 , 186-92, 214, 3 5 1 ,3 5 8 . 83. Z aionchkovskii, Krizis samoderzhaviia, 305-13. 84. Z aionchkovskii, Dnevnik D. A. Miliutina, 4:54; P. E. Shchegolev, Okkranniki i avantiuristy (M oscow : Izd. Politkatorzhan, 1930), 5 -1 1 ; V. E. K el’ner, ed., 1 marta 1881 goda: Kazn ’ imperatora Aleksandra 11: Dokumenty i vospominaniia (Leningrad: L enizdat, 1991), 2 0 -2 1 ; Dnevnik E. Ia. Perettsa (1880-1883), pref. A. E. Presniakov (M oscow: Gos. izd, 1927), 82, 84-85. 8 5 . 1. M ichael A ronson, Troubled Waters: The Origins o f the 1881 Anti-Jewis Pogroms in Russia (Pittsburgh: U niversity o f Pittsburgh Press, 1990), 5 0 -5 4 , 164-66, 173; Fuller, “R ussian M ilitary Courts,” 294. 86. Dnevnik E. A. Perettsa; Zaionchkovskii, Dnevnik D. A. Miliutina; Valuev, Dnevnik, 171. 87. Faleev, “R ossiia pod okhranoi,” 24 -2 8 ; A. I. G alinovskii, “Z akliuchitel’noe postanovlenie,” GARF, f. 1467, op. 1, d. 396,1. 270 ob. 88. Z aionchkovskii, Krizis samoderzhaviia, 19-20; A. I. G alinovskii, “Zakliuchitel’noe postanovlenie,” GARF, f. 1467, op. 1, d. 396,11. 2 8 4 ,2 9 3 . 89. Sobranie uzakonenii, 9 Septem ber 1881, no. 94, art. 616. 90. R abe, Widerspruch, chap. 3; V. I. Lenin, “T ri zaprosa” (D ecem ber 1911), in PSS, 21:114. 91. L idtke, The Outlawed Party, 7 7 -7 8 , 3 3 9-45; T héodore R einach, De Tétât de siège: Etude historique et juridique (Paris: L ib rairie C otillon, 1885), 2 3 9 -4 9 , 2 5 6 -5 9 , 115-19; “E tat de siège,” in Dictionnaire général de la politique, ed. M aurice B lock (Paris: O. Lorenz, 1873), 1:917. 92. B ritish rule in India, for exam ple, was often very harsh. See R ichard J. Popplew ell, Intelligence and Imperial Defence: British Intelligence and the Defence o f the Indian Empire, 1904-1924 (London: Frank Cass, 1995), 45, 1 0 5 -1 1 ,1 6 7 ,1 7 4 -7 5 . 93. R ichard Pipes has argued that the security law m arked the beginning o f R u ssia’s developm ent into a police state: Russia under the Old Regime (New York: C harles Scribner’s Sons, 1974), 3 0 5 ,3 0 7 . 94. O n bureaucratic “liberals” and “conservatives,” the institutions they dom i­ nated, and the struggle am ong them under A lexander m , see Taranovski, “Politics o f C ounter-R eform ,” chap. 3. 95. Sobranie uzakonenii, 9 Septem ber 1881, no. 94, art. 616. 96. “P olozhenie o neglasnom politseiskom nadzore,” 1 M arch 1882, GARF, f. 102, op. 316, 1915, d. 367,11. 166-67; D epartm ent o f S tate Police directive, 9 A pril 1882, in KSS, 8 2 -8 4 ; law o f 12 M arch 1882, in P. M. L iukevich, com p., Politseiskii

nadzor: Rukovodstvo po osushchestvleniiu podsledstvennogo, sudebnogo i administrativnogo nadzorov (L om zha: Tip. G ub em sk o g o P ravleniia, 1913), 4 2 -4 6 ; R abe,

198

Notes to Pages 41 -4 4

Widerspruch, 112-13, 203; B aberow ski, Autokratie und Justiz, 601, 705. 97. “O b zo r d eiatel’nosti D epartam enta politsii . . . 1 m art 188 1 -2 0 o k tiab r’ 1894,” GARF, f. 102, op. 253, d. 98,1. 10; Gessen, Iskliuchitel’noe polozhenie, 5 -1 4 ; Police D epartm ent directive, 1 D ecem ber 1889, in KSS, 5 0 5-7. 98. See T. A. Soboleva, Tainopis ' v istorii Rossii: Istoriia kriptograficheskoi sluzhby Rossii XVIII-nachala XX v. (M oscow : M ezhdunarodnye otnosheniia, 1994), 97-1 0 0 , 157-58; Orzhekhovskii, Samoderzhavie, 73. Perlustration developed in w est­ ern Europe even e arlie r Payne, Police State, 269-71; Le Clère, “Police politique,” in A ub ert et al., U Etat et sa police en France, 107; Tony B unyan, The History and Practice o f the Political Police in Britain (London: Julian Friedm an, 1976), 5 8 -6 4 ,1 9 7 ; Porter, Origins o f the Vigilant State, 168; Bernard Porter, Plots and Paranoia: A History o f Political Espionage in Britain, 1790-1988 (London: U nw in Hym an, 1989), 76-82. 99. PSZ, ser. 2, vol. 53, no. 58967 (30 October 1878); directive on perlustration, 5 June 1882, GARF, f. 102, op. 316,1910, d. 333,11.1-6. Tampering with the mail was unlaw­ ful for postal employees (penal code, in Volkov and Filipov, Svod zakonov, vol. 15, a rt 1102). 100. S. M aiskii, “C hem ye kabinety: Iz vospom inanii byvshego tsenzora,” Byloe 13 (1918): 195-97; A. Bogdanovich, Tri poslednikh samoderzhtsa (M oscow: Novosti, 1990), 65 (diary entry for 30 M arch 1881); L eroy-B eaulieu, L ’Empire des tsars et les russes, 2 : 1 5 7 - 5 8 ; E m e r s o n , M etternich and the P olitical Police, 4 6 ; S. E . Kryzhanovskii, “O perliustratsii,” Novyi zhumal 121 (1975): 123-25; “M aterialy po noveishei istorii russkoi tsenzury,” Osvobozhdenie 1 (1903): 20 5 -6 ; Bakai, “Pri polit­ sii,” GARF, f. 5881, op. 1, d. 221,1. 189; M. G. Fleer, ed., “R evoliutsiia 1905-1906 gg. v doneseniiakh inostrannykh diplom atov,” KA 16 (1926), 220. 101. R iberette, “Police de N apoléon,” in A ubert et al., L ’Etat et sa police en France, 4 6 -4 9 ; O rzhekhovskii, Samoderzhavie, 73; Z aionchkovskii, Krizis samoderzhaviia, 225; “O perliustratsii,” 5 June 1882, GARF, f. 102, op. 3 1 6 ,1 9 1 0 , d. 333,11. 1-6; R. Kantor, “K istorii chem ykh kabinetov,” KS 37 (1927): 93; Tiutiunnik, “D epar­ tam ent politsii,” 106 (num ber o f copies); M aiskii, “C hem ye kabinety,” 186-88, 190 (Fom in and Z ybin); Kantor, “K istorii chem ykh kabinetov,” 9 4 -9 5 ; Z. I. Peregudova, “Vazhnyi istochnik po istorii revoliutsionnogo dvizheniia: K ollektsiia perliustratsii TsG A O R SSSR,” in Istoricheskii opyt Velikogo Oktiabria: K 90-letiiu akademika I. I. Mintsa (M oscow: N auka, 1986), 377, 3 8 2-83 (Zverev). 102. Tiutiunnik, “D epartam ent politsii,” 106. 103. Peregudova, “V azhnyi istochnik,” 3 8 3 -8 9 ; Z aionchkovskii, Rossiiskoe samoderzhavie, 307; intercepted letter, GARF, f. 102, OO, 1911, d. 9, ch. 46, lit. b, 1. 21; M aiskii, “C hem ye kabinety,” 190. 104. PSZ, ser. 3, vol. 2, no. 992 (25 June) and no. 1022 (1882); law o f 16 July, cited in Shebeko, Khronika, 2 2 4 -2 5 ; directive o f 31 D ecem ber 1882, GARF, f. 102, op. 316, 1915, d. 367, 11. 2 1 2 -1 3 ; P olice D epartm ent report, 22 S eptem ber 1903, GARF, f. 102, O O , 1902, d. 825,1. 211 ob.; M enshchikov, “C hernaia kniga,” GARF, f. 1723, op. l , d . 3 7 5 ,1 .6 9 6 . 105. D irective o f 29 January 1883, GARF, f. 102, op. 316, 1915, d. 367, 11. 2 7 0 -7 1 ; N. A. T ro itsk ii, “ D eg aev sh ch in a,” Voprosy istorii, 1976, no. 3 :1 2 5 -2 7 ; Dnevnik Gosudarstvennogo sekretariaA. A. Polovtsova, vol. 1, 1883-1886 (M oscow: N auka, 1966), 157 (diary entry for 18 D ecem ber 1883). 106. Z agorskii, “V 1881-1882 gg.,” 165. 107. Sudeikin, quoted in A. N. Bakh, Zapiski narodovol’tsa (M oscow : M olodaia gvardiia, 1929), 185; Z agorskii, “V 1881-1882 gg.,” 169-73; A nna PribylevaK orba, “S erg ei P etro v ich D egaev: Iz vo sp o m in an ii,” Byloe 4 (1906): 5; N orm an

Notes to Pages 4 4 -4 8

199

N aim ark, Terrorists and Social Democrats: The Russian Revolutionary Movement un­ der Alexander III (C am bridge, M ass.: Harvard U niversity Press, 1983), 5 3 -5 4 ; R. M. Kantor, “Provokator Stepan Belov,” KS 10 (1924): 141-50. 108. T roitskii, “D egaevshchina,” 127, 129n, 132-33; Pavel A ksel’rod, Perezhitoe i peredumannoe, intro, by A. A scher (Berlin, 1923; Cam bridge: O riental Research Partners, 1975), 4 3 5 -3 6 ; K. A. S olov’ev, “Degaev, S. P ,” in 01, 1:687; Von Hardesty and John D. Unruh, Jr., “T he E nigm a o f Degaev-Pell,” South Dakota History 3 (W in­ ter 1972): 1-29. T hree years after his w ife’s death in 1904, D egaev m arried one o f his students; he died in 1921 in B ryn M awr, Pennsylvania, w here she had taught. 109. Shebeko, Khronika, 202; A ndrieux, Souvenirs, 1:189-90, 199, 2:173; A. P. K oznov, “Z ag ra n ic h n y i p o litic h e sk ii sysk, 1 9 0 0 -fe v ra l’ 1917 gg.,” Kentavr 1 -2 (1992): 98; Zhukov to Police D epartm ent director, 1882, GARF, f. 102, op. 3 1 6 ,1 9 1 5 , d. 3 6 7 , 11. 2 2 8 - 6 9 ; M ik h a il L em k e, “N a sh z a g ra n ic h n y i sy sk , 1 8 8 1 -1 8 8 3 gg.: P ravitel’stvennoe sodruzhestvo s Evropoi,” KL 5 (1922), 6 7 -8 4 ; V. K. Agafonov, Zagranichnaia okhranka (M oscow: Kniga, 1918), 16-21. 110. “K ar’era P. I. Rachkovskogo: Dokum enty,” Byloe 2 (1917): 78; Zagranich-

naia agentura Departamenta politsii: Zapiski S. Svatikova i dokumenty zagranichnoi agentury, ed. I. N ikitinskii and S. M arkov (M oscow : G lavnoe arkhivnoe upravlenie N K V D SSSR, 1941), 5 -8 1 ; “Rachkovskii, P. I.,” in Padenie, 7:403^1; Agafonov, Zagranichnaia okhranka, 2 6 -2 7 , 51; S. Iu. W itte, Vospominaniia, 3 vols. (Tallin and M oscow : Skif-A leks, 1994), 2:160. 111. Z aionchkovskii, Rossiiskoe samoderzhavie, 1 8 3 n ll5 . It is therefore incor­ rect to suggest that regular reporting on the public m ood by the governors was first in­ stituted in R ussia in 1915; ironically, provincial officials in 1915 still hesitated to sub­ m it negative assessm ents o f public life. See Holquist, “A lpha and Om ega,” 4 27-28. 112. Z aionchkovskii, Rossiiskoe samoderzhavie, 303-5. 113. Shebeko, Khronika, 225, 247, 2 9 0-95, 3 2 3-35, 3 36-38; Fricke, Bismarcks Prätorianer, 167-68; PSZ, ser. 3, vol. 4, no. 2445 (5 O ctober); M argolis, 'Hur’ma i ssylka, 113-14; K. M avrodi, “K ratkii ocherk revoliutsionnogo dvizheniia v Rossii,” GARF, f. 102, op. 253, d. 98,11. 5 0 -5 1 ; Leonid M enshchikov, Okhrana i revoliutsiia: Kistorii tainykh politicheskikh organizatsii v Rossi, 3 vols. (M oscow : Izd. P olitkatorzhan, 1925-1928), vol. 2 ,1 :1 6 -1 7 . 114. N. A. Troitskii, “Narodnaia volia”pered tsarskim sudom, 1880-1891 gg. (Sara­ tov: Izd. Saratovskogo universiteta, 1971), 18, 53, 106-7, 162-63; N. A. Troitskii, Tsarizm pod sudom progressivnoi obshchestvermosti, 1866-1895 gg. (Moscow: M ysl’, 1979), 13. 115. See E. D. N ikitina, “N arodovol’cheskie protsessy v tsifrakh,” in Iakim ovaD ik o v sk aia et al., “Narodnaia volia“ pered tsarskim sudom, 2 :1 2 6 -2 7 , 154; E. I. Iakobenko, “Protsess 1 m arta 1887 goda,” in ibid., 2:8 4 -9 1 ; D erek O fford, The Russ­ ian Revolutionary Movement in the 1880s (Cam bridge: C am bridge U niversity Press, 1986), 3 8 - 3 9 ,5 0 - 5 1 ,6 5 - 6 7 ,7 2 ,7 5 - 7 6 . 116. Iakobenko in Iakim ova-D ikovskaia et al., “Narodnaia volia ” pered tsarskim sudom, 2 :8 5 ,1 0 7 -8 . See also M enshchikov, Okhrana i revoliutsiia, vol. 2 ,2 :7 5 -7 7 . 117. D irectiv e o f 23 M ay 1887, in lstoriia politsii dorevoliutsionnoi Rossii (M o sco w : M o s k o v sk a ia v y ss h a ia sh k o la m ilits ii, 1981), 6 1 - 6 3 ; M e n sh c h ik o v , Okhrana i revoliutsiia, 1:24; Shebeko, Khronika, 336-38. 118. Bakh, Zapiski narodovoVtsa, 170-71, 184; Lev Tikhom irov, Pochemu ia perestal byt ’ revoliutsionerom, rev. ed. (M oscow: Tip. vil’de, 1895), 2 4 -2 5 ; Shebeko, Khronika, 325; Offord, Russian Revolutionary Movement, 7 7 -79. 119. Naim ark, Terrorists and Social Democrats, 232-35; Rabe, Widerspruch, 144.

200

Notes to Pages 4 9-52

2. The Security Police System 1. George Kennan, Siberia and the Exile System, 2 vols. (New York: T he C en­ tury Com pany, 1891), l:iv, 258. See a sim ilar assertion in Petrunkevich, “Iz zapisok,” 245. Ironically, in 1885 K ennan’s own governm ent w as transform ing the A m erican In­ dians into pow erless subjects o f the state (see W alter L. W illiam s, “A m erican Im peri­ alism and the Indians,” in Indians in American History: An Introduction, ed. Frederick E. H o x ie [A rlin g to n H eig h ts, 111.: H arlan D av id so n , 1988], 2 3 5 -3 6 ); and 9,6 9 9 (m ostly Black) prisoners w ere leased out in 1886 to private entrepreneurs, largely in the form er slave states, under terrible w ork conditions (see Alex L ichtenstein, Twice

the Work o f Free Labor: The Political Economy o f Convict Labor in the New South [London and New York: Verso, 1996], 1 9 ,5 2 -5 3 ,1 3 0 ,1 3 5 ). 2. Iulii M artov, Zapiski sotsial-demokrata (Berlin, 1922; Cam bridge: O riental R esearch Partners, 1975), 107-8; Petrunkevich, “Iz zapisok,” 117; K orolenko, Istoriia moego sovremennika, 4:103. 3. See Bakh, Zapiski narodovoVtsa, 15-16, 43, 185; V. M. Chernov, Pered burei: Vospominaniia (New York: Izd. im eni Chekhova, 1953), 8 1 -8 5 , 173; D eich, Za polveka, 1:236, 2 4 8 -4 9 , 296, 2:71, 188; O. A. E rm anskii, Iz perezhitogo, 1887-1921 (M oscow -Leningrad: Gos. izd., 1927), 47; Peter A. Garvi, Zapiski sotsial-demokrata, 1906-1921 (Newtonville, M ass: O riental R esearch Partners, 1982), 102, 143; G rigorii G ershuni, Iz nedavnego proshlogo (Paris: Tribune russe, 1908), 15, 107, 246; G essen, “V dvukh vekakh,” 61, 66; A. Kizevetter, Na rubezhe dvukh stoletii: Vospominaniia, 1881-1914, intro, by R ichard G. Robbins, Jr. (Prague: O rbis, 1929; C am bridge: O ri­ ental R esearch P artners, 1974), 43, 391, 4 4 6 -4 8 , 522; K orolenko, Istoriia moego sovremennika, 3:18, 9 5 ,4 :1 8 3 -8 6 ; K ropotkin, Zapiski revoliutsionera, 351; P. N. Lepeshinskii, Na povorote, 4th ed. (M oscow: Gos. izd. politicheskoi literatury, 1955), 56; M aklakov, Iz vospominanii, 1 33-35; M iliukov, Vospominaniia, 81, 121, 140, 145; Petrunkevich, “Iz zapisok,” 117, 123-24, 146; V. Z enzinov, Perezhitoe (N ew York: Izd. im eni Chekhova, 1953), 6 2 ,1 6 6 . 4. V. Bakharev, Kak derzhat *sebia na doprosakh (Geneva: Tip. Soiuza, 1900), 12-17, 23, 32, 39; Lepeshinskii, Na povorote, 56; Zenzinov, Perezhitoe, 166; Ts. Zelikson-Bobrovskaia, Zapiski riadovogo podpoTshchika (1894-1914), pt. 1 (Moscow: Gos. izd., 1922), 3 1-32; “Pravila povedeniia revoliutsionnykh sotsial-demokratov, imevshie khozhdenie nakanune I s’ezda R SD R P” in lu. S. U ral’skii, ParoT: “Ot Petrova Iz istorii postanovki konspiratsii v deiateVnosti “Iskry” (Moscow: M ysl’, 1988), 220; M ar­ tov, Zapiski, 156-57; Shapovalov, Po doroge k marksizmu, 1:31,2:104. 5. G ershuni, Iz nedavnego proshlogo, 15. 6. Zenzinov, Perezhitoe, 60; M ikhail K richevskii, ed., Dnevnik A. S. Suvorina (M oscow and Petrograd: Izd. Frenkel’, 1923), 15-16 (diary fragm ent, 1887). 7. B ab ero w sk i, Autokratie und Justiz , 6 91; D eich , Za polveka, 1 :2 3 5 -3 7 , 2 4 8 -4 9 ; K ropotkin, Zapiski revoliutsionera, 351; N ovitskii, Iz vospominanii zhandarma, 27. 8. S ee “Vodovozov, V. V ,” in Ol, 1:416; “ Vodovozov, V. V ,” in RP, 1:454; N ovitskii, Iz vospominanii zhandarma, 194n5; L eonard S chapiro, The Communist Party o f the Soviet Union (New York: R andom H ouse, 1959), 29. 9. Police D epartm ent report, 22 Septem ber 1903, GARF, f. 102, O O , 1902, d. 825,1. 207; lu. F. O vchenko, “M oskovskoe okhrannoe otdelenie v b o r’be s revoliutsionnym dvizheniem v 1880-1904 gg.” (K andidat, diss., M oskovskii gosudarstvennyi universitet, 1989), 78.

Notes to Pages 5 2 -5 5

201

10. V. Vodovozov, “V. D. Novitskii: Iz vospom inanii,” Byloe 5 - 6 (1917): 83-88. See also M enshchikov, Okhrana i revoliutsiia, vol. 2, 1:24-25, 157; Bakharev, Kak derzhat'sebia na doprosakh, 17. 11. Svod voennykh postanovlenii, 2d ed. (St. P eterburg: Tip. G e n era l’nogo Shtaba, 1889), art. 656. 12. Z aionchkovskii, Krizis samoderzhaviia, 176; Police D epartm ent report, 22 Septem ber 1903, GARF, f. 102, O O , 1902, d. 825, 11. 2 1 5 -1 5 ob.; M artynov, Moia sluzhba, 1 1 6 -1 8 ; L o p u k h in , Iz itogov, 1 7 -1 9 , 22; A lek san d er I. S piridovich, “Pri tsarsk o m rezhim e,” in Arkhiv russkoi revoliutsii, ed. I. V. G essen, vol. 15 (B erlin, 1926), 37. 13. Spisok obshchego sostava chinov Otdel’nogo Korpusa Zhandarmov (St. Pe­ tersburg: Tip. O td el’nogo K orpusa Z handarm ov, 1907-1915) (num ber o f gendarm e sta tio n s); Russkii politicheskii sysk za granitsei (Paris: M in u v sh ee, 1914), 221; Z aionchkovskii, Krizis samoderzhaviia, 173 (num ber o f gendarm es at provincial sta­ tions); “Z apiska dlia pam iati,” 11 February 1902, GARF, f. 102, OO , 1902, d. 1791,1. 3 ob.; “D o k lad n aia zap isk a S ankt-P eterburgskogo gubem atora,” 11 January 1906, GARF, f. 102, O O (II), 1906, d. 5, ch. 1, 11. 10-11 ob.; M artynov, Moia sluzhba, 21 (provincial gendarm es). 14. Spiridovich, “Pri tsarskom rezhim e,” 115; M artynov, Moia sluzhba, 11-14 (gendarm e divisions); A. C. Stepanov, “M oskovsko-kievskoe zhandarm skoe upravlenie zheleznoi dorogi, 1 8 9 7 -1 9 17” (Dipl, rabota, M G IA I, 1983), 17-18, 29, 40—41 ; Spisok obshchego sostava (10 July 1911), 16-20 (railroad gendarm es). 15. Z aionchkovskii, Rossiiskoe samoderzhavie, 163; Spisok obshchego sostava (1 June 1907), 639; Payne, Police State, 21; Svod voennykh postanovlenii, art. 691; A. N. Iarm ysh, “K aratel’nye organy tsarizm a na U kraine v kontse X IX -nachale X X v.” (D oktor, d iss., K h a r’k o v ski i iu rid ich esk ii in stitu t, 1990), 16 3 -6 4 ; A. I. IvanchinPisarev, “Iz m oikh vospom inanii: Po doroge v S ibir’, v K rasnoiarske i M inusinske,” KS 5 7 -5 8 (1929): 304; Henry R eichm an, Railwaymen and Revolution: Russia, 1905 (B erkeley and L os Angeles: U niversity o f C alifornia Press, 1987); Spiridovich, “Pri tsarskom rezhim e,” 115-16. 16. C o lo n e l S o sio n k o v , c o m p ., Sbornik primerov iz sluzhby zhandarma (Z am ost’e: U p . M . G erguta, 1903), 7 -8 , 3 5 -3 6 ,4 2 . 17. Iz prikazov po Shtabu OtdeVnogo korpusa zhandarmov za 1901 g., cited by E lena Tim ofeeva, form erly o f GARF, in a personal com m unication to the author. 18. Pom erantsev, com p., Svod znanii obiazatel ’nykh dlia kazhdogo unter-ofitsera . . . po nabliudateVnoi ikh deiatel’nosti (K har’kov: Z il’berberg, 1897), 3 4 ,4 2 ,4 6 . 19. N. V. Shatina, “M estnyi gosudarstvennyi apparat sam oderzhaviia v b o r’be s pervoi rossiiskoi revoliutsiei: N a prim ere M oskvy” (K andidat, diss., M G IA I, 1989), 217; M artynov, Moia sluzhba, 2 1 -2 2 . T here was a police ch ief (ispravnik) in each dis­ trict (uezd), a captain in each tow nship (stanovoi pristav), and a sheriff (uriadnik) in each ward (volost’). In 1900, the entire em pire had only 1,582 tow nship officers and 6,874 sheriffs: see N eil B. W eissm an, “R egular Police in T sarist R ussia, 1900-1914,” Russian Review 44 (1985): 4 6 -5 7 . 20. Z aionchkovskii, Rossiiskoe samoderzhavie, 163; Spisok obshchego sostava (1 June 1907), 639. 21. Service records, GARF, f. 58, op. 6, dd. 22, 79, 92; and op. 14, dd. 177, 180-81, 1 8 3 -8 4 ,1 8 6 -8 9 . 22. N ikolai V ladim irovich Veselago, “T he D epartm ent o f Police, 1911-1913, from the R ecollections o f N ikolai V ladim irovich Veselago” '(an interview conducted in

202

Notes to Pages 55-60

1962 by E d w ard E llis S m ith), E dw ard E llis S m ith C o llection, H oover In stitution A rchives, p. 19; Spiridovich, “Pri tsarskom rezhim e,” 108; Z avarzin, Zhandarmy i revoliutsionery, 34. 23. S piridovich, “Pri tsarskom rezhim e,” 108-10. In 1873, the color o f gen­ darm e uniform s ch anged from aquam arine to m idnight blue (personal com m unica­ tion to the au th o r by S. Iu. Sam otin, cu rator o f the costum e collection o f the State H istorical M useum , M oscow , 28 M ay 1996); A. A. M iroliubov, “Z handarm eriia,” in OI, 2:167). 24. O rzhekhovskii, Samoderzhavie, 155-57; M artynov, Moia sluzhba, 87. To graduate in the upper third, one had to pass all the final exam s with an average o f ten (out o f a possible tw elve) points: Iu. G alushko and A. Kolechikov, Shkola rossiiskogo ofitserstva: Istoricheskii spravochnik (M oscow: R usskii mir, 1993), 151. 25. S piridovich, “Pri tsarskom rezhim e,” 110-11. S ee also M artynov, Moia sluzhba, 17-18. 26. M artynov, Moia sluzhba, 18. O n the program o f study, see Z. I. Peregudova, “M etody b o r’by D epartam enta politsii s revoliutsionnym dvizheniem : Kadry, kursy, program m y,” in Fakel, 1990: Istoriko-revoliutsionnyi aVmanakh (M oscow : Politizdat, 1990), 198. 27. M artynov, Moia sluzhba, 16-19. 28. Spiridovich, “Pri tsarskom rezhim e,” 110. 29. G endarm e Corps rules, PSZ, ser. 2, vol. 42, pt. 2, no. 44956, art. 47 (9 Sep­ tem ber 1867); Spiridovich, “Pri tsarskom rezhim e,” 112. 30. M artynov, Moia sluzhba, 27; Zavarzin, Zhandarmy i revoliutsionery, 36; Spiridovich, “Pri tsarskom rezhim e,” 115. 31. S ee M oscow S ecu rity B ureau to P o lice D epartm ent, 25 O cto b er 1900, GARF, f. 63, op. 53, d. 201,1. 3; M artynov, Moia sluzhba, 2 8-29. 32. M artynov, Moia sluzhba, 8; “Iz vospom inanii M. E. Bakaia: Provokatory i provokatsiia,” Byloe 8 (1908): 109; Porter, Plots and Paranoia, 82-88. 33. P e tru n k ev ich , “Iz zap iso k ,” 1 4 6 -4 8 . K. F. S ch ram m , w h o h e ad e d th e M oscow G endarm e Station in the 1890s, was a kind m an but a poor police official. See M artynov, Moia sluzhba, 20, 2 4 -2 5 , 33; M enshchikov, Okhrana i revoliutsiia, 1:164-67, 365. 34. O rzh ek h o v sk ii, Samoderzhavie, 1 6 7 -6 9 ; V. M . G essen, “O m estnoi re ­ form e,” Pravo, 18 M ay 1903, no. 21; Spiridovich, “Pri tsarskom rezhim e,” 109; Jef­ frey B ro o k s, When Russia Learned to Read: Literacy and Popular Literature, 1861-1917 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton U niversity Press, 1985), 142-46, 208-11. 35. Z av arzin , Zhandarmy i revoliutsionery, 35; S pirid o v ich , “Pri tsarsk o m rezhim e,” 110; Korolenko, Istoriia moego sovremennika, 3:53-54. 36. On prosecutors’ role in gendarm e investigations, see Police D epartm ent re­ port, 22 Septem ber 1903, GARF, f. 102, OO, 1902, d. 825,1. 214; A. F. Koni, Sobranie sochinenii v vos'mi tomakh, vol. 2 o f Vospominaniia o dele Very Zasulich (M oscow: Iu rid ic h esk aia lite ratu ra, 1966), 3 3 3 -3 4 ; M artynov, Moia sluzhba, 4 6 -5 6 ; Ustav ugolovnogo sudopmizvodstva, in Volkov and Filipov, Svod zakonov, vol. 15, pt. 2. 37. G endarm e C orps directive, 14 February 1875, in KSS, 2 6 -33. 38. O rzhekhovskii, Samoderzhavie, 166. 39. Z aionchkovskii, Krizis samoderzhaviia, 74; Police D epartm ent to provincial gendarm e stations, 21 M ay 1887, in KSS, 155-57. 40. Police D epartm ent to governors and gendarm e chiefs, 1 D ecem ber 1889, in KSS, 5 0 7 -1 1 .

Notes to Pages 6 0 -6 4

203

4 1. O v ch en k o , “M o sk o v sk o e o k h ran n o e o td ele n ie ,” 78; S u d eik in , cited in K uz’m ina, “S.-Peterburgskoe okhrannoe otdelenie,” 32; Martynov, Moia sluzhba, 23-24. 42. Spiridovich, “Pri tsarskom rezhim e,” 124-25. 43. Police D epartm ent report, 22 Septem ber 1903, GARF, f. 102, OO , 1902, d. 825.1. 213 ob. 44. M. V. Sidorova, “Istoriki s Fontanki, 16,” Otechestvermye arkhivy, 1993, no. 4 :4 0 -4 1 . See the originals in GARF, f. 102, op. 252, and excerpts in “Iz obzora vazhneishikh doznanii o gosudarstvennykh prestupleniiakh za 1901 god,” Byloe 3 (1907): 23 9 -5 8 . 4 5 . P la to c o n sid ere d fa ilu re to d en o u n ce law b reak ers b lam ew orthy {Laws 6.762d, 11.917d, 932d), and R om an legal statutes guaranteed significant m aterial re­ w ards to delators (W illiam G. Sinnigen, “T he R om an Secret Service,” Classical Jour­ nal 57 [O ctober 1961]: 6 5 -6 6 ). O n the history o f denunciations in m odem Europe, see the special issue o f the Journal o f Modem History 68 (D ecem ber 1996). 46. Isabel de M adariaga, Russia in the Age o f Catherine the Great (New Haven, Conn.: Yale U niversity Press, 1981), 22; A lexander n , cited in “Tsarskii listok,” Byloe 1 (1908): 97; B ukhshtab, “P osle vystrela,” 67; K letochnikov, cited in Tikhom irov, Zagovorshchiki i politsiia, 202; denunciations verified by the M oscow Security B u­ reau in 1902 (GARF, f. 63, op. 22, d. 44,11. 15-205). 47. Police D epartm ent directive, 26 June 1891, in Savitskii, com p., Sistematicheskii sbomik, 2 6 -2 8 . 48. Iulii Pesikov, Saratovskaia nakhodka: Proekt russkoi konstitutsii (Saratov: Slovo, 1993), 6 -9 . P esikov falsely asserts th at Ivanov had graduated in law from K azan ’ U niversity (Spisok obshchego sostava [26 February 1911], 195); the rest o f the account is probably true. 49. Iarm ysh, “K aratel’nye organy tsarizm a,” 134. 50. Z ubatov to Rataev, 1 M ay 1900, GARF, f. 102, OO , 1898, d. 2, ch. 1, lit. v, 1. 123; M artynov, Moia sluzhba, 22. 51. Police D epartm ent report, 22 Septem ber 1903, GARF, f. 102, OO, 1902, d. 825.1. 225 ob.; Spiridovich, “Pri tsarskom rezhime,” 117; M artynov, Moia sluzhba, 68. 52. See P. G. Kurlov, GibeV imperatorskoi Rossii (Berlin: O tto Kirchner, 1923), 5 -9 ; M artynov, Moia sluzhba, 16; Spiridovich, “Pri tsarskom rezhim e,” 108-9. 53. See, fo r exam ple, M oscow Security B ureau to Police Departm ent, 25 O cto­ ber 1900, GARF, f. 63, op. 53, d. 201,11. 1-5. 54. B udget records, GARF, f. 63, OO , 1898-1905, d. 2, t. 1 and 2. 55. Troitskii, “D egaevshchina,” 126; S. V. Zubatov, service records, GARF, f. 63, op. 53, d. 161,1. 121. 56. In the second h alf o f the nineteenth century, the rules requiring that the im ­ portance o f a given office correspond to the officeholder’s rank w ere “m ore or less o p e n ly flo u te d .” S ee D o m in ic C. B . L iev en , “T h e R u ssia n C iv il S e rv ice u n d e r N icholas II: Som e Variations on the Bureaucratic Them e,” Jarbücher fü r Geschichte Osteuropas 29 (1981): 366n4. 5 7 . K u z ’m in a , “ S .- P e t e r b u r g s k o e o k h r a n n o e o t d e l e n i e , ” 5 8 , 6 4 - 8 4 ; P a n k ra t’ev to P o lice D ep artm ent director, 31 A ugust 1906, G A RF, f. 102, op. 316, d. 9, ch. 1, 11. 2 0 -2 5 ob.; Z ubatov to Rataev, 26 A pril 1897, GA RF, f. 102, O O , 1898, d. 2, ch. 1,1. 139; “S .-P eterburgskoe okhrannoe o tdelenie v 1895-1901 gg.: ‘T ra d ’ ch in o v n ik a O td elen iia P. S tatkovskogo,” Byloe 16 (1921): 116; M artynov, Moia sluzhba, 29. 58. Police D epartm ent report, 27 M ay 1902, GARF, f. 5802, op. 1, d. 214,11.

204

Notes to Pages 6 4-68

6 -7 ; Police D epartm ent report, 22 Septem ber 1903, GARF, f. 102, 0 0 , 1902, d. 825, I. 202 ob.; T iutiunnik, “D epartam ent politsii,” 98. 59. R eport o f M oscow city governor, 25 Septem ber 1880, GARF, f. 109, op. 3d e k sp e d itsiia, 1880, d. 71 8 , 11. 9 -1 9 . U ntil 1905, M o sco w ’s city g o v e rn o r (oberpolitsmeister) was subordinated to the deputy interior m inister, w hile the St. Peters­ burg city g o v e rn o r (gradonachal’nik) an sw e red d ire c tly to the in te rio r m in iste r (Zaionchkovskii, Rossiiskoe samoderzhavie, 149n4). 60. Istoriia politsii, 6 1 -6 3 ; K uz’m ina, “S.-Peterburgskoe okhrannoe otdelenie,” 34; O vchenko, “M oskovskoe okhrannoe otdelenie,” 39-40. 61. Z aio n ch k o v sk ii, Rossiiskoe samoderzhavie, 166; K u z ’m ina, “S .-P eterburgskoe okhrannoe otdelenie,” 3 4 -3 5 , 57; Police D epartm ent report, 31 D ecem ber 1902, GARF, f. 102, OO, 1902, d. 825,11. 167 ob.-168 ob.; “O sozdanii Sysknogo otd elen iia v M oskve,” 1880, GA RF, f. 63, op. 1, 1880, d. 340, t. 1, 1. 375; “O bzor deiatel’nosti O tdeleniia po okhraneniiu obshchestvennoi bezopasnosti i poriadka v g. M oskve,” 25 M ay 1895, GARF, f. 102, op. 316, 1906, d. 215, 11. 1-8 ; O vchenko, “M oskovskaia ‘O khranka,’” 193. 62. Penal code, in Volkov and Filipov, Svod zakonov, vol. 15, art. 268; corre­ spondence, Ju n e-S ep tem b er 1902, GARF, f. 58, op. 1, d. 174,11. 3-4 5 . 63. See N. V. M urav’ev, Instruktsiia chinam politsii po obnaruzheniiu i issledovaniiu prestuplenii (St. P etersb u rg : T ip. S .-P e terb u rg sk o g o G ra d o n a c h a l’stva, 1904), 3 0 -3 1. 64. See, for exam ple. Sm ith, Policing Victorian London, 6, 39, 55; Fosdick, Eu­ ropean Police Systems, 148, 2 1 3 -36; Bayley, Patterns o f Policing, 4 9 -5 0 ; E laine G. Spencer, “Police-M ilitary R elations in Prussia, 1848-1914,” Journal o f Social History 19 (W inter 1985): 3 1 2 -1 3 ; Spencer, Police and the Social Order in German Cities, 102-8; Rezerv Sankt-Peterburgskoi stolichnoi politsii (St. Petersburg: Tip. S.-Peter­ burgskogo G radonachal’stva, 1901), 4. 65. M en sh ch ik o v , Okhrana i revoliutsiia, vol. 2, 1:11; “ S h tat m o skovskoi gorodskoi politsii,” 1905, GARF, f. 826, op. 1, d. 198, 11. 17-20; “Instruktsiia Politseiskim N adzirateliam . . . ” M oscow, 10 M arch 1897, GARF, f. 102, op. 261, d. 61, II. 1-7; “Instru k tsiia okolotochnym nadzirateliam ,” GA RF, d. 158, 1. 1; O vchenko, “M oskovskoe okhrannoe otdelenie,” 133-34. 6 6. S ee, fo r e x a m p le , M o sco w c ity g o v e rn o r to p re c in c t c a p ta in s, 1902, R G IA gM , f. 46, op. 8, d. 5274,11. 2 -5 . 67. M oscow Security B ureau report, 18 N ovem ber 1887, GARF, f. 102, op. D3, 1887, d. 664,1. 2. 68. Fosdick, European Police Systems, 350-56. 69. See “Politsiia,” ES, 24:332. 70. See, for exam ple, M oscow Security B ureau to precinct captains, 18 Septem ­ ber 1901, R G IA gM , f. 475, op. 17., d. 611, 1. 78; alphabetic lists and registers for 1900-1905, GARF, f. 63, op. 45, dd. 4 9 4 ,4 9 7 , 503. 71. S ee M oscow S ecu rity B u reau to p re cin ct c ap tain s, 1 N o v em b er 1900, R G IA gM , f. 475, op. 17, d. 90,1. 44; M oscow Security B ureau to precinct captains, 8 Septem ber 1901, R G IA gM , f. 475, op. 17, d. 611,1. 78; GARF, f. 102, op. D-3, 1887, d. 664,1. 2. 72. Jam es C. F em ald, Funk and Wagnalls Standard Handbook o f Synonyms, Antonyms, and Prepositions, rev. ed. (New York: F unk and W agnalls, 1947), 360. 73. G eneral H erlaut, “L es certificats de civism e,” Annales historiques de la Révolution française 15 (N ovem ber-D ecem ber 1938): 481 -5 3 6 .

Notes to Pages 68-71

205

74. T iutiunnik, “D epartam ent politsii,” 49. 75. Police D epartm ent directive, 29 N ovem ber 1891, in KSS, 125-29; M oscow Security B ureau to Police D epartm ent, 14 N ovem ber 1900, GARF, f. 102, OO , 1901, d. 555,1. 20. 76. Police D epartm ent report, 1901, GARF, f. 102, op. 253, d. 103,1. 194. 77. C orresp o n d en ce on the verification o f political reliability in M oscow in 1900 and 1902, R G IA gM , f. 475, op. 17, d. 90,11. 2 3 -2 4 ; GARF, f. 63, op. 22, d. 37; “Svod p r a v i l . . . ” 21 O ctober 1902, GARF, f. 102, op. 2 6 2 ,1 9 0 2 , d. 10,11. 5 -8 . 78. Interior M inistry to governors, 28 June 1894, ZA , X IIId (l), 8; Tiutiunnik, “D epartam ent politsii,” 9 1 -9 2 ; Interior M inistry to governors, 16 M ay 1901, GARF, f. 102, O O , 1901, d. 555,11. 3 2 -3 3 . 79. See Robert W. Thurston, Liberal City, Conservative State: Moscow and Rus­ sia's Urban Crisis, 1906-1914 (New York: O xford University Press, 1987), 100-101. 80. See Police D epartm ent directive, 12 M arch 1901, GARF, f. 102, D - l, d. 666,1. 91/20. 81. Police D epartm ent directive, 27 June 1900, GARF, f. 102, op. D - l , d. 666, 1. 91/11; Police D epartm ent directive, 29 Septem ber 1902, R G IA gM , f. 46, op. 8, d. 5274, 1. 66; L evison, com p., Posobie dlia podgotovleniia na dolzhnosti klassnye i okolotochnykh nadziratelei S.-Peterburgskoi stolichnoi politsii (St. Petersburg, Tip. S.-Peterburgskogo G radonachal’stva, 1900), 9 2 -93. 82. Police D epartm ent to M oscow precinct captains, 23 M arch 1900, R GIA gM , f. 46, op. 17, d. 91,11. 2 -4 ; correspondence, F ebruary-M arch 1903, R G IA gM , f. 475, op. 19, d. 164,11. 1-15. 83. S ee th e in co m p lete e n tries u n d er the ru b ric “se a rc h e s” (obyski) in the M oscow Security B ureau subject catalog, GARF. 84. F or exam ple, see M oscow Security Bureau to precinct captains, 24 January 1900, RG IA gM , f. 475, op. 17, d. 90,1. 2. 85. Police D epartm ent directives, 5 Septem ber 1884 and 12 N ovem ber 1885, in KSS, 261; “Instruktsiia Gg. U chastkovym Pristavam ,” GARF, f. 102, OO , 1898, d. 2, ch. 1, lit. b, 11.73 o b .-74. 86. O vchenko, “M oskovskoe okhrannoe otdelenie,” 171, 173; Zavarzin, Zhandarmy i revoliutsionery, 4 7 -4 9 . 87. M ulukaev, Politsiia v Rossii, 4 3 ,7 6 ; “Politsiia,” ES, 24:333. Anthropom etry, a forerunner o f fingerprinting, used a com bination o f m easurem ents o f hum an body parts fo r personal identification; it could not be applied to w om en or children. 88. PSZ, ser. 3, vol. 3, no. 1911 (20 D ecem ber 1883); Joseph Bradley, Muzhik and Muscovite: Urbanization in Late Imperial Russia (B erkeley and L os Angeles: U niversity o f C alifornia Press, 1985), 187; “Z hum al o soveshchanii,” 21 Novem ber 1909, GA RF, f. 102, op. 316, 1909, d. 361, 11. 39 o b .-4 0 ; lists o f dvorniki given bonuses in St. Petersburg and O dessa, 1902, in GARF, f. 102, op. 1, 1902, d. 765,11. 2 -3 3 ; obligation to assist the police in “Instruktsiia politicheskim nadzirateliam ,” 10 M arch 1897, GARF, f. 102, op. 261, 1907, d. 61,11. 5 ob .-6 ; Spravochnaia knizhka

dlia upravliaiushchikh domami, starshikh dvomikov i shveitsarov: Rukovodstvo pri ispolnenii imi politseiskikh obiazanostei (St. Petersburg, 1896), 14-16, 69; Zavarzin, Zhandarmy i revoliutsionery, 47. 89. Gr. Nestroev, Iz dnevnika maksimalista (Paris: R usskoe knigoizdatel’stvo, 1910), 1 5 8 -6 0 ; K orolenko, Istoriia moego sovremennika, 3 :1 5 -1 8 ; G arvi, Zapiski sotsial-demokrata, 1 4 2 -4 4 ; S. L. C h u d k o v sk ii, Iz davnikh let: Vospominaniia (M oscow : Izd. P o litkatorzhan, 1934), 1 1 5-16, 2 0 7 -8 ; Ivanchin-Pisarev, “Iz m oikh

206

Notes to Pages 7 1 -7 6

vospom inanii,” 304; I. K. M ikhailov, Chetvert’ veka podpol’shchika (M oscow : Gos. izd. politicheskoi literatury, 1957), 162.

3. New Security Policing Methods 1. “M o lo d y e g ody Z ubatova,” Osvobozhdenie, 1903, no. 22:393; Jerem iah S ch n eid erm an , Sergei Zubatov and Revolutionary Marxism: The Struggle fo r the Working Class in Tsarist Russia (Ith aca, N.Y.: C o rn ell U n iv ersity P ress, 1976), 4 9 -5 1 . 2. K. Tereshkovich, “M oskovskaia m olodezh’ 80-kh godov i Sergei Zubatov: Iz vospom inanii,” Minuvshie gody 1 (M ay-June 1908): 207. 3. Philip Pom per, The Russian Revolutionary Intelligentsia, 2d ed. (W heeling, 111.: H arlan D avidson, 1993), 6 7 -73. 4. Z ubatov to V. L. Burtsev, 22 N ovem ber 1906, in B. P. K oz’m in, ed., S. V

Zubatov i ego korrespondenty: Sredi okhrannikov, zhandarmov i provokatorov (M oscow and Leningrad: Gos. izd., 1928), 53. 5. A llan K. W ildm an, “T h e R ussian In telligentsia o f the 1890’s,” American Slavic and East European Review 19 (April 1960): 167. 6. S c h n e id e rm a n , Sergei Zubatov, 50 n 4 ; “M o lo d y e god y Z u b ato v a,” 394; Kizevetter, Na rubezhe dvukh stoletii, 18. 7. Zubatov statem ent to police, 1888, GARF, f. 1695, op. 1, d. 40, 11. 16-18; Tereshkovich, “M oskovskaia m olodezh’,” 209; M. R. Gots, “S. V. Zubatov: Stranichka iz perezhitogo,” Byloe 9 (1906): 65. 8. “Spravka o S. V. Zubatove,” 6 M ay 1913, GARF, f. 1695, op. 1, d. 40,1. 2 ob. Z ub ato v ’s ow n claim that he had becom e an inform ant only on 13 June 1886 w as therefore false (Zubatov to Burtsev, 22 N ovem ber 1906, in K oz’m in, Zubatov, 52). 9. Gots, “S. V. Zubatov,” 6 7 -6 8 ; V. G o l’tsev, “Pervyi arest: Z nakom stvo s g. Zubatovym : Iz vospom inanii i perepiski,” Russkaia mysT 11 (O ctober 1906): 116-17; “Spravka o Zubatove,” GARF, f. 1695, op. 1, d. 40,1. 13. 10. Police D epartm ent to E. K. Iurkovskii, 16 M ay 1888, GARF, f. 63, op. 53, d. 161, 11. 1-1 ob.; M oscow City G overnor to Interior M inistry, 27 N ovem ber 1888, GARF, f. 63, op. 53, d. 161,1. 2; service records, GARF, f. 63, op. 53, d. 161,1. 9; “Spravka o Zubatove,” GARF, f. 1695, op. 1, d. 40,1. 2 ob.; Service records, GARF, f. 63, op. 53, d. 161,11. 3 5 ,6 6 ,7 7 . 11. Spiridovich, “Pri tsarskom rezhim e,” 118; D. N. Liubim ov, “R usskaia sm uta nachala deviatisotykh godov, 1902-1906: Po vospom inaniiam , lichnym zapiskam i dokum entam ,” Liubim ov C ollection, B akhm eteff Archive, C olum bia University, 24. 12. Zubatov to Burtsev, 18 D ecem ber 1906, in K oz’m in, Zubatov, 70. 13. See, fo r ex am p le, Z ubatov to P o lice D ep artm en t, 17 S ep tem b er 1899, GARF, f. 102, OO , 1898, d. 2, ch. 1, lit. b, 11. 3 7 -3 7 ob.; Zubatov to Police D epart­ m ent, 26 July 1901, GARF, f. 102, OO, 1898, d. 2, ch. 1, lit. g, 1. 75; panegyrics at a party in his honor at the bureau, GARF, f. 1695, op. 1, d. 18. 14. Spiridovich, “Pri tsarskom rezhim e,” 118. 15. Z ubatov to Police D epartm ent, 14 O ctober 1900, GARF, f. 102, op. 316, 1908, d. 538,11. 27 9 -8 0 . 16. Z ubatov to Police D epartm ent, 6 June 1898, GARF, f. 102, O O , 1898, d. 2, ch. 1, lit. a, 11. 132-33; Z ubatov to Rataev, 4 February 1899, GARF, f. 102, OO , 1899, d. 5 6 4,1. 18; Z ubatov to Police D epartm ent, 19 D ecem ber 1899, GARF, f. 102, OO , 1898, d. 2, ch. 1, lit. b, 1. 109.

Notes to Pages 7 6 -7 9

207

17. Spiridovich, “Pri tsarskom rezhim e,” 168. 18. Chernov, Pered burei, 78; M enshchikov, Okhrana i revoliutsiia, 1:316. 19. Police D epartm ent to M oscow city governor, 31 January 1898, GARF, f. 63, op. 53, d. 161,1. 81; Police D epartm ent to Zubatov, 16 February 1898, GARF, f. 63, op. 53, d. 161,1. 82. 20. N ovitskii, [V. D .], “Z apiska gen. Novitskogo, podannaia na vysochaishee im ia cherez kn. Sviatopolka- M irskogo,” Sotsialist-revoliutsioner 2 (1910): 62; A. V. Gerasim ov, Na lezvii s terroristami (Paris: Y M C A Press, 1985), 24. 21. “Evno A zef: Istoriia ego predatel’stva,” Byloe 2 (1917): 195; A. I. Spiri­ dovich, “Petr Ivanovich R achkovskii,” YSP, B ox 26, envelope; S. M elgunov, ed., “Iz perepiski okhrannikov: P is’m a L. A. R ataev-S . V. Zubatov,” GM 1 (1922): 51; Spiri­ dovich, “Pri tsarskom rezhim e,” 121, 124; O. V. A ptekm an, “Partiia ‘N arodnoe pravo’ : Po lichnym vospom inaniiam ,” Byloe 1 (1907): 205. 22. “S.-Peterburgskoe okhrannoe otdelenie,” 114-16. 23. A. I. Spiridovich, Istoriia boVshevizma v Rossii ot vozniknoveniia do zakhvata vlasti, 1883-1903-1917 (Paris: Franko-R usskaia P echat’, 1922), 4 9 -5 0 ; Pervoe maia v tsarskoi Rossii, 1890-1916 gg.: Sbomik dokumentov (M oscow: Gos. izd. politicheskoi literatury, 1939), 2 8 7 -9 3 ; M anfred Hilderm eier, Die Sozialrevolutionäre

Partei Russlands: Agrarsozialismus und Modernisierung im Zarenreich (1900-1914) (Cologne: B öhlau Verlag, 1978), 38-41. 24. See K uz’m ina, “S.-Peterburgskoe okhrannoe otdelenie,” 6 4 -8 4. 25. O n B e rd iaev , see V ik to r C h ern o v , Zapiski sotsialista-revoliutsionera (Berlin: Izd. Z. I. G rzhebina, 1922; C am bridge: O riental R esearch Partners, 1975), 212; M enshchikov, Okhrana i revoliutsiia, 1:316. 26. Service records, GARF, f. 63, op. 53, d. 161,1. 35; Z ubatov to Burtsev, 18 D ecem ber 1906, in K oz’m in, Zubatov, 70; M enshchikov, “C hernaia kniga,” GARF, f. 1723, op. 1, d. 375,11. 7 3 -7 4 ; “O bzor deiatel’nosti,” 25 M ay 1895, GARF, f. 102, op. 316, d. 2 1 5 ,1 . 14; M enshchikov, Okhrana i revoliutsiia, 1:282. Zubatov was nam ed acting director in M ay 1896 and director in A pril 1897 (service records, GARF, f. 63, op. 53, d. 161,11. 6 6 ,7 7 ). 27. G endarm e C orps directive, 16 February 1872, in KSS, 62 5 -2 6 ; Kom issiia dlia obsuzhdeniia voprosa o reorganizatsii naruzhnogo nabliudeniia, “Z hum al 2-ogo dekabria 1909 goda,” GARF, f. 102, op. 316, 1909, d. 361,1. 23; P. E. Shchegolev, ed., Provokator: Vospominaniia i dokumenty o razoblachenii Azefa (M oscow : P riboi, 1929), 147. 28. Troitskii, “Degaevshchina,” 127nl6. 29. Spiridovich, “Pri tsarskom rezhim e,” 118. 30. Ibid., 125, 31. “Iz vospom inanii M. E. Bakaia,” 109, 109n; “Shtat,” O ctober 1880, GARF, f. 63, op. 1, d. 340, t. 1,1. 375; M oscow Security B ureau to Police Departm ent, 30 O c­ tober 1902, GARF, f. 102, OO, 1906, otd. 1, d. 125,1. 35; Z. I. Peregudova, “Istochnik izucheniia sotsial-dem okraticheskogo dvizheniia v R ossii: M aterialy fonda departam enta politsii,” Voprosy istorii KPSS, 1988, no. 9:97; M ednikov to Spiridovich, 30 January 1903, in “P is’m a M ednikova Spiridovichu,” KA 17 (1926): 197. 32. “O bzor deiatel’nosti,” 25 A pril 1895, GARF, f. 102, op. 316, 1906, d. 215, 11. 9 ,1 2 . 33. Police D epartm ent report, 11 O ctober 1909, GARF, f. 102, op. 316, 1909, d. 361,1. 35 ob.; P olice D epartm ent to security chiefs, 24 April 1903, GARF, f. 102, op. 316, 1908, d. 540,11. 444- 44 ob.; Police D epartm ent report, 10 June 1915, GARF, f.

208

Notes to Pages 7 9-82

102, 0 0 , 1915, d. 100,1. 25; Kom issiia . . . “Z hum al,” GARF, f. 102, op. 316, 1909, d. 361,1. 37 ob. 34. M oscow Security B ureau to Police D epartm ent, 31 A ugust 1900, GARF, f. 102, O O , 1898, d. 2, ch. 1, lit. v, 1. 156; M oscow Security B ureau to Police D epart­ m ent, 30 O ctober 1902, GARF, f. 102, OO , 1906 (I), d. 125,11. 3 5 ,4 1 -4 1 ob. 35. S piridovich, “Pri tsarskom rezhim e,” 126-27; A leksei T. Vassiliyev, The Okhrana: The Russian Secret Police, ed. R ené Fülöp-M iller (Philadelphia: Lippincott and Co., 1930), 49; P. P. Zavarzin, Rabota tainoi politsii (Paris: Izd. avtora, 1924), 35; T iutiunnik, “D epartam ent politsii,” 97. F or a negligence case, see Z ubatov to Police D epartm ent, 30 M arch 1901, GARF, OO , 1906 (I), d. 125,1. 10. 36. S piridovich, “Pri tsarskom rezhim e,” 1 2 6-27; Sm ith, Policing Victorian London, 50. 37. G eneral V. N. Russian, “R abota okhrannykh otdelenii v Rossii: D oklad gen. m aio ra V iktora N ikolaev ich a R ussiana,” V alerian Ivanovich M oravskii C ollection, H oover In stitu tio n A rchives, box 3, fo ld er 35. G orky dram atized such a situation: Zhizn’ nenuzhnogo cheloveka, in vol. 8 o f Sobranie sochinenii v tridtsati tomakh (M oscow : Gos. izd. khudozhestvennoi literatury, 1950). 38. O vchenko, “M oskovskoe okhrannoe otdelenie,” 69; Vassiliyev, Okhrana, 47; M artynov, Moia sluzhba, 2 4 1 -42; “Shkola filerov,” Byloe 3 (1917): 4 4 -4 9 . 39. V. Z h ilin sk ii, “O rganizatsiia i zh izn ’ okhrannogo o td elen iia vo vrem ena tsarskoi vlasti,” GAf 9 -1 0 (1917): 25 3 -5 7 ; exhibit o f police paraphernalia, M useum o f Political History, G orokhovaia Street Branch, St. Petersburg, R ussia, M ay 1996. F or a sense o f the alm ost endless variety o f nicknam es, see GARF, f. 63, op. 45, d. 493,11. 11 o b .-18. 40. S ee p ictu res o f such album s in Z. I. Peregudova, “S luzhba naruzhnogo nabliudeniia v russkoi politsii,” in Gosudar ’, Gosudarstvo, Gosudarstvennaia sluzhba, vol. 1 o f Reka vremen (M oscow: Ellis Lak/R eka V rem en, 1995), 256. 41. Vassiliyev, Okhrana, 47; Spiridovich, “Pri tsarskom rezhim e,” 125-26. 42. M oscow Security B ureau to Police D epartm ent, 9 D ecem ber 1902, GARF, f. 102, OO , 1906, d. 125,11.41-42. 43. Peregudova, “D epartam ent politsii,” 95; surveillance notebooks, GARF, f. 63, op. 45, dd. 1-391. A notebook from 1894 has been published: I. P. B elokonskii, ed., “ ‘Gorokhovoe p al’to ’: Pam iatnaia knizhka professional’nogo shpiona,” Minuvshie gody 9 (1908): 290 -3 1 2 . 44. “Instruktsiia fileram letuchego otriada,” GARF, f. 63, op. 45, d. 531,1. 3. 45. See the various registers in GARF, f. 63, op. 45, dd. 493-511. 46. Police D epartm ent directive, 8 M ay 1913, GARF, f. 102, OO , 1913, d. 119, 1. 189; K om issiia . . . “Z hum al,” GARF, f. 102, op. 316, 1909, d. 361,11. 3 5 -3 5 ob.; Spiridovich, “Pri tsarskom rezhim e,” 127; Spiridovich, Histoire du terrorisme russe, 1886-1917, trans. V ladim ir L azarevski (Paris: Payot, 1930), 74, 509; M enshchikov, Okhrana i revoliutsiia, vol. 2 ,1 :1 5 . 47. P olice D epartm ent directive, 15 M ay 1913, GARF, f. 102, O O , 1913, d. 119, 1. 186; Police D epartm ent to gendarm e chiefs, 13 A ugust 1902, GARF, f. 102, OO , 1902, d. 825,1. 25; Police D epartm ent report, 22 Septem ber 1903, GARF, f. 102, O O , 1902, d. 825,11. 2 0 2 -5 ob.; Peregudova, “M etody b o r’by,” 199. 48. Police D epartm ent report, 22 Septem ber 1903, GARF, f. 102, O O , 1902, d. 825, 11. 2 0 2 -3 ob., 2 0 5 -7 , 2 1 0 -1 5 ; Z ubatov to P olice D epartm ent, 1900, G A RF, f. 102, O O , 1898, d. 2, ch. 1, lit. v, 1. 82; L. M enshchikov reports, A p ril-M ay 1902, GARF, f. 102, OO , 1901, d. 825, t. 6; “K rukovodstvu fileram i letuchego otriada,”

Notes to Pages 8 2 -8 5

209

GARF, f. 102, OO , 1898, d. 1, ch. 1, lit. v, 11. 189-90; Zubatov to M oscow G endarm e Station, 13 A pril 1900, GARF, f. 58, op. 6, d. 13,1. 19; correspondence, 1900-1902, GARF, f. 63, op. 53, d. 216,11. 1-33. 49. Interior M inistry report, 20 O ctober 1909, GARF, f. 102, OO , 1909, d. 50, ch. 2,11. 91v-d. 50. M oscow S ecurity B ureau to P olice D epartm ent, 4 M ay and 16 O ctober 1902, GARF, f. 102, OO , 1906 (I), d. 125,11. 2 8 -2 8 ob., 30. 51. C orrespondence o f 12, 15, 23, and 30 M arch, 23 and 26 April 1901, GARF, f. 102, OO , 1906 (I), d. 125,11. 4 - 1 0 ,1 1 ob. 52. Police D epartm ent report, 22 Septem ber 1903, GARF, f. 102, OO, 1902, d. 825,11. 205 o b .- 6 ,212. 53. N urit Schleifm an, Undercover Agents in the Russian Revolutionary Move­ ment: The SR Party, 1902-1914 (London: M acm illan, 1988), ix -x i. 54. Gerasim ov, Na lezvii, 56. 55. M oscow S ecurity B ureau report, 27 A pril 1912, GARF, f. 102, op. 316, 1911, d. 1, ch. 46, lit. a, 11. 150-50 ob.; Police D epartm ent report, 27 M ay 1902, GARF, f. 5802, op. 1, d. 214,11. 5 -6 ; M artynov, Moia sluzhba, 170; Vassiliyev, Okhrana, 59. 56. A. Shreiber, “V. K. Plehve i terror: Istoricheskaia spravka,” Narodnyi vestnik 3 - 4 (1906): 6 7 -6 8 ; Ivanchin-Pisarev, “Iz m oikh vospom inanii,” 310. 57. Porter, Origins o f the Vigilant State, 123; A nna G eifm an, Thou Shalt Kill: Revolutionary Terrorism in Russia, 1894—1917 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1993), 85; B ogdanovich, Tri poslednikh samoderzhtsa (diary entry for 13 Feb­ ruary 1880), 39. 58. “Sekretnye sotrudniki,” 182-83. 59. Schleifm an, Undercover Agents, xii, 3 2 ,5 9 . 60. P etr P il’skii, O zhandarmakh i provokatorakh (Petrograd: Viktoriia, 1917), 9; U ral’skii, Parol, 222. 61. “Spravka o Zubatove,” GARF, f. 1695, op. 1, d. 40,1. 17; Z ubatov to B urt­ sev, 22 N ovem ber 1906, in K oz’m in, Zubatov, 5 3 -5 4 ; Vassiliyev, Okhrana, 54; “Iz vospom inanii M . E. Bakaia,” 124-34; Zavarzin, Rabota, 16-18; Bakai, “Pri politsii,” GARF, f. 5881, op. 1, d. 221,1. 194; Spiridovich, “Pri tsarskom rezhim e,” 200. 62. Spiridovich, “P ri tsarskom rezhim e,” 199-200; Z avarzin, Rabota, 16-18; Gerasim ov, Na lezvii, 5 7 -5 8 . 63. “O bzor deiatel’nosti,” 25 M ay 1895, GARF, f. 102, op. 3 1 6 ,1 9 0 6 , d. 215,1. 15 ob.; inform ant list, 1912, GARF, f. 102, op. 3 1 6 ,1 9 1 2 , d. 202, t. 2,11. 2 6 -2 6 ob.; Z. F. Zhuchenko, dossier, GARF, f. 102, op. 316, 1906, d. 1019, 1. 98; Agafonov, Zagranichnaia okhranka, 189-190. 64. “In straktsiia po organizatsii i vedeniiu vnutrennei agentury, sostavlena pri m oskovskom O khrannom O tdelenii,” GARF, f. 63, op. 47, d. 524,11. 1-14; “Svedeniia neo bkhodim ye d lia ro zyska,” 1907, GA RF, f. 102, op. 308a, 1906, d. 14, 11. 1-2; “K ratkoe rukovodstvo dlia zaveduiushchikh vnutrennei agenturoi,” GARF, f. 102, op. 308a, 1907, d. 236,11. 5 -7 ; “Instruktsiia D epartam enta politsii po organizatsii i ve­ deniiu vnutrennego (agentum ogo) nabliudeniia,” in Zagranichnaia agentura, 121-31. M ost o f the follow ing account is based on these docum ents. 65. “Sekretnye sotrudniki,” GM 7 -8 (1917): 182. See also Bakai, “Pri politsii,” GARF, f. 5881, op. 1, d. 221,1. 194; Payne, Police State, 266. 66. M enshchikov, Okhrana i revoliutsiia, 1:411. 67. Pis’ma Azefa, 1893-1917 (M oscow: Terra, 1994), 14-15; “Blavatskaia, E. P .” i n RP, 1:272.

210

Notes to Pages 8 5-89

68. See, fo r ex am p le, Z u b ato v to P o lice D e p artm en t, 19 D ece m b er 1899, GARF, f. 1 0 2 ,0 0 ,1 8 9 8 , d. 2, ch. 1, lit. b, 1. 109. 69. Z av arzin , Zhandarmy i revoliutsionery, 58; N. A. B u k h b in d er, “Z ubatovshchina v M oskve,” KS 1 (1925): 9 6 -9 7 ; Schneiderm an, Sergei Zubatov, 7 8 -8 2 . 70. Chernov, Pered burei, 7 7 -86. 71. Chernov, Zapiski sotsialista-revoliutsionera, 21 2 -1 6 , 225. 72. “O bzor deiatel’nosti,” 25 April 1895, GARF, f. 102, op. 316, 1906, d. 215, 1. 11. T he bureau received sixty thousand rubles in 1902 and 1903 fo r inform ants’ salaries (Police D epartm ent report, 31 D ecem ber 1902, GARF, f. 102, OO, 1902, d. 825, 11. 168 ob.). A t an average o f forty rubles per m onth, that sum sufficed to hire over one hundred inform ants. By contrast, the bureau em ployed few er than one hun­ dred inform ants in 1912 and 1913, the only other years for w hich such statistics are available (agent list, GARF, f. 102, OO, 1912, d. 202, t. 2,11. 26 -2 7 ; agent list, GARF, f. 102, OO , 1913, d. 200,11. 16^17 ob.). 73. Z ubatov to P olice D epartm ent, 21 N ovem ber 1900, GA RF, f. 102, OO , 1898, d. 2, ch. 1, lit. v, 1.191; Spiridovich, “Pri tsarskom rezhim e,” 124. See also M ar­ tynov, Moia sluzhba, 81; Kurlov, Gibel’, 113; Gerasim ov, Na lezvii, 138. 74. C ited in O vchenko, “M oskovskoe okhrannoe otdelenie,” 63. 75. M artynov, Moia sluzhba, 8 0 ,1 7 0 ; Zavarzin, Rabota, 47 -4 8 . 76. M enshchikov, Okhrana i revoliutsiia, 1:56-57. 77. G. K. Sem iakin to A zef, 29 M ay 1893, in Boris N ikolaevskii, Konets Azefa (Leningrad: Gos. izd., 1926), 77. 78. Pis’ma Azefa; inform ant reports, M oscow Security Bureau, 1897-1900 in GARF, f. 102, OO , 1898, d. 2, ch. 1, lit. a, lit. b, lit. v. 79. M. S. A leksandrov, ‘“ G ruppa narodovol’tsev,’ 1891-1894 gg.,” Byloe 11 (1906): 2 3 -2 4 ; M artynov, Moia sluzhba, 138-39. 80. M enshchikov, “C hernaia kniga,” GARF, f. 1723, op. 1, d. 375,11. 68 0 -8 6 ; M oscow Security B ureau to Police Departm ent, 28 M ay 1907, GARF, f. 102, op. 316, 1907, d. 694,11. 1-2 ob.; M. F. von Koten to Police D epartm ent, 28 M ay 1907, in I. V. Alekseev, ed., Istoriia odnogo provokatora: ObviniteVnoe zakliuchenie i materialy k protsessu A. E. Serebriakovoi (M oscow: Izd. M oskovskogo Gubsuda, 1925), 3 1 -33; Z ubatov to P olice D epartm ent, 26 M arch 1907, in Alekseev, Istoriia, 2 6 -28. 81. Zubatov to Police Departm ent, 26 M arch 1907, in Alekseev, Istoriia, 2 6 -28; Serebriakova testim ony, 1925, in Alekseev, Istoriia, 54. 82. H e had also been an inform ant in the early 1880s (M enshchikov, “C hernaia kniga,” GARF, f. 1723, op. 1, d. 375,1. 680; Serebriakova testim ony, 1925, in A lek­ seev, Istorii, 5 2 -5 3 ). 83. L unacharskii, cited in Alekseev, Istoriia, i-ii, iv; Zubatov, cited in M en­ shchikov, “C hernaia kniga,” GARF, f. 1723, op. 1, d. 375,1. 685. 84. Alekseev, Istoriia, 4—5. 85. M enshchikov, “C h ern aia kniga,” G A R F, f. 1723, op. 1, d. 375, 1. 685; M oscow S ecurity B ureau to P olice D epartm ent, A pril 1907, in A lekseev, Istoriia, 29 -3 0 ; Stolypin to N icholas II, 31 January 1911, in Alekseev, Istoriia, 4 0 -4 1 . 86. M enshchikov, “C hernaia kniga,” GARF, f. 1723, op. 1, d. 375,1. 685; A lek­ seev, Istoriia, 6 -7 , 62. 87. V il’bushevich to Zubatov, 2 and 18 A ugust 1900, GARF, f. 102, op. 316, 1908, d. 538, 11. 215 -1 7 . O n VU’bushevich, see also D. Zaslavskii, Zubatov i Mania Vil ’bushevich (M oscow: K rasnaia nov’, 1923); Schneiderm an, Sergei Zubatov, 229-32. 88. Police report on G em gross-Z huchenko, 1906, GARF, f. 102, op. 3 1 6 ,1 9 0 6 ,

Notes to Pages 8 9 -9 2

211

d. 1 0 1 9 ,1 .7 1 ; M enshchikov, Okhrana i revoliutsiia, 1:272-75. 8 9 . C o rre s p o n d e n c e , M o sco w S e c u rity B u re a u a n d P o lic e D e p a rtm e n t, J u ly - A u g u s t 19 0 6 , G A R F , f. 102, op. 3 1 6 , 1906, d. 1287, 11. 1 -1 3 ; r e p o rt on Zhuchenko, 1906, GARF, f. 102, op. 3 1 6 ,1 9 0 6 , d. 1019,1. 31. 90. P. Pavlov [P. E. Shchegolev], Agenty, zhandarmy, palachi (Petrograd: Byloe, 1922), 38; correspondence from V. L. B urtsev to Zhuchenko, w ith com m entary by Zhuchenko, A ugust 1909, GARF, f. 102, op. 3 1 6 ,1 9 0 6 , d. 1019,11. 2 0 -2 0 ob. 91. P i l ’sk ii, O zhandarmakh i provokatorakh, 1 5 -1 8 . A m e ric an “ a n ti-red squads” in this century apparently preferred w om en spies for their ability to allay sus­ picion (Donner, Protectors o f Privilege, 171). 92. Serebriakova testim ony, in Alekseev, Istoriia, 58-59. 93. “G u ro v ich , M . I . ” in Padenie, 7:331; Z avarzin, Zhandarmy i revoliutsionery, 6 0 -6 1 . 94. M enshchikov, “C hernaia kniga,” GARF, f. 1723, op. 1, d. 375, 1. 232; L. K leinbort, “M . I. G urovich-K har’kovets,” Byloe 16 (1921): 105; Zavarzin, Zhandarmy i revoliutsionery, 61. W hile m any revolutionaries possessed autom atic handguns, the M oscow regular police used old, neglected Sm ith and W essons (A. A. R einbot to N. P. G arin, 19 January 1908, GARF, f. 826, op. 1, d. 107, 1. 26). Okhranniki carried no w eapons at all. 95. Pis’ma Azefa, 14-16. O n Azef, see B oris N ikolaevskii, Istoriia odnogopredatelia: Terroristy i politicheskaia politsiia (Berlin, 1931; M oscow: Izd. politicheskoi literatury, 1991); N ikolaevskii, Konets Azefa. 96. N ikolaevskii, Istoriia odnogo predatelia, 4 3 -4 6 , 50 -5 1 , 60-61. 97. Prowakatorzy ochran i zandarmerji Krölestwa Polskiego (P e tro g rad : R aboczeje dielo, 1918); S. V. Chlenov, Moskovskaia okhranka i ee sekretnye sotrudniki (M oscow : Otdel pechati M oskovskogo soveta r.i.k.d., 1919), 6 1 -8 4 ; Agafonov, Zagranichnaia okhranka, 30 9 -8 3. 98. M aureen Perrie, ‘T h e Social C om position and Structure o f the SocialistRevolutionary Party before 1917,” Soviet Studies 24 (O ctober 1972): 235. 99. O rzhekhovskii, Samoderzhavie, 122; “O bzor deiatel’nosti,” GARF, f. 102, op. 316, 1906, d. 215,1. 11; Rachkovskii, “K ratkaia zapiska,” 27 M ay 1902, GARF, f. 5802, op. 1, d. 24,11. 6 -7 . 100. Police D epartm ent report, 31 D ecem ber 1902, GARF, f. 102, OO, 1902, d. 825,11. 167-73. 101. M artov, Zapiski, 70; N ikolai Baum an, “D oklad N. E. Baum ana o sotsialdem ok ratich esk o m dvizhenii v M oskve,” in Nikolai Ernestovich Bauman: Sbomik statei, vospominanii i dokumentov (M o sco w : M o sk o v sk ii ra b o c h ii, 1937), 85; U l’ianova-Elizarova, cited in N. A. B ukhbinder, Zubatovshchina i rabochee dvizhenie vRossii (M oscow: Izd. Politkatorzhan, 1926), 20. 102. A. P. Koznov, “M etam orfozy politicheskogo detektiva: Kom u sluzhil L. P. M enshchikov,” Kentavr 4 (1993): 115-28; Spiridovich, “Pri tsarskom rezhim e,” 128. 103. R eport on L. M enshchikov, 1910, GARF, f. 102, op. 316, 1910, d. 88,11. 72-8 1 ob. 104. M oscow Security B ureau to Police D epartm ent, 14 January and 7 M ay 1897, GARF, f. 102, OO , 1898, d. 2, ch. 1,11. 87 -8 8 , 156; Police D epartm ent to bor­ der gendarm es, 15 February 1910, N IC , box 179, folder 1, p. 2. 105. A. V. G erasim ov once deliberately seized a cache o f illegal publications despite his know ledge that Z ubatov had intended to use them as bait (Gerasim ov, Na

lezvii, 18).

212

Notes to Pages 93-99

106. Police D epartm ent to border gendarm es, 15 February 1910, NIC, box 179, folder 1, pp. 4 -6 . 107. B oris N ikolaevskii, “Pam iati L. P. M enshchikova,” NIC, box 179, folder 2, p. 6. 108. V iPbushevich to Zubatov, 2 A ugust 1900, GARF, f. 102, op. 316, 1908, d. 538.1. 216; Spiridovich, “Pri tsarskom rezhim e,” 199-206. 109. Spiridovich, “Pri tsarskom rezhim e,” 124, 200; Vassiliyev, Okhrana, 78; M artynov, Moia sluzhba, 127. 110. M artynov, Moia sluzhba, 190; Gerasim ov, Na lezvii, 5 8-59. 111. Nikolaevskii, KonetsAzefa, 70-78. 112. Schneiderm an, Sergei Zubatov, 76n. 113. M au rice L ap o rte, Histoire de I’okhrana: La police secrète des tsars, 1880-1917 (P aris: P ay o t, 1935), 34; “ K o n sp ira tsiia ,” in S. I. O zh egov, Slovar ’ russkogo iazyka (M oscow: R usskii iazyk, 1981), 258; on the attem pt o f a revolution­ ary “spy” to enter the M oscow Security Bureau in 1901, see M oscow Security B ureau re p o rt, 7 S e p tem b e r 1901, G A R F, f. 102, O O , 1901, d. 500, 1. 66. S p irid o v ich , “Politicheskii rozysk,” YSP, box 27, folder 1, pp. 2 -3 ; N. N. Ansim ov, Bor’ba bolshevikov protiv tainoi politicheskoi politsii samoderzhaviia, 1903-1917 (Sverdlovsk: Izd. U ral’skogo universiteta, 1989), 11; V. Ia. Iretskii, Okhranka: Stranitsa russkoi istorii (Petrograd: N ovaia Rossiia, 1918), 23. 114. Troitskii, “Degaevshchina,” 132. See also I. V. Alekseev, Provokator Anna Serebriakova (M oscow: Izd. Politkatorzhan, 1932), 3 -4 , in which the author likens in­ form ants to “kulaks” and “wreckers.” 115. M oscow Security B ureau to Police D epartm ent, 7 M ay 1897, GARF, f. 102, OO , 1898, d. 2, ch. 1,11. 156-70. 116. N ovitskii, Iz vospominanii zhandarma, 172-80; Gerasim ov, Na lezvii, 21; M enshchikov, Okhrana i revoliutsiia, 3:40-49; “Iz zapisok M. E. Bakaia,” Byloe 9 -1 0 (1909): 1 9 3 -9 8 ; “O k h ran k i i ch em y e kabinety,” Revoliutsionnaia mysV 1 (A pril 1908): 10. 117. Spiridovich, “Pri tsarskom rezhim e,” 179; Gerasim ov, Na lezvii, 5 8 -6 0 ; Kurlov, GibeP, 111-12; Vassiliyev, Okhrana, 73. 118. Police D epartm ent report, 2 N ovem ber 1902, GARF, f. 102, OO , 1902, d. 1791.1. 3 ob. See also Lopukhin, Iz itogov, 32. 119. Vodovozov, “V. D. Novitskii,” 84-85. 120. Spiridovich, “Pri tsarskom rezhim e,” 125,128. 121. M ednikov to S p iridovich, 5 June 1903, in “ P is ’m a M ednikova S piridovichu,” 202; “Zubatov, Sergei Vasillevich,” YSP, Box 2. 122. A. I. Spiridovich, personal correspondence, 21 January 1946, YSP, box 2, folder 4.

4. Combating Conspiratorial and Broad-Based Opposition 1. Slukhotskii, “O cherk deiatel’nosti M inisterstva iustitsii,” 277-79. 2. Police D epartm ent report, cited in B oris N ikolaevskii, “Pam iati L. P. M en­ shchikova,” NIC, box 179, folder 2, p. 3; A lexander I. Spiridovich (A lexandre Spiridovitch). Histoire du terrorisme russe, 1886-1917, trans. V ladim ir L azarevski (Paris: Payot, 1930), 1 0 ,2 0 -2 1 . 3. See W ildm an, “R ussian Intelligentsia,” 157-79; Jam es Y. Sim m s, Jr., “T he Fam ine and the Radicals,” in Modernization and Revolution: Dilemmas o f Progress in

Notes to Pages 9 9 -1 0 2

213

Late Imperial Russia: Essays in Honor o f Arthur P. Mendel, ed. E dw ard H. Judge and Jam es Y. Sim m s, Jr. (New York: E ast E uropean M onographs, 1992), 13-42. 4. G al ai, Liberation Movement, 5 9 -6 5 ; W ildm an, “R u ssian Intelligentsia,'” 176-77; Spiridovich, Histoire du terrorisme russe, 4 6 -4 8 ; V. Akimov, Ocherk razvitiia sotsial-demokratii v Rossii, 2d ed. (St. Petersburg: Izd. O. N. Popovoi, 1906), 39. 5. Spiridovich, Histoire du terrorisme russe, 5 2 -5 3 ; O vchenko, “M oskovskoe okhrannoe otdelenie,” 105. 6. S. E. Z volianskii to Z ubatov, 3 June 1896, in K oz’m in, Zubatov, 24, 26; Spiridovich, Histoire du terrorisme russe, 4 9 -5 1 . 7. S ee Z elnik, Labor and Society, 3 3 3 -3 5 , 3 7 4 -8 1 ; O rzhekhovskii, Samoderzhavie, 169-71; T heodore H. Von L aue, “Factory Inspection under the ‘W itte Sys­ tem,* 1892-1903,’* American Slavic and East European Review 19 (O ctober 1960): 3 4 8 -5 0 ; Von L aue, ‘T sa ris t L abor Policy, 1895-1903,” Journal o f Modem History 34 (June 1962): 144-45; G aston V. Rim linger, “Autocracy and the Factory O rder in Early R ussian In dustrialization,” Journal o f Economic History 20 (M arch 1960): 6 9 -9 1 ; Zaionchkovskii, Rossiiskoe samoderzhavie, 169. 8. R im linger, “Autocracy and the Factory Order,” 78. 9. T iutiunnik, “D epartam ent politsii,” 145. 10. Troitskii, Tsarizm pod sudom, 3 0 -3 1 ; W ildm an, “R ussian Intelligentsia,” 173; M . B. P erel’m an, “ ‘Kapital,* Karl M arks i tsarskaia okhranka,” Sovetskie arkhivy, 1968, no. 1 :1 0 2 -3 . F ro m 1867 to 1894, R u ssia’s censors banned only 158 books (Z aionchkovskii, Rossiiskoe samoderzhavie, 299-301). 11. Lenin, Chto delat’? in PSS, 6:15. 12. Rabochee dvizhenie v Rossii, 1895-1917 g.: Khronika, vol. 1, 1895 god (M oscow : K om itet po delam arkhivov pri pravitel’stve R ossiiskoi federatsii, 1992), 112; O vchenko, “M oskovskoe okhrannoe otdelenie,” 161-63, 170-72; Alekseev, Provokator, 107; B aum an, “D oklad N. E. Baum ana,” 7 2 -8 7 . 13. M artov, Zapiski, 1 6 0 ,1 7 5 -7 6 ,2 1 3 ,2 4 0 . 14. Schneiderm an, Sergei Zubatov, 214-15. 15. “S -P eterburgskoe okhrannoe otdelenie,” 122; M artov, Zapiski, 290; A ki­ m ov, Ocherk razvitiia sotsial-demokratii, 5 3 -5 8 , 67. A lthough V. I. U lianov first adopted the pseudonym L enin in January 1901, he w ill be called L enin throughout this study. 16. Akim ov, Ocherk razvitiia sotsial-demokratii, 84. 17. A llan K. W ildm an, The Making o f a Workers ’ Revolution: Russian Social Democracy, 1891-1903 (C hicago: U niversity o f C hicago Press, 1967), 4 4 -4 9 , 53, 5 5 -5 6 ; J. L. H. Keep, The Rise o f Social Democracy in Russia (Oxford: O xford U ni­ versity Press, 1963), 4 7 -4 8 ; H aim son, Russian Marxists, 7 1 -7 8 ; Schapiro, Communist Party, 19-3 5 ; Ansim ov, Bor’ba boTshevikov, 44; R ichard Pipes, Social Democracy and the St. Petersburg Labor Movement, 1885-1897 (Cam bridge, M ass.: H arvard U ni­ versity Press, 1963), 6 0 -6 5 ,9 5 -9 6 , 119-22; Lenin, Chto delat’?, in PSS, 6:127. 18. “ S .-P e te rb u rg s k o e o k h ra n n o e o td e le n ie ,” 1 1 4 -1 5 ; K le in b o rt, “ M . I. G urovich-K har’kovets,” 88. 19. M artov, Zapiski, 3 1 3 -1 4 ; D im itry P o spielovsky, Russian Police Trade Unionism: Experiment or Provocation? (London: W eidenfeld and N icolson, 1971), 22; W ildm an, “R ussian Intelligentsia,” 178-79. 20. P ip es, Social Democracy, 119; W ildm an, Workers’ Revolution, 5 5 -5 7 , 7 3 -7 4 , 81, 8 9 -9 0 ; “S.-Peterburgskoe okhrannoe otdelenie,” 118, 122. 21. “Z h u m al osobogo V ysochaishe uchrezhdennogo soveshchaniia . . . ” 23

214

Notes to Pages 102-6

January 1897, GARF, f. 1723, op. 2, d. 31,11. 2 3 -2 3 ob.; V. O bolenskii, Ocherki minuvshego (Belgrade: R usskaia tip., 1931), 231. 22. Police D epartm ent directive, 5 A pril 1897, in KSS, 52; Police D epartm ent to governors, 12 A ugust 1897, GARF, f. 1 0 2 ,0 0 ,1 9 0 1 , d. 555,11. 5 - 6 ob. 23. L ist o f strikes, 1897 to January 1899, GARF, f. 102, OO , 1898, d. 4, ch. 22, 11. 5 -7 ; M urav’ev to G orem ykin, 7 February 1898, GARF, f. 102, O O , 1898, d. 4, ch. 22,11. 18-19 ob.; M argolis, Tiur’ma i ssylka, 115; T iutiunnik, “D epartam ent politsii,” 148. 24. S ee Fricke, Bismarcks Prätorianer, 107; Schneiderm an, Sergei Zubatov; P o sp ielo v sk y , Police Trade Unionism; M adhavan K. P alat, “P o lice S o c ialism in T sarist R ussia, 1900-1905,” Studies in History 1 (1986). 25. S. V. Zubatov, letter to the editor, “Iz obshchestvennoi khroniki,” Vestnik Evropy 2 (1 9 0 6 ): 434. 26. Grazhdanin, 2 N ovem ber 1906, no. 82, p. 2; 19 Novem ber 1906, no. 87, p. 2. 27. Z ubatov report, 8 April 1898, GARF, f. 1695, op. 1, d. 26,11. 3 o b .-4 ob.; Schneiderm an, Sergei Zubatov, 6 3 -67. 28. Z ubatov to Rataev, 10 Septem ber 1900, GARF, f. 102, op. 316, 1908, d. 538,1. 254; Palat, “Police Socialism ,” 96; S. V. Zubatov, “Z ubatovshchina,” Byloe 26 (1917): 173. 29. See W itte, Vospominaniia, 3:102-3; Schneiderm an, Sergei Zubatov, 84-88. 30. Interior and Finance M inistries to governors and factory inspectors, 4 Sep­ tem ber 1898, GARF, f. 102, OO , 1898, d. 4, ch. 22,1. 4; PSZ, ser. 3, vol. 19, pt. 1, no. 16439 (1 February 1899); Interior M inistry to governors, 8 A pril 1899, in KSS, 61; “Instruktsiia chinam politsii po nadzoru za blagoustroistvom i poriadkom na fabrikakh i zavodakh . . . ” 14 A ugust 1899, in Instruktsii chinam politsii po fabrichnym de lam (Erevan: Tip. Erevanskogo G ubem skogo Pravleniia, 1914), 4 -8 ; Schneiderm an, Sergei Zubatov, 3 8 -3 9 , 86-8 8 . 31. Slukhotskii, “O cherk deiatel’nosti M inisterstva iustitsii,” 273-74. 32. T iutiunnik, “D epartam ent politsii,” 53 -5 8 . A lso in the sam e year, a bureau was created w ithin the Berlin Polizeipräsidium to coordinate antianarchist police re­ pression across the G erm an E m pire (Fricke, Bismarcks Prätorianer, 303n). 33. “Rataev, L. A . ” Padenie, 7:403; S. Svatikov, Russkii politicheskii sysk za granitseiu: Po dokumentam Parizhskogo arkhiva Zagranichnoi agentury (Rostov-naD onu, 1918), 6; Bakai, “Pri politsii,” GARF, f. 5881, op. 1, d. 221,1. 154. O n the Spe­ cial Section’s structure and personnel, see Rataev reports, 1902, GARF, f. 102, OO, 1902, d. 444, lit. a, 11. 1 -7, 15-20; Tiutiunnik, “D epartam ent politsii,” 58 -6 0 . 34. Rataev to Z volianskii, February 1902, GARF, f. 102, O O , 1902, d. 444, lit. a, 11. 7 -8 ; T iutiunnik, “D epartam ent politsii,” 5 5 -57. 35. S id o ro v a, “Isto rik i s F ontanki,” 1 1 6 -1 7 ; S pecial S ection rep o rt, 1901, GARF, f. 102, op. 253, d. 103, 1. 197; A ndré-Jean T udesq, “Police e t état sous la M onarchie de Juillet,” in A ubert et al., L ’Etat et sa police en France, 75. T he R ussian g e n d arm es h ad to fu rn ish p h o to g ra p h s o f p o litic a l su s p e c ts b e g in n in g in 1871 (O rzhekhovskii, Samoderzhavie, 132). 36. V. L. B urtsev acquired a few issues o f such reports, w hich he published abroad: “Tsarskii listok,” 9 5 -1 0 3 ; Tsarskii listok: Doklady Ministra vnutrennikh del Nikolaiu II za 1897 god, pt. 1 (Paris: B yloe, 1909). For the originals, see GARF, f. 102, op. 255, dd. 2 9 -3 2 . 37. Special Section report, 1901, GARF, f. 102, op. 253, d. 103, 1. 197; Z. I. Peregudova, “B ib lio tek a revoliutsionnykh izdanii D epartam enta politsii,” in Gosu-

Notes to Pages 106-10

215

darstvennye uchrezhdeniia i obshchestvennye organizatsii SSSR: Istoriia i sovremenn o stM e zh v u z o v sk ii sbornik (M o sco w : M o sk o v sk ii g o su d a rstv e n n y i isto rik o arkhivnyi institut, 1985), 108-14; Peregudova, “Prizhiznennye izdaniia V. I. L enina v kollektsii n eleg al’n ykh izdanii TsG A O R ,” in L. M . G oriushkin, ed., Politicheskaia

ssylka i revoliutsionnoe dvizhenie v Rossii: Konets XIX-nachalo XX v.: Sbornik nauchnykh trudov (Novosibirsk: N auka, Sibirskoe otdelenie, 1988), 3 9 -49. 38. See, for exam ple, relational chart, GARF, f. 102, OO, 1901, d. 850, t. 1,1. 3; Zhilinskii, “O rganizatsiia i zhizn’,” 2 5 7 ,2 7 2 -7 9 . 39. H annah A rendt, Totalitarianism, pt. 3 o f The Origins o f Totalitarianism (N ew York: H arcourt B race Jovanovich, 1951), 131-32. 40. L e C lère, “Police politique,” in A ubert et al., L ’Etat et sa police en France, 105. 4 1. Z u b ato v to M ed n ik ov, 15 F eb ru ary 1897, in M enshchikov, Okhrana i revoliutsiia, 3 :3 4 -3 5 ; M enshchikov, “C hem aia kniga,” GARF, f. 1723, op. 1, d. 375,1. 679; O vchenko, “M oskovskoe okhrannoe otdelenie,” 104; Spiridovich, “Pri tsarskom rezhim e,” 141; V. Burtsev, ed., “D oneseniia E vno Azefa: Perepiska A zefa s Rataevym v 1 903-1906 g g .” Byloe 1 (July 1917): 198. 42. I. N. M oshinskii (Iuz. K onarskii), “D o i p osle pervogo s”ezda R SD R P: Poiski iuzhnoi tipografii i razgrom s.-d. organizatsii,” KS 4 (1928): 4 1 -5 4 ; Ovchenko, “M oskovskoe okhrannoe otdelenie,” 160-61. 4 3. S ch n e id e rm a n , Sergei Zubatov, 2 1 8 -2 0 ; N. A. B u k h b in d er, “R azgrom evreiskogo rabochego dvizheniia v 1898 g.: Po neizdannym arkhivnym m aterialam ,” KL 4 (1 9 2 2 ): 149. 44. Spiridovich, “Pri tsarskom rezhim e,” 141. 45. Pipes, Russian Revolution, 4. 46. Sam uel D. Kassow, Students, Professors, and the State in Tsarist Russia (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University o f California Press, 1989), 94; Baberowski, Au­ tokratie und Justiz, 564; Haimson, Russian Marxists, 81-84; Richard Pipes, Struve: Lib­ eral on the Left, 1870-1905 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1970), 212-31, 252-54; Galai, Liberation Movement, 84-103; Schapiro, Communist Party, 15-16. 47. Z aionchkovskii, Rossiiskoe samoderzhavie, 3 28-43; Kassow, Students, 57, 7 2 -7 5 ; M axim e Kovalewsky, La crise russe: Notes et impressions d fun témoin (Paris: V. G iard & E. B rière, 1906), 146-49. 48. Kassow, Students, 3 -4 , 387. 49. Ibid., 13-1 4 , 9 0 -9 2 ; W ildm an, “R ussian Intelligentsia,” 163; Kovalewsky, La crise russe, 143-44. 50. K. A rsen’ev, “Po povodu V ysochaishego poveleniia 20 fevralia,” Pravo, 27 F ebruary 1899, no. 9; O vchenko, “M oskovskoe okhrannoe otdelenie,” 137; “S.-Peterbu rg sk o e o k h ran n o e o td elen ie,” 1 2 6 -2 8 ; K assow , Students, 92, 95, 9 9 -1 0 7 ; K o­ valewsky, La crise russe, 149-50. 51. Rabe, Widerspruch, 80; Kassow, Students, 107-13, 15. 52. R ataev to L opukhin, 5 June 1902, GARF, f. 102, OO , 1902, d. 1791, 11. 1 1 -1 2 ob.; student, cited in “Studencheskie volneniia v 1901-1902 gg.,” KA 8 9 -9 0 (1938): 305. 53. Serebriakova testim ony, in Alekseev, Istoriia, 59; Zubatov to Rataev, 7 June 1899, GARF, f. 102, OO , 1898, d. 2, ch. 1, Ht. b, 11. 26-28. 54. Z ubatov to Rataev, 19 and 27 Septem ber 1899, GARF, f. 102, OO, 1899, d. 2, ch. 1, lit. b, 11.47-50. 55. Z ubatov to Rataev, 12 N ovem ber 1899, GA RF,'f. 10 2, OO, 1898, d. 2, ch.

216

Notes to Pages 110-15

1, lit. b, 11. 6 4 -6 4 ob.; M oscow Security B ureau reports to city governor, 1 and 4 N o­ vem ber 1899, GARF, f. 102, OO , 1898, d. 2, ch. 1, lit. b, 11. 6 6 -6 7 ; “Instruktsiia Gg. Uchastkovym Pristavam . . . ” GARF, f. 102, OO , 1898, d. 2, ch. 1, lit. b, 11. 7 2 -8 4 ob.; Z ubatov to Rataev, 17 N ovem ber 1899, GARF, f. 102, OO , 1898, d. 2, ch. 1, lit. b, 1. 87; Z ubatov to precinct captains, R G IA gM , f. 46, op. 17, d. 91,1. 38. 56. M oscow Security B ureau to Special Section, 10 M arch 1900, GARF, f. 102, OO, 1898, d. 2, ch. 1, lit. v, 11. 8 7 -8 8 ; Police D epartm ent to M oscow Security Bureau, 1 February 1901, GARF, f. 102, OO , 1898, d. 2, ch. 1, lit. v, 1. 219. 57. M enshchikov, Okhrana i revoliutsiia, vol. 2, 2:40. 58. Andrieux, Souvenirs, 1:176, 339. 59. V. A bram kin and A. D ym shits, uNachalo Marksistskii zhumal devianostykh godov (M oscow: Izd. Politkatorzhan, 1932), 35 -5 8 ; Pipes, Struve: Liberal on the Left, 2 1 5 -2 0 ; “M. I. Gurovich i zhum al ‘N achalo,’” Byloe 5 (1917): 287. 60. M artov, Zapiski, 407. 6 1 . S c h n e id e rm a n , Sergei Zubatov, 2 2 0 - 2 8 , 2 3 5 - 3 6 ; “ Iz is to r ii Z u b a tovshchiny,” 95; N. A. B ukhbinder, “N ezavisim aia evreiskaia rabochaia partiia: Po neizdannym arkhivnym dokum entam ,” KL 2 -3 (1922): 208, 210; “Novoe o zubatovshchine,” KA 1 (1922), 2 9 2 -9 3 ; Zaslavskii, Zubatov i Mania ViVbushevich, 28 -2 9 . 62. Z ubatov to Rataev, 10 Septem ber 1900, GARF, f. 102, op. 316, 1908, d. 538.11. 2 5 4 -5 5 ob.; “Z apiska o zadachakh russkikh rabochikh soiuzov i nachalakh ikh organizatsii,” 1900, GARF, f. 1695, op. 1, d. 19,11. 2 5 -3 2 ; Schneiderm an, Sergei Zu­ batov, 9 6 -9 7 . 63. Z ubatov to Rataev, 10 Septem ber 1900, GARF, f. 102, op. 316, 1908, d. 538.11. 2 5 5 -5 7 ob. 64. Spiridovich, “Pri tsarskom rezhim e,” 141. 65. B ogdanovich, Tri poslednikh samoderzhtsa (diary entry for 15 February 1901), 233 (on Bogolepov); Nikolaevskii, Istoriia odnogo predatelia, 8 2 ,2 4 3 (on Azef). 66. Kassow, Students, 110-16, 129-31, 147, 159-72; Galai, Liberation Move­ ment, 113-14; Schneiderm an, Sergei Zubatov, 9 9 -1 0 0 ; W ildm an, Workers' Revolution, 21 4 -1 6 ; “D nevnik A. A. Polovtsova” (diary entry for 4 M arch 1901), 82. 67. “M aterialy po noveishei istorii Russkoi tsenzury,” Osvobozhdenie, 1903, no. 1:204-8. 6 8 . Vospominaniia: Iz bumag S. E . Kryzhanovskogo, poslednego gosudarstvennogo sekretaria Rossiiskoi imperii (B erlin, n .d .), 190; G alai, Liberation Movement, 115; Sipiagin to governors, 12 M arch 1901, GARF, f. 102, (X ), 1898, d. 4, ch. 22,11. 107b-g, 145-46. 69. V. D. B onch-B ruevich, “R ossiia pod glasnym nadzorom ,” in V. D. BonchBruevich, Izbrannye sochineniia (M oscow : Izd. A kadem ii nauk SSSR, 1961), 2:46; Sipiagin to governors, 30 A pril 1901, GARF, f. 102, OO , 1901, d. 555,11. 3 4-35. 70. Bonch-B ruevich, “R ossiia pod glasnym nadzorom ,” 4 7 -4 9 . It is not certain that th e Iaro slav P g o v ern o r co uld legally ad m in ister such pu n ish m en ts, since his province was not under a state o f reinforced security. T hat right was, however, granted on an ad hoc basis to som e adm inistrative officials. See Sovet ministrov Rossiiskoi im­ perii, 1905-1906 gg.: Dokumenty i materialy (Leningrad: Nauka, 1990), 414. 71. V. I. T en’tiukov, “B onch-B ruevich, V. D . ” in 01, 1:271; E. I. B oitsova, “B onch-B ruevich, V. D . ” i n RP, 1:310-11. 72. Zenzinov, Perezhitoe, 144; G ershuni, Iz nedavnego proshlogo, 7; “N ogin, V. P ,” in Politicheskie deiateli Rossii, 1917 (M oscow : B ol’shaia R ossiiskaia entsiklopediia, 1993), 237.

Notes to Pages 115-19

217

73. N estro ev , Iz dnevnika maksimalista, 157; G essen , “V dvu k h vekakh,” 6 3 -6 5 ; R abe, Widerspruch, 189, 192; R obert Service, The Strengths o f Contradiction, vol. 1 o f Lenin: A Political Life (London: M acm illan, 1985), 63-64. 74. See G oriushkin, Politicheskaia ssylka, 7 3-173. 75. B aum an, “D oklad N. E. Baum ana,” 80. 76. A b ram k in an d D y m sh its, “ Nachalo,” 9 7 -1 0 6 ; “D ep artam en t p o litsii v 1892-1908 gg.,” 19. 77. St. Petersburg Security B ureau to Police D epartm ent, 7 and 8 M ay 1901, in Pervoe maia v tsarskoi Rossii, 4 9 -5 1 ; Palat, “Police Socialism ,” 7 6 -77. 78. “Z apiska L. Rataeva ob E vne Azefe,” in Shchegolev, Provokator, 156-57; N ovitskii, “Z apiska gen. N ovitskogo,” 88—89; “S.-Peterburgskoe okhrannoe otdelenie,” 135-36; O vchenko, “M oskovskoe okhrannoe otdelenie,” 178-81. 7 9 . S p irid o v ic h , Histoire du terrorisme russe, 7 0 - 7 4 ; S p irid o v ic h , “ P ri tsarskom rezhim e,” 137-40; T rutkov report, 22 Septem ber 1903, GARF, f. 102, OO, 1902, d. 825,1. 209; O vchenko, “M oskovskoe okhrannoe otdelenie,” 108; “Z apiska L. R ataev a o b A zefe,” in S hchegolev, Provokator, 1 4 6 -4 9 ; A. A. A rgunov, “A z ef— sotsialist-revoliutsioner,” in Shchegolev, Provokator, 2 0 -32. 80. O vchenko, “M oskovskoe okhrannoe otdelenie,” 170-75; Baum an, “D oklad N . E . B a u m a n a ,” 8 0 - 8 1 ; I. I. S k v o r ts o v - S te p a n o v , “ O b r a z o v a n ie i p r o v a l m oskovskogo kom iteta RSDRP, 1901 g.,” in U istokov boTshevizma: Vospominaniia, dokumenty, materialy, 1894-1903 (M oscow: M oskovskii rabochii, 1983), 7 6 -78. 81. B. M. Frum kin, “Z ubatovshchina i evreiskoe rabochee dvizhenie,” Perezhitoe 3 (1 9 1 1 ): 2 1 2 -1 4 , 2 2 4 -2 5 ; P alat, “ P o lice S o cialism ,” 1 0 2 -3 ; S chneiderm an, Sergei Zubatov, 2 3 8 -5 7 , 267. 82. Schneiderm an, Sergei Zubatov, 103-16; Pospielovsky, Police Trade Union­ ism, 9 9 -1 0 0 ; B u k h b in d er, “Z ub ato v sh ch in a,” 9 8 -9 9 ; B ukhbinder, “N ezav isim aia evreiskaia rabochaia partiia,” 214; Frum kin, “Z ubatovshchina,” 224-25. 83. S ch n eid erm an , Sergei Zubatov, 19 3 -9 4 ; W alter Sablinsky, The Road to Bloody Sunday: Father Gapon and the St. Petersburg Massacre o f 1905 (Princeton: Princeton U niversity Press, 1976), 69n. 84. Zubatov, “Zubatovshchina,” 164-65; Zubatov to Zvolianskii, 10 Septem ber 1901, in Bukhbinder, “Zubatovshchina,” 100-101, 111. 85. Palat, “Police Socialism ,” 8 4 -8 6 ,9 1 -9 3 . 86. Schneiderm an, Sergei Zubatov, 117-22; Zaslavskii, Zubatov i Mania ViVbushevich, 11; V. I. Novikov, “Leninskaia ‘Iskra’ v b o r’be s Z ubatovshchinoi,” Voprosy istorii, 1974, no. 8:32; B aum an, “D oklad N. E. B aum ana,” 74, 83, 85; U l’ianovaElizarova, cited in B ukhbinder, Zubatovshchina, 20. 87. Schneiderm an, Sergei Zubatov, 141-44. 88. Z ubatov to Rataev, 26 July 1901, GARF, f. 102, OO , d. 2, ch. 1, lit. g, 1. 77. 89. B ukhbinder, “Z u b atovshchina,” 9 9 -1 0 0 ; S chneiderm an, Sergei Zubatov, 135-40; B. V. A n an ’ich et al., Krizis samoderzhaviia v Rossii, 1895-1917 (Leningrad: N auka, 1984), 8 3 -8 4 ; Pospielovsky, Police Trade Unionism, 73, 7 8 -8 2 , 104—5; Palat, “Police Socialism ,” 104-6. 90. S. A inzaft, “Z ubatov i studenchestvo,” KS 34 (1927): 6 5 -6 9 ; O vchenko, “M oskovskoe okhrannoe otdelenie,” 141-42; Zaslavskii, Zubatov i Mania ViVbushevich, 6 3 -6 4 . 91. R ataev to Zubatov, 8 N ovem ber 1901, GARF, f. 63, op. 11, 1901, d. 1090, t. 1, 11. 2 7 0 -7 0 ob.; R ataev to Zubatov, 6 D ecem ber 1901, in M elgunov, “Iz perepiski okhrannikov,” 5 6 -5 7 .

218

Notes to Pages 119-23

92. A. S yrom iatnikov, ed., “S tudencheskie v o lneniia v 1 9 0 1 -1 9 0 2 gg,” KA 8 9 -9 0 (1938): 2 5 8 -9 4 ; Pravo, 17 M arch 1902, no. 12:618-19; Trepov to police cap­ tain s, 10 F eb ru a ry 1902, R G IA g M , f. 4 6 , op. 1, d. 1391, 1. 1; “D n e v n ik A. A. Polovtsova” (diary entry for 21 February 1902), 122. 93. Ansim ov, Bor’ba bol’shevikov, 109; R eginald E. Zelnik, A Radical Worker in Tsarist Russia: The Autobiography o f Semen Ivanovich Kanatchikov (S tanford, Calif.: Stanford U niversity Press, 1986), 117; E. D. Stasova, Stranitsy zhizni i bor’by, 3d ed. (M oscow: Izd. politicheskoi literatury, 1988), 6 9 -70. 94. V. I. L enin, “K peterburgskim rabochim i sotsialistam ot ‘Soiuza bo r’by,’” in PSS, 2 :4 6 8 -9 4 ; L enin, “Nasushchnyi vopros,” in PSS, 4:194 (quote). 95. V. I. Lenin, “S chego nachat’?” in PSS, 5:5 -1 3 ; Lenin, Chto delat? in PSS, 6:109-27. 96. Ansim ov, Bor'ba boVshevikov, 71; Lenin, Chto delat*? in PSS, 126-27 (ital­ ics supplied); U ral’skii, Parol*, 174. 97. B. Gorev, “Pered vtorym s”ezdom : Vospominaniia,” KS 8 (1924): 46; V. I. Lenin, “P is’m o k tovarishchu o nashikh organizatsionnykh zadachakh,” in PSS, 7:17n. 98. See W ildm an, Workers*Revolution, 117, 228. 99. Tiutiunnik, “D epartam ent politsii,” 125. 100. Special Section to border gendarm es, 10 February 1910 (NIC, box 179, folder 1, p. 7); B. Gorev, “Leonid M en’shchikov: Iz istorii politicheskoi politsii i provokatsii: Po lichnym vospom inaniiam ,” KS 10 (1924): 132-34; L. M enshchikov, letter to the editor, KS 22 (1926): 2 8 6 -8 7 ; Koznov, “M etam orfozy politicheskogo detektiva,” 116-17; O vchenko, “M oskovskoe okhrannoe otdelenie,” 183-85. 101.0 . A. Ermanskii, Iz perezhitogo (1887-1921) (Moscow: Gos. izd., 1927), 59-60. 102. “P is’m o S. V. Zubatova A. I. Spiridovichu,” 281; Spiridovich, Histoire du terrorisme russe, 8 1 -8 4 ; Hilderm eier, Sozialrevolutionäre Partei, 51. 103. G eifm an, Thou Shalt Kill, 51; Spiridovich, Histoire du terrorisme russe, 149-57; Hilderm eier, Sozialrevolutionäre Partei, 5 8 -65. 104. Hilderm eier, Sozialrevolutionäre Partei, 112-16; Schleifm an, Undercover Agents, 5 9 -6 3 ; S p irid o v ich , Histoire du terrorisme russe, 1 6 4 -6 7 ; R ach k o v sk ii, “K ratkaia zapiska ob usloviiakh,” GARF, f. 5802, op. 1, d. 214,1. 6. 105. A. A. Kornilov, “Vospominaniia,” Voprosy istorii (1994), no. 3:144-51; A. V. Chantsev, “Kornilov, A. A.,” in RP, 3:72. 106. A. V. A m fiteatrov, “G ospoda Obm anovy,” in Russkii feVeton (M oscow : Gos. izd. politicheskoi literatury, 1958), 3 1 2-16. “Obm anov,” a hom onym ie play on Rom anov, m ight be translated as “Mr. Deceiver.” 107. B ogdanovich, Tri poslednikh samoderzhtsa (diary entries for 16 and 17 Jan u ary 1902), 277; K rich ev sk ii, Dnevnik A. S. Suvorina, 2 7 3 -7 6 ; “M aterialy po noveishei istorii R usskoi tsenzury,” 205. 108. Porter, Origins o f the Vigilant State, 116-17; penal code, in Volkov and Filipov, Svod Zakonov, vol. 15, art. 245. 109. PSZ, ser. 3, vol. 22, pt. 1, no. 22307 (20 D ecem ber); G eroid T. R obinson, Rural Russia under the Old Regime (New York: M acM illan, 1949), 138; R ichard G. R obbins, The Tsar*s Viceroys: Russian Provincial Governors in the Last Years o f the Empire (Ithaca, N.Y.: C ornell U niversity Press, 1987), 213-20. 110. Official assessm ents in R obinson, Rural Russia, 139-44, 152-55; S piri­ dovich, Histoire du terrorisme russe, 133-34; P olice D epartm ent to governors, 21 M ay 1902, in “Sekretnye tsirkuliary i instruktsii” (n.p., n.d.; L ibrary o f C ongress R are B ook R eading Room ), sheet 78.

N o te s to P a g e s 1 2 4 - 2 8

219

5. Zubatov’s Unfinished Reforms 1. S ee V. Ia. L averychev, “ ‘B e se d a ’ i ten d e n tsiia k k o n so lid atsii konservativnykh sil v R ossii kontsa X IX -nachala X X veka,” Otechestvennaia istoriia, 1994, no. 3 :4 3 -5 7 ; Galai, Liberation Movement, 1 9 - 3 3 ,4 7 - 5 2 ,5 6 ,1 2 0 - 3 6 , 142-43. 2. S piridovich, Histoire du terrorisme russe, 1 3 3 -43; P olice D epartm ent to gendarm e chiefs, 13 A ugust 1902, GARF, f. 102, O O , 1902, d. 825,1. 25; Police D e­ partm ent to gendarm e chiefs, 4 M ay 1902, GARF, f. 102, O O (I), 1906, d. 125, 11. 2 8 -2 8 ob.; D epartm ent report, 22 Septem ber 1903, GARF, f. 102, O O (I), 1902, d. 825.1. 210. 3. Gerasim ov, Na lezvii, 18. 4. Speech in honor o f S. V. Zubatov, 25 D ecem ber 1901, GARF, f. 1695, op. 1, d. 18. 5. Special Section report, 21 D ecem ber 1901, GARF, f. 102, OO , 1901, d. 987, I. 1. For the reports subm itted by the participants, see GARF, f. 102, OO, 1901, d. 987, II. 2 -6 2 . 6. Police D epartm ent report, 22 Septem ber 1903, GARF, f. 102, OO , 1902, d. 825.1. 218; Gerasim ov, Na lezvii, 19-20. 7. Police D epartm ent report, 22 Septem ber 1903, GARF, f. 102, OO, 1902, d. 825, ll.2 0 6 o b .- 7 . 8. N. N. Ansim ov, “O khrannye otdeleniia i m estnaia v last’ tsarskoi R ossii v nachale X X v.,” Sovetskoe gosudarstvo i pravo, 1991, no. 5:119. 9. Schneiderm an, Sergei Zubatov, 128-32; Liubim ov, “R usskaia smuta,” 2 5 -26; B ukhbinder, “Z ubatovshchina,” 103, 115; Special Section to border gendarm es, 15 February 1910, p. 6, NIC, box 179, folder 1. 10. S ch n eid erm an , Sergei Zubatov, 1 4 2 -6 4 ; A n a n ’ich e t al., Krizis samoderzhaviia v Rossii, 87; B u k h b in d er, “Z u b ato v sh c h in a,” 1 0 2 -8 ; “ K isto rii Z u b atovshchiny,” Byloe 1 (1917): 95. 11. L eonid Rataev, “Z apiska dlia pam iati,” 11 February 1902, GARF, f. 102, OO , 1902, d. 1791,11. 1 -6 ob. O n civil-m ilitary conflicts, see W illiam C. Fuller, Jr., Civil-Military Conflict in Imperial Russia, 1881-1914 (Princeton: Princeton U niver­ sity Press, 1985), 93 -1 1 0 . 12. Special Section to P olice D epartm ent personnel office, 14 January 1903, GARF, f. 102, O O (I) 1906, d. 125,1. 48; Police D epartm ent report, 16 January 1904, GARF, f. 102, O O (I) 1906, d. 125,1. 125. 13. Kizevetter, Na rubezhe dvukh stoletii, 103; E dw ard H. Judge, Plehve: Re­ pression and Reform in Imperial Russia, 1902-1904 (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse U ni­ versity Press, 1983), 14-25, 2 1 8 -1 9 ; Spiridovich, “Pri tsarskom rezhim e,” 156; “Z a­ piska L. R ataeva ob E vno Azefe,” in Shchegolev, Provokator, 160; G urko, Features and Figures, 113. 14. Liubim ov, “R usskaia sm uta,” 7. 15. M ed n ik o v to S p irid o v ic h , 6 M ay 1902, in “P is ’m a M ed n ik o v a S p iridovichu,” 193 -9 4 ; Judge, Plehve, 133-34; S chneiderm an, Sergei Zubatov, 166-68; Pospielovsky, Police Trade Unionism, 5 5 -5 6 ; Zubatov, letter to the editor, “Iz obshchestvennoi khroniki,” 435; Pervoe maia v tsarskoi Rossii, 293n90. 16. Gerasim ov, Na lezvii, 22; B. P. Baluev, “D elo A. A. L opukhina,” Voprosy is­ torii, 1996, no. 1:135; N. V. Davydov, Iz proshlogo (M oscow: Tip. I. D. Sytina, 1913), 137-38; C harles A. R uud, “A. A. L opukhin, Police Insubordination, and the R ule o f Law,” Russian History 20 (1993): 148-50.

220

Notes to Pages 128-33

17. Delo A. A. Lopukhina v osobom prisutstvii pravitel’stvuiuchshego senata: Stenograficheskii otchet (St. Petersburg: Tip. P. I. Artsivi, 1910), 113; N ikolaevskii, Istoriia odnogo predatelia, 2 6 -2 7 . 18. L opukhin to A. D. Fom in, 17 D ecem ber 1902, GARF, f. 102, op. 267, d. 35, 11. 3, 5. 19. Delo A. A. Lopukhina, 113. 20. “P is’m o R ataeva k N. P. Z uevu,” in S hchegolev, Provokator, 128, 138; Spisok chinov Ministerstva vnutrennikh del, pt. 1 (St. Petersburg: Tip. M inisterstva vnutrennikh del, 1895), 221; Adres-kalendar’: Obshchaia rospis ’ nachal’stvuiushchikh i pmchikh dolzhnostnykh lits po vsem upravleniiam Rossiiskoi Imperii (St. Petersburg: Senatskaia tip, 1883-1894). 21. T his w as a play on the phonic sim ilarity betw een the term s “B u n d or “union,” and ,,bunt,n m eaning “rebellion,” both o f w hich derived from the G erm anic term fo r “union.” 22. “K ratkaia zapiska ob usloviiakh d eiatel’nosti uchrezhdenii politicheskoi politsii,” 27 M ay 1902, GARF, f. 5802, op. 1, d. 214,11. 1-24. 23. M em orandum , Rataev to Lopukhin, 5 June 1902, GARF, f. 102, OO , 1902, d. 1791,11.7-13; Nikolaevskii, Istoriia odnogo predatelia, 47; Gessen, “V dvukh vekakh,” 287-88; R. Kantor, ed., “Podpol’nye tipografii 1902-1904 godov: Materialy dlia Tstorikorev o liu tsio n n o g o k alen d aria,’” KS 25 (1926): 138; M iliukov, Vospominaniia, 227; “Chamoluskii V. I.,” ES, vol. 45 ,3 :571-72; Galai, Liberation Movement, 221. 24. G essen, “V dvukh vekakh,” 339; Syrom iatnikov, “Studencheskie volneniia ” 3 0 5 -8 . 25. “Z apiska L. .Rataeva ob E vno Azefe,” in Shchegolev, Provokator, 158-59; Zagranichnaia agentura, 11-12; T iutiunnik, “D epartam ent politsii,” 97. 26. In m id-A ugust F. S. Z ibert becam e interim director o f the Special Section. O n 28 A ugust 1902 Z ubatov was transferred to the Interior M inistry (GARF, f. 63, op. 53, d. 161, 1. 116; co ngratulatory letters to Zubatov, 2 S eptem ber 1902, GA RF, f. 1695, op. 1. d. 13; M ednikov to Spiridovich, 3 S eptem ber 1902, in “P is’m a M ednikova Spiridovichu,” 195). 27. “D nevnik A. A. Polovtsova” (diary entry for 1 Septem ber 1902), 159-60; “R achkovskii, P. I.” in Padenie, 7 :403-4; W itte, Vospominaniia, 2:259-60. 28. “K ar’e ra P. I. R achkovskogo,” 7 8 -8 7 ; Z. “ ‘L iga spaseniia R o ssii’ i P. I. R achkovskii: Iz zapisok zh um alista,” Russkoe slovo, 21 July 1913, N IC , box 203, fo ld er 12; F. S. Z uckerm an, “Self-Im agery and the A rt o f P ropaganda: V. K. von Plehve as Propagandist,” Australian Journal o f Politics and History 28 (1982): 68 -8 1 . 29. Tiutiunnik, “D epartam ent politsii,” 76. 30. “ P o lo zh en ie o n a c h a l’nik ak h R ozy sk n y k h o td elen ii,” 12 A u g u st 1902, GARF, f. 102, op. 262, 1902, d. 10, 11. 1-4; “Svod pravil . . . ” 21 O ctober 1902, GARF, f. 102, op. 2 6 2 ,1 9 0 2 , d. 10,11. 5 -8 . 31. Novitskii, “Z apiska gen. Novitskogo,” 110; M artynov, Moia sluzhba, 93. 32. Rom anov, “Politicheskaia politsiia v Povolzh’e,” 73 -7 4 . 33. Spisok obshchego sostava (10 July 1911), 284; Spiridovich, “Pri tsarskom rezhime,” 166; S. V. Volkov, Russldi ofitsersfdi korpus (Moscow: Voenizdat, 1993), 77-78. 34. Spisok obshchego sostava (15 June 1913), 441. 35. Spiridovich, “Pri tsarskom rezhim e,” 156-57. 36. Police D epartm ent to gendarm e chiefs, 13 A ugust 1902, GARF, f. 102, OO , 1902, d. 825,1. 25; N ovitskii, “Z apiska gen. N ovitskogo,” 74. 37. P olice D epartm ent to governors, 18 O ctober 1902, GARF, f. 102, O O , d.

Notes to Pages 133-36

221

825,1. 87; Spiridovich, “Pri tsarskom rezhim e,” 156-57; Ansim ov, “O khrannye otdeleniia i m estnaia vlast’,” 120-21; Rataev, “Z apiska dlia pam iati,” GARF, f. 102, 0 0 , 1902, d. 1791,1. 5 ob.; Police D epartm ent report, 22 Septem ber 1903, GARF, f. 102, O O , 1902, d. 825,11. 218 o b .- 1 9 ,224 ob. 38. Police D epartm ent to gendarm e chiefs, 13 A ugust 1902, in KSS, 35; Police D epartm ent directives, 5 M arch, 13 May, 15 June 1903, ZA, X IIId (l), f. 8. 39. See, for example, N. G. Rabotnov, Tainy Iaroslavskogo zastenka (n.p., n.d.), 4-5. 40. Police D epartm ent directives, 1 M arch 1904, ZA, X ffld (l), f. 8; Police D e­ partm ent directives, 29 May, 27 N ovem ber 1904, ZA , X m d ( l) , f. 9. 41. Rataev, “Z apiska d lia pam iati,” 8 July 1902, GARF, f. 102, OO, 1902, d. 444, lit. a, 11. 12-14. 42. Police D epartm ent report, 31 D ecem ber 1902, GARF, f. 102, OO , 1902, d. 825, 11. 167-73 ob.; L. P. M enshchikov, articles and correspondence o f 1911-1913, N IC , box 179, folder 23. 43. I. P. Pokrovskii, Gosudarstvennyi biudzhet Rossii za poslednie desiat’ let (1901-1910) (St. Petersburg: Tip. B. M. VolTfa, 1911), 11, 1 5 ,5 2 ,9 7 . 44. M oscow Security B ureau to Special Section, 1 M ay 1900, GARF, f. 102, OO , 1898, d. 1, ch. 1, lit. v, 1. 123 (Zubatov on G erardi); M ednikov to Spiridovich, 24 February 1903, in “P is’m a M ednikova Spiridovichu,” 199. 4 5. M en sh ch ik o v , Okhrana i revoliutsiia, 3:126; M enshchikov, “C h e rn aia kniga,” GARF, f. 1723, op. 1, d. 375,1. 632; O vchenko, “M oskovskoe okhrannoe otdelenie,” 188-90; Special Section to border gendarm es, 10 February 1910, p. 8, NIC, box 179, folder 1; Alekseev, Istorii, 8 - 9 ,4 4 - 4 8 . 46. Zubatov, cited in Alekseev, Istoriia, 18; M itskevich testim ony, in Alekseev, Istoriia, 65. 47. See, fo r exam ple, E. B. Tim ofeeva, ed., “P is’m o politseiskogo chinovnika o sluzhbe, 1903 g.,” Otechestvennye arkhivy, 1993, no. 1:100-105. 48. M oscow Security B ureau to Police D epartm ent, 9 D ecem ber 1902, GARF, f. 102, OO , 1906 (I), d. 125,1. 40; Z ubatov report, 10 D ecem ber 1902, GARF, f. 102, O O , 1906 (I), d. 125,1. 43; Special Section to Police D epartm ent personnel office, 16 January 1904, GARF, f. 102, OO , 1906 (I), d. 125,1. 125 ob.; Police D epartm ent re­ port, 22 Septem ber 1903, GARF, f. 102, OO , 1902, d. 825,1. 220; “Instruktsiia fileram L etuchego otriada i fileram rozysknykh i okhrannykh otdelenii,” 31 O ctober 1902, GARF, f. 102, op. 261, d. 144,11. 1 -2 ob. 49. M ednikov to Spiridovich, 3 N ovem ber 1902, in “P is’m a M ednikova Spiri­ dovichu,” 195. 50. “G a ze ta D ep arta m e n ta P o litsii,” Byloe, pts. 1 and 2 (1908), 7 :1 0 4 -1 8 , 8:4 3 -5 7 . T he surveys o f gendarm e investigations w ere discontinued in 1904. 51. See, fo r exam ple, “O bzor revoliutsionnogo dvizheniia za 1901-1903 gg.,” GARF, f. 102, op. 253, d. 152; Tiutiunnik, “D epartam ent politsii,” 133-34. 52. Police D epartm ent report, 22 Septem ber 1903, GARF, f. 102, OO , 1902, d. 825,11. 214, 220 o b .-2 1 ; Spiridovich, “Pri tsarskom rezhim e,” 158, 161-67; M ednikov to S pirid o v ich , 30 January, 14 February, and 2 M ay 1903, in “P is’m a M ednikova S p ir id o v ic h u ,” 1 9 6 - 9 7 , 1 9 9 - 2 0 0 , 2 1 7 n ; “ Z a p is k a L . R a ta e v a o b A z e f e ,” in Shchegolev, ed. Provokator, 153-54; N ikolaevskii, Istoriia odnogo predatelia, 68. 53. N ikolaevskii, Istoriia odnogo predatelia, 67 -6 8 . 54. O n Plehve, see “Z apiska L. Rataeva ob Azefe,” in Shchegolev, Provokator, 150; N ikolaevskii, Istoriia odnogo predatelia, 60 -6 7 . O n Zubatov, see “P is’m o S. V. Z ub ato v aA . I. Spiridovichu,” 282; M enshchikov, Okhrana i revoliutsiia, vol. 2, 2:118;

222

Notes to Pages 136-40

S p irid o v ic h , “P ri tsa rsk o m r e z h i m e 179. O n L o p u k h in , see S p irid o v ic h , “ P ri tsa rsk o m re z h im e ,” 179; N ik o la e v sk ii, Istoriia odnogo predatelia, 6 In ; R u u d , “Lopukhin,” 152. 55. “Z ap isk a L. R ataev a ob E vno A z efe ,” in Shchegolev, Provokator, 154, 161-63; N ikolaevskii, Istoriia odnogo predatelia, 7 3 -7 7 . 56. “K ratkaia zapiska,” D ecem ber 1912, GARF, f. 102, OO , 1912, d. 248, 11. 39, 44 ob.; Special Section to N ovgorod G endarm e Station, O ctober 1903, GARF, f. 102, O O , 1903, d. 2415, 1. 5; I. V. N arskii, “Paradoks avtoritam oi povsednevnosti: V zaim o o tn o sh en iia le v o ra d ik a l’n oi op p o zitsii i vlasti v R o ssii n achala X X v. na lokal’nom urovne: Po u ral’skim m aterialam ,” Istoricheskie nauki-Vestnik Cheliabinskogo gosudarstvennogo pedagogicheskogo universiteta, 1995, no. 1:55-56. 57. N ovitskii, Iz vospominanii zhandarma, 187-88; Spiridovich, “Pri tsarskom rezhim e,” 166-67; Z ubatov service records, GARF, f. 63, op. 53, d. 161 ,1.110. 58. Spiridovich, “Pri tsarskom rezhim e,” 156-57; Ansim ov, “O khrannye otdeleniia i m estnaia v last',” 120. 59. “Z apiska L. R ataeva ob Azefe,” in Shchegolev, ed. Provokator, 158. 60. Schneiderm an, Sergei Zubatov, 175-90, 2 5 7 -7 7 , 30 0 -3 0 6 ; M enshchikov, Okhrana i revoliutsiia, 3:20; S piridovich, “P ri tsarskom rezhim e,” 159; A nsim ov, “O khrannye otdeleniia i m estnaia vlast’,” 119; Zaslavskii, Zubatov i Mania ViVbushevich, 9; B ukhbinder, “N ezavisim aia evreiskaia rabochaia partiia,” 23 0 -3 1 ; M el’gunov, “Iz perepiski okhrannikov,” 54; Pospielovsky, Police Trade Unionism, 122-43. 61. Judge, Plehve, 6 8 -7 0 ; Robbins, Tsar’s Viceroys, 216-18. 62. E dw ard H. Judge, Easter in Kishinev: Anatomy o f a Pogrom (New York: New York U niversity Press, 1992), 7 2 -74. 63. S. M . D ubnov and G. la. K rasnyi-A dm oni, Dobussarskoe i Kishinevskoe delà 1903 goda, vol. 1 o f Materialy dlia istorii antievreiskikh pogromov v Rossii (P e tro g rad : T ip. K ad im a, 1919), 282, 3 3 3 -3 5 ; Z av arzin , Zhandarmy i revoliutsionery, 6 4 -6 5 ; G urko, Features and Figures, 249. 64. See, for exam ple, N. K arabchevskii, Chto glaza moi videli, 2 vols. (Berlin: Izd. O l’gi D ’iakovoi, 1921), 2:37. 65. Schneiderm an, Sergei Zubatov, 282-85. 66. Zavarzin, Zhandarmy i revoliutsionery, 82 -8 3 ; Karabchevskii, Chto glaza moi videli, 2:3 6 -4 0 . 67. B ogdanovich, Tri poslednikh samoderzhtsa (diary entry for 30 M ay 1903), 286; Pravo, 8 June 1903, no. 2 4 :1650-51. 68. “Dnevnik A. N. Kuropatkina” (diary entry for 14 April 1903), KA 2 (1922), 43. 69. Judge, Plehve, 84; Rossiia: Entsiklopedicheskii slovar* (Leningrad: Lenizdat, 1991), 83. By 1907, there w ere still only fifty-seven thousand rural guards: N. R u b ak in , “M n o g o li v R o ssii chinovnikov: Iz etiudov o ch isto i publike,” Vestnik Evropy (January 1910), 127. O n the grow ing law lessness in rural R ussia in 1903 and the low professional level o f rural police officers, see “Z apiska A. Plansona,” 30 D e­ cem ber 1903, GARF, f. 586, op. 1, d. 316,11. 3 -2 0 ob. 70. S ee S c h n e id e rm a n , Sergei Zubatov, 3 1 2 - 3 2 , 3 4 7 - 4 8 ; Ju d g e , Plehve, 1 4 2 -4 9 ; “ K isto rii vseo b sh ch ei stachki na iuge R ossii v 1903 g . ” KA 88 (1938): 7 6 -1 2 2 ; “Z apiska direktora D epartam enta p o lits ii. . . po delu o stachkakh i besporiadkakh . . . ” KL 4 (1922): 385 -9 5 . 71. O n Z ubatov’s fall from grace, see Schneiderm an, Sergei Zubatov, 350-61. W ahl, cited in B ogdanovich, Tri poslednikh samoderzhtsa (diary entry for 9 A pril 1907), 432. O n Sazonov and Skandrakov, see M enshchikov, “C hernaia kniga,” GARF,

Notes to Pages 140-43

223

f. 1723, op. 1, d. 375,1. 670; N ovitskii, “Z apiska gen. Novitskogo,” 173; M ednikov to Spiridovich, 3 Septem ber 1903, in “P is’m a M ednikova Spiridovichu,” 204. 72. Spiridovich, “Pri tsarskom rezhim e,” 153; Alekseev, Istoriia, 60; “Spravka o Z ubatove,” GARF, f. 1695, op. 1, d. 40,1. 1 ob.; “K istorii Zubatovshchiny,” 96-98. 73. “25 let nazad: Iz dnevnikov L. Tikhom irova,” KA 38 (1930): 24 (diary entry for 3 January 1903); “Spravka o Zubatove,” GARF, f. 1695, op. 1, d. 40,11. 1 ob.-2; Police D epartm ent to M oscow city governor, 3 D ecem ber 1904, GARF, f. 63, op. 53, d. 161,1. 121; B ogdanovich, Tri poslednikh samoderzhtsa (diary entries for 28 O cto­ b er and 27 N ovem ber 1904), 302, 315; M ednikov to Spiridovich, 11 July and 10 O c­ tober 1904, in “P is’m a M ednikova Spiridovichu,” 2 0 9-10. 74. Z ubatov to Burtsev, 12 D ecem ber 1906, in K oz’m in, Zubatov, 65; “K istorii Zubatovshchiny,” 9 8 -9 9 ; Police D epartm ent to city governor, 15 M ay 1910, GARF, f. 63, op. 53, d. 161, 1. 127. O n Z u b ato v ’s m onarchism , see Z avarzin, Zhandarmy i revoliutsionery, 59; Z ubatov to Burtsev, 21 M arch 1908, in K u z'm in , Zubatov, 90; Grazhdanin, 2 N ovem ber 1906, no. 82, pp. 1-2, and 19 N ovem ber 1906, no. 87, pp. 1-2. O n his death, see Uiro Rossii, 5 M arch 1917. 75. M orozov, quoted by Zubatov, “Zubatovshchina,” 178; M artov, quoted in E. Sm irnov, “Z ubatovshchina,” in Kalendar’ russkoi revoliutsii, ed. V. L. Burtsev (Petro­ grad: Shipovnik, 1917), 52; “D nevnik A. A. Polovtsova” (diary entry for 21 M arch 1902), 127. 76. “K istorii Zubatovshchiny,” 93; Palat, “Police Socialism ,” 97. 77. Sablinsky, Road, 8 1 -8 3 ; “Vospominaniia: M em uary professora I. Kh. O ze­ rova,” Voprosy istorii, 1997, no. 2:88. 78. B aum an, “D oklad N. E. Baum ana,” 83. See also H aim son, Russian Marx­ ists, 166. 7 9 . 1. Tkachukov, “O khranka i 2-i s”ezd partii,” KS 48 (1929): 28 -3 2 ; Tiutiun nik, “D epartam ent politsii,” 129-31. 80. M oscow Security B ureau to Special Section, 19 Septem ber 1903, and Spe­ cial Section to M oscow city governor (draft), O ctober 1903, GARF, f. 102, OO , 1898, d. 4, ch. 2, lit. e, 11. 7 8 -8 3 ; Palat, “Police Socialism ,” 78; Schneiderm an, Sergei Zuba­ tov, 187-89. 81. “Z ap isk a L. R ataev a ob E v n o A zefe,” in S hchegolev, Provokator, 159; “M akarov, N. A . ” in Padenie, 7:372; Spiridovich, “Pri tsarskom rezhim e,” 193. 82. M ednikov to Spiridovich, 8 February and 11 July 1904, in “P is’m a M ed­ nikova Spiridovichu,” 2 0 7 -9 ; “Z apiska L. R ataeva ob E vno Azefe,” in Shchegolev, Provokator, 157; “O khranki i chem ye kabinety,” Revoliutsionnaia mysV 1 (1908): 10. K rem enetskii was dism issed from the G endarm e Corps in 1916 for having seized an “ illeg al” p ress th at as gen d arm e c h ie f o f P enza P rovince he had h im self outfitted (“K rem enetskii, L. N.,” in Padenie, 7:360). 83. M ednikov to Spiridovich, 8 February and 1 D ecem ber 1904, in “P is’m a M ednikova Spiridovichu,” 2 0 7 -1 2 ; PSZ, ser. 3, v. 24, pt. 1, art. 23845 (5 January); M artynov, Moia sluzhba, 19, 2 2 -2 3 ; Police D epartm ent report, 22 Septem ber 1903, GARF, f. 102, OO , 1902, d. 825,11. 225 ob.-29. 84. R ataev to Z ubatov, 10 M arch 1903, in M elgunov, “Iz perepiski okhrannikov,” 58; N ikolaevskii, Istoriia odnogo predatelia, 60 -6 1 . 85. Special Section to gendarm e stations, 19 A ugust 1903, GARF, f. 102, OO, 1903, d. 2415, 1. 3; “N ikolai II i sam oderzhavie v 1903 g.,” Byloe 30 (1918): 191; checklists, 1903-1917, GARF, f. 102, op. 267, d. 36,11. 1-17; Revoliutsionnaia mysV 1(19 0 8 ): 10-11.

224

Notes to Pages 144-49

86. Spiridovich, “Pri tsarskom rezhim e,” 193; Special Section to border gen­ darm es, 15 February 1910, NIC, box 179, folder 1, pp. 8 -9 (M enshchikov); M ednikov to Spiridovich, 7 N ovem ber 1904, in “Pis*ma M ednikova Spiridovichu,” 211; “Z apiska L. R ataeva ob Azefe,” in Shchegolev, Provokator, 161. 87. K om issiia . . . “Z hum al,” GARF, f. 102, op. 316, 1909, d. 361,1. 23; corre­ spondence, P olice D epartm ent— security bureaus— G endarm e C orps, M a rch -A p ril 1903, GA RF, f. 102, O O , 1903, d. 2145, 11. 1 -80; G endarm e C orps directive, 20 M arch 1903, cited in “Instruktsiia nachal’nikam ,” GARF, f. 102, op. 261, d. 68,1. 2; Spiridovich, “Pri tsarskom rezhim e,” 184; Special Section to Volynia G endarm e Sta­ tion, 1 July 1904, GARF, f. 102, OO , 1903, d. 2145,11. 14-15 ob. 88. O vchenko, “M oskovskoe okhrannoe otdelenie,” 192. 89. Rabe, Widerspruch, 87, 352; G. G. Evangulov, “N ovoe ugolovnoe ulozhenie,” Pravo, 18 M ay 1903, no. 21:1479-82; Sovet ministrov Rossiiskoi imperii, 5 2 n l0 ; Baberow ski, Autokratie und Justiz, 208; PSZ, ser. 3, vol. 24, pt. 1, no. 24732 (7 June 1904); Slukhotskii, “O cherk deiatel’nosti M inisterstva iustitsii,” 27 9 -8 0 ; M aklakov, Iz vospominanii, 265. 90. Baluev, “D elo A. A. L opukhina,” 136; L. I. G o l’dm an, ed., Politicheskie protsessy v Rossii: 1901-1917 (M oscow : Izd. Politkatorzhan, 1932), 1:52, 61; la. M. Sverdlov, Izbrannye pwizvedeniia: Stat’i, rechi, p is’ma (M oscow : Politizdat, 1976), 32; Ansim ov, “Okhrannye otdeleniia i m estnaia vlast’,” 123; B aberow ski, Autokratie und Justiz, S i l , 742; N. N. Polianskii, Tsarskie voennye sudy v bor’be s revoliutsiei, 1905-1907 gg. (M oscow: Izd. M oskovskogo universiteta, 1958), 33. 91. Rabe, Widerspruch, 83, 146, 150, 252-57. 92. Intercepted Jetter in “N ikolai II i sam oderzhavie v 1903 g.,” 209; Gurko, Features and Figures, 227. 93. Judge, Plehve, 199-208; M aklakov, Iz vospominanii, 306; Plehve, quoted in Liubim ov, “R usskaia sm uta,” 2 2 -2 3 ; Galai, Liberation Movement, 57. 94. M ednikov to Spiridovich, 14 February 1903, in “P is’m a M ednikova Spiri­ dovichu,” 199; M elissa K irschke Stockdale, “Politics, M orality, and Violence: K adet L iberals and the Q uestion o f Terror,” Russian History 22 (W inter 1996): 45 5 -8 0 . 95. G essen, “V dvukh vekakh,” 174-75; M iliukov, Vospominaniia, 144-45. 96. Gurko, Features and Figures, 237-38. 97. Pipes, Struve: Liberal on the Left, 344; Galai, Liberation Movement, 188. 98. Judge, Plehve, 119-21. 99. PSZ, ser. 3, vol. 24, pt. 1, no. 23958 (29 January 1904). G essen cites six such cases in 1904, seven each in 1905 and 1906, and tw enty-one in 1907 {Iskliuchitel’noepolozhenie, 21 0 -1 1 ). 100. “Mestnosti, sostoiashchiia na voennom polozhenii,” GARF, f. 102, op. 302, d. 4,11. 1-3; “Pravila o mestnostiakh, ob”iavlennykh sostoiashchimi na voennom polozhenii,” in Volkov and Filipov, eds., SvodZakonov, vol. 2, p t 1, a it 23; Gessen, Iskliuchitel’noepolozhenie, 205-6. 101. Judge, Plehve, 199-208; Liubim ov, “R usskaia sm uta,” 19-23. 102. M enshchikov, “C hernaia kniga,” GARF, f. 1723, op. 1, d. 375,1. 696; L iu­ bimov, “R usskaia sm uta,” 16. 103. Liubim ov, “R usskaia sm uta,” 116-17; Spiridovich, Histoire du terrorisme russe, 180-81; A zef to Police D epartm ent, 19 June 1904, in Pis’maAzefa, 101. 104. N ikolaevskii, Istoriia odnogo predatelia, 70; “Z apiska L. R ataeva ob E vno Azefe,” in Shchegolev, Provokator, 153. 105. G erasim ov, Na lezyii, 137-38; N ikolaevskii, Istoriia odnogo predatelia, 70, 80-8 7 .

Notes to Pages 149-54

225

106. Judge, Plehve, 2 3 2 -37. 107. N ikolaevskii, Istoriia odnogo predatelia, 88. 108. Ibid., 9 1 -9 3 . 109. S truve, cited in P ipes, Russian Revolution, 15; Savinkov, excerpted in “Krov*po sovesti”: Terrorizm v Rossii: Dokumenty i biografii (R ostov-na-D onu: Izd. R G PU , 1994), 145. 110. R abe, Widerspruch, 8 5 ,1 5 0 . 111. V lad im ir N iko laev ich K okovtsov, Iz moego proshlogo: Vospominaniia, 1903-1991 gg. (M oscow : N auka, 1992), 1:58-59; PSZ, ser. 3, vol. 24, pt. 1, no. 25123 (22 S ep tem b er 1904); R ydzevskii, quoted in B ogdanovich, Tri poslednikh samoderzhtsa (diary entry for 4 N ovem ber 1904), 305. 112. Judge, Plehve, 2 3 8 -4 2 ; G urko, Features and Figures, 2 9 8 -308; Vospomi­ naniia . . . Kryzhanovskogo, 18; M irskii, quoted in A. L. Sidorov, ed., “D nevnik kn. E kateriny A lekseevny Sviatopolk-M irskoi za 1904-1905 gg.” (diary entries for 25 A u­ gust and 22 N ovem ber 1904), Istoricheskie zapiski 11 (1965): 241, 259; M iliukov, quoted in V. A. M aklakov, Vlast' i obshchestvennost’ na zakate staroi Rossii (Vospomi­ naniia), 3 vols, in 1 (Paris, 1950), 323. 113. Police D epartm ent report, GARF, f. 102, OO, 1912, d. 2 7 ,1 1 .4 -5 ; Sidorov, “ D n e v n ik . . . S v ia to p o lk -M irs k o i” (d ia ry e n try fo r 16 N o v e m b er 1904), 2 55; M iliukov, Vospominaniia, 169; G alai, Liberation Movement, 216; B ogdanovich, Tri poslednikh samoderzhtsa (diary entry for 21 O ctober 1904), 300. 114. P e tru n k e v ic h , “ Iz z ap iso k ,” 358; P ip e s, Russian Revolution, 1 8 -1 9 ; Sidorov, “D nevnik . . . Sviatopolk-M irskoi” (diary entry for 1 N ovem ber 1904), 252; G urko, Features and Figures, 306; Terrence E m m ons, “R ussia’s B anquet Cam paign,” California Slavic Studies 10 (1977): 84-86. 115. L. A. Rataev, “K ratkii obzor deiatel’nosti zagranichnoi agentury . . . ,” N IC , box 203, folder 22, pp. 9 -1 0 ; Galai, Liberation Movement, 21 0 -1 3 , 220; Pipes, Struve: Liberal on the Left, 347, 36 0 -6 1 ; Police D epartm ent to governors, 16 D ecem ­ ber 1904, in “Sekretnye tsirkuliary i instruktsii,” 71. 116. R atko to Zubatov, 3 D ecem ber 1904, in K oz’m in, Zubatov, 41 -4 4 . 117. K oz’m in, Zubatov, 46n5. 118. PSZ, ser. 3, vol. 24, pt. 1, no. 25495 (12 D ecem ber 1904); Galai, Libera­ tion Movement, 238; Sidorov, “D nevnik . . . Sviatopolk-M irskoi” (diary entry for 14 D ecem ber 1904), 266; Bogdanovich, Tri poslednikh samoderzhtsa (diary entries for 9 and 10 D ecem b er 1904), 3 2 0 -2 1 ; Kokovtsov, Iz moego proshlogo, 1:59-60; Spiridovich, “Pri tsarskom rezhim e,” 184. 119. R u ud, “L o pukhin,” 152; “Z apiska A. A. L opukhina o razvitii revoliutsionnogo dvizheniia v R ossii, 1904 g.,” Byloe 9 -1 0 (1909): 7 4 -7 8 ; Lopukhin on his critics in Otryvki, 55. 120. G em et, G o l’dovskii, and Sakharov, eds., Protiv smertnoi kazni, 398. 121. Dokladnaia zapiska . . . Lopukhina, 1-13. 122. W itte, q uoted in L opukhin, Otryvki, 57; PSZ, ser. 3, vol. 24, pt. 1, no. 25599 (31 D ecem ber 1904).

6. Police and Administration in the Revolution of 1905

1. A braham Ascher, The Revolution o f 1905, 2 vols. (Stanford, Calif.: Stanfor U niv ersity P ress, 1988), 1 :8 1 -8 3 ; Sablinsky, Road, chaps. 6 -7 ; G apon, quoted in R a ta e v to p o lic e d ire c to r, 7 F e b ru a ry 1905, Z A , X Ic (5 ), pp. 4 - 6 , 12; “ D o k lad

226

Notes to Pages 154-59

direktora departam enta politsii L opukhina M inistru vnutrennikh del o sobytiiakh 9-go ianvaria,” KL 1 (1922): 335; L. Gurevich, “N arodnoe dvizhenie v Peterburge 9-go ianvaria 1905 goda,” Byloe 1 (1906): 2 0 3 ,2 0 8 . 2. “P e terb u rg sk o e g ra d o n a c h a l’stvo i 9 -e ianvaria,” KL 12 (1925): 3 8 -4 3 ; Sablinsky, Road, 2 0 6 -9 , 3 4 4 -4 9 ; R ydzevskii, quoted in A. A. M osolov, Pri dvore

poslednego Rossiiskogo imperatora: Zapiski nachal’nika kantseliarii Ministerstva Imperatorskogo Dvora (M oscow : Ankor, 1993), 194; “D oklad direktora departam enta politsii Lopukhina,” 334; G urevich, “N arodnoe dvizhenie,” 218. 3. PSZ, ser. 3, vol. 25, pt. 1, no. 25642 (11 January 1905); Liubim ov, “R usskaia sm uta,” 267; S. R. M intslov, “Dnevnik, 1905-1906 gg.” (diary entry for 12 January 1905), GM 5 (1917): 16-18; Radtsig, quoted in Bogdanovich, Tri poslednikh samoderzhtsa (diary entry for 12 January 1905), 336; M ednikov to Spiridovich, 10 January 1905, in “P is’m a M ednikova Spiridovichu,” 212. 4. “B u ly g in , A. G .,” in OI, 1:308; B ulygin, qu o ted in V. F. D zhunkovskii, “Vospominaniia, 1905-1908,” GARF, f. 826, op. 1, d. 4 7 ,1 .4 8 . 5. Special Section report, 17 January 1905, GARF, f. 102, OO , 1915, d. 444,11. 11-16 ob.; Rom anov, “Politicheskaia politsiia v Povolzh’e,” 55. 6. M ednikov to Spiridovich, 24 January and 10 M arch 1905, in “P is’m a M ed­ nikova Spiridovichu,” 213; Gerasim ov, Na lezvii, 23. 7. R obert E. B lobaum , Rewolucja: Russian Poland, 1904-1907 (Ithaca, N.Y.: C ornell U niversity Press, 1995), 7 4 -8 3 ; PSZ, ser. 3, vol. 25, nos. 25802, 25819, 25929 (6 M arch 1905), 25988 (18 M arch 1905), 26065 (5 April 1905), 26173 (7 M ay 1905). 8. C om m ittee o f M inisters report in D rezen, Tsarizm v bor’be s revoliutsiei, 31 -4 5 ; G alinovskii, “Z akliuchitel’noe postanovlenie,” GARF, f. 1467, op. 1, d. 396,11. 2 7 5 -7 7 ; G essen , IskliuchiteVnoe polozhenie, 2 7 0 -7 7 ; W aldron, “ S tates o f E m er­ gency,” 18-20; Pravo, 14 M ay 1905, no. 19:1616-17. 9. A. D anilkin and O. M arinin, “B om ba vo slavu vesny chelovechestva,” Ve­ che miaia Moskva, 15 February 1991, p. 4. 10. N. E ro sh k in , “A d m in istrativ n o -p o litseisk ii apparat,” in Istoriia Moskvy (M oscow: Izd. Akadem ii nauk SSSR, 1955), 5:668. A ccording to one jo k e heard in the hom e o f a professor, “T he grand duke had for once been obliged to cast his brains aro u n d an issu e [Prishlos’ vse-taki raz i velikomu kniaziu poraskinut’ mozgamï]” (Gessen, “V dvukh vekakh,” 195). 11. Petrunkevich, “Iz zapisok,” 366. 12. Sidorov, “D nevnik . . . S viatopolk-M irskoi” (diary entry fo r 7 February 1 9 0 5 ), 2 8 2 ; A n s im o v , “ O k h ra n n y e o td e le n iia i m e s tn a ia v l a s t ’,” 122; A . M . Z aionchkovskii, “V gody reaktsii,” KA 8 (1925): 242; Spiridovich, “Tablitsa terrora P. S. R.,” YSP, box 6. 13. Spiridovich, Histoire du terrorisme russe, 233; Spiridovich, “Pri tsarskom rezhim e,” 2 0 1 -6 . 14. G em et, G o l’dovskii, and Sakharov, Protiv smertnoi kazni, 398-400. Nine soldiers and sailors w ere also executed for m utiny in 1905. 15. M iliukov, Vospominaniia, 184; Pipes, Russian Revolution, 29; Ascher, Rev­ olution o f 1905, 1 :1 1 2 -1 5 ; G urko, Features and Figures, 372; S p irid o v ich , “Pri tsarskom rezhim e,” 194-95. 16. R . S h . G a n e lin , ‘“ B itv a d o k u m e n to v ’ v s re d e ts a r s k o i b iu r o k r a tii, 1899-1901,” VspomogatePnye istoricheskie distsipliny 17 (1985): 246; K oz’m in, Zubatov, 1 15n9; Gerasim ov, Na lezyii, 6 -9 , 2 9 -3 0 , 57. 17. M ednikov to Z ubatov, 30 June 1905, in K o z’m in, Zubatov, 112, 116n;

Notes to Pages 159-63

227

Provo, 1 M ay 1905, no. 17:1436; Ruud, “Lopukhin,” 153-54. 18. “ O b u c h re z h d e n ii p o lu -o ffits ia l’n o g o , su b sid iru e m o g o p ra v ite l’svtom ‘R usskogo biuro korrespondentsii,’” 19 A pril 1905, GARF, f. 102, op. 253, d. 172,11. 4 ob .-1 2 . 19. Rataev to Police D epartm ent, 26 A pril 1905, ZA, n ia ; D. B. Pavlov, ed., “T ainaia voina protiv Rossii: Iz dokum entov russkoi kontrrazvedki, 1904-1905 gg.,” Istoricheskii arkhiv, 1994, no. 3 :1 3 ,4 3 -4 7 , 51, 54; Ascher, Revolution o f 1905, 1:50. 20. A nonym ous letter to city governor, 8 February 1905, GARF, f. 63, op. 14, d. 186,1. 1. T he prison guards earned sixteen rubles per m onth. 21. N ovitskii, “Z apiska gen. Novitskogo,” 6 6 -6 7 , 7 4 -7 5 , 8 6 -8 9 , 9 5 -100; “Zapiska L. R ataeva ob Azefe,” in Shchegolev, Provokator, 147-48. 22. Special Section directive, 15 A pril 1905, in “Sekretnye tsirkuliary i instruktsii,” 74; Ascher, Revolution o f 1905, 1:130-31. 23. Ascher, Revolution o f 1905, 1:115-16. 24. Spiridovich, Histoire du terrorisme russe, 21 6 -1 7 ; W ildm an, Workers*Rev­ olution, 253; R ataev to police director, 7 February 1905, ZA , XIc(5), p. 13. 25. S ch ap iro , Communist Party, 5 9 -6 0 ; P eregudova, “Isto c h n ik izu ch en iia sotsial-dem okraticheskogo dvizheniia,” 90; Iarm ysh, “K aratel’nye organy tsarizm a,” 33; A scher, Revolution o f 1905, 1:189-90; Pervoe maia v tsarskoi Rossii, 301. 26. “Z apiska o deiatel’nosti letuchego otriada . . . ” 29 N ovem ber 1905, GARF, f. 102, O O , 1906, d. 125,11. 345 ob.-55 ob.; Spiridovich, Histoire du terrorisme russe, 2 4 6 -4 9 ; Oskar, “D elo o pokushenii 16-ti lits na zhizn’ generala Trepova v 1905 godu,” Byloe 10 (1907): 2 8 2 -8 5 ; B oris Savinkov, lzbrannoe (Leningrad: K hudozhestvennaia literature, 1990), 114-20. 27. D. B. Pavlov, Esery-maksimalisty v pervoi rossiiskoi revoliutsii (M oscow: Izd. V sesoiznogo zaochnogo politekhnicheskogo instituta, 1989), 45; Scott J. Seregny, “A D ifferent Type o f Peasant M ovem ent: T he Peasant U nions in the R ussian Revolu­ tion o f 1905,” SR 47 (1988): 5 4 ,6 0 ,6 5 , 67. 28. Pipes, Russian Revolution, 30; Police D epartm ent to gendarm e and security chiefs, 2 July 1905, Z A , X IQ d (l), 9, pp. 1-6; M iliukov, Vospominaniia, 197-200; A scher, Revolution o f 1905, 1:142-44. 29. Peregudova, “D epartam ent politsii,” 173-74. 30. PSZ, ser. 3, vol. 25, pt. 1, no. 26254 (21 M ay 1905); Gurko, Features and Figures, 37 6 -7 7 . 31. C harles A. R uud, Fighting Words: Imperial Censorship and the Russian Press, 1804-1906 (Toronto: University o f Toronto Press, 1982), 2 1 4 -22; Ascher, Rev­ olution o f 1905, 1:128-29; F. M. L u r’e, Khraniteli proshlogo: Zhumal “Byloe”: Istoriia, redaktory, izdateli (Leningrad: L enizdat, 1990), 9; Sidorova, “Arkhivy,” 189; Shchegolev, Okhranniki, 11. 32. F. X. Coquin, 1905: La révolution russe manquée (Brussels: E ditions com ­ p lex e, 1985), 131; A sch er, Revolution o f 1905, 1 :1 6 2 -6 6 ; L iubim ov, “ R u ssk aia sm uta,” 239. 33. Ascher, Revolution o f 1905, 1:147-49; “Krest’ianskoe dvizhenie,” 7 0 ,6 8 -9 3 . 34. Police D epartm ent report in “K rest’ianskoe dvizhenie,” 6 8 -6 9 ; Steven L. H och, “O n G ood N um bers and Bad: M althus, Population Trends and Peasant Stan­ d ard o f L iving in L ate Im p erial R ussia,” Slavic Review 53 (Spring 1994): 6 7 -7 5 ; H einz-D ietrich L öw e, Die Lage der Bauern in Russland, 1880-1905 (St. Katherinen: Scripta M ercaturae Verlag, 1987), 370-77. 35. Liubim ov, “R usskaia sm uta,” 236-38.

228

Notes to Pages 163-69

36. PSZ, sen 3, vol. 25, pt. 1, no. 26173 (7 M ay 1905); Blobaum , Rewolucja, 9 8 -1 0 1 ,2 1 9 -2 4 ; Ascher, Revolution o f 1905, 1:170-74. 3 7 . B lo b a u m , Rewolucja, 9 3 - 9 4 , 1 4 2 - 4 8 ; A s c h e r, Revolution o f 1905, 1:127-41. 38. G o rd m a n , Politicheskie protsessy, 1:61, 85; Polianskii, Tsarskie voennye sudy, 33. 39. Rabe, Widerspruch, 89. 40. R obbins, Tsar’s Viceroys, 22 5 -2 7 , 231; Ascher, Revolution o f 1905, 1:176; “D um ovo, P. R,” in Gosudarstvennye deiateli Rossii, XIX-nachala XX v.: Biografcheskii spravochnik, com p. I. I. L in ’kov et al. (M oscow: Izd. M oskovskogo universiteta, 1995), 69; M aklakov, Vlast’ i obshchestvennost’, 382; P etrunkevich, “Iz zapisok,” 3 6 6 -6 7 ; M ikhailov, Chetvert’veka podpol’shchika, 164-66. 41. M ikhailov, Chetvert’veka podpol’shchika, 140; report on Z huchenko, 1906, GARF, f. 102, op. 316, 1906, d. 1019,1. 31; A. N. Petrov, “G engross-Zhuchenko [sic], Z. F.,” in 01, 1:525; Spiridovich, “Pri tsarskom rezhim e,” 196; M ednikov to Zubatov, 30 June 1905, in K oz’m in, Zubatov, 111-12. 42. E rm an sk ii, Iz perezhitogo, 1 0 8 -9 ; S pirid o v ich , Histoire du terrorisme russe, 233. 43. Police D epartm ent to governors and gendarm e chiefs, 28 June 1905, GARF, f. 102, op. 260, d. 13,11. 312 -1 4 . 44. Gurko, Features and Figures, 386n. 45. “Garin, N. R,” in Padenie, 7 :321-22; Liubim ov, “R usskaia sm uta,” 2 9 7 -98; M ednikov to S piridovich, 24 June and 2 July 1905, in “P is’m a M ednikova S piridovichu,” 215; M ednikov to Zubatov, 30 June 1905, in K oz’m in, Zubatov, 113-14; L aporte, Histoire de l ’okhrana, 119, 130; G anelin, “ ‘B itva dokum entov,” ’ 246; “O ‘politicheskoi’ chasti byvshego D epartam enta politsii,” 1917, GARF, f. 5802, op. 2, d. 236,11. 1-1 ob.; Special Section to governors and gendarm e and security chiefs, 6 A u­ gust 1905, ZA, Xmd(l), 9. 46. “G arting, A. M.,” in Ol, 1:515-16; N ikolaevskii, Istoriia odnogo predatelia, 119-20. 47. Liubim ov, Russkaia smuta, 298. 48. Special Section directives, 24 A ugust and 8 O ctober 1905, in “Sekretnye tsirkuliary i instruktsii,” 96, 103; Special Section directive, 24 A ugust 1905, GARF, f. 102, op. 260, d. 13, 11. 3 7 6 -7 7 ob.; T im ofeev, cited in P eregudova, “D epartam ent politsii,” 146. 49. Statistics in Iarm ysh, “K aratel’nye organy tsarizm a,” 315; K. A. Z alesskii, “B ulyginskaia dum a,” in OI, 1:308-9. 50. Ascher, Revolution o f 1905, 1:181; Galai, Liberation Movement, 2 5 3-58. 51. Police D epartm ent to gendarm e and security chiefs, 2 July 1905, GARF, f. 102, OO , 1901, d. 555,11. 195-97 ob.; M iliukov, Vospominaniia, 20 3 -5 ; Gerasim ov, Na lezvii, 3 2 -3 3 ; Galai, Liberation Movement, 259. 52. B ogdanovich, Tri poslednikh samoderzhtsa (diary entry for 16 N ovem ber 1908), 467; Galai, Liberation Movement, 261; Kassow, Students, 247-53; W itte, Vospom­ inaniia, 2:520; Gerasimov, Na lezvii, 31-35; Liubimov, “Russkaia smuta,” 306,308. 53. “Iz sekretnogo doklada, sostavlennogo dlia prem ’er-m inistra Vitte po delam dep artam en ta politsii,” after 20 O ctober 1905, S. Svatikov C ollection, B akhm eteff Archive, C olum bia University, box 30, sheet 1; Police D epartm ent to governors, 21 Septem ber 1905, GARF, f. 102, OO, 1905, d. 999, t. 2,11. 198-98 ob.; Police D epart­ m ent to governors, 3 Septem ber 1905, R G IA gM , f. 46, op. 21, d. 20,1. 289.

Notes to Pages 169-73

229

54. Kassow, Students, 2 6 5 -6 8 ; Ascher, Revolution o f 1905, 1:211-13. 55. PraviteVstvuiushchii Senat . . . Donoshenie, 13 N ovem ber 1908, NIC, box 197, folder 4, sheet 2; M oscow M ilitary D istrict to city governor, 13 Septem ber 1905, R G IA gM , f. 46, op. 21, d. 20,1. 1. 56. N ikolaevskii, Istoriia odnogo predatelia, 121-25, 129; Koznov, “M etam orfozy politicheskogo detektiva,” 117-18. 57. Trepov, quoted in “Dnevnik A. A. Polovtsova” (diary entry for 20 Septem ­ ber 1905), 6 6 -6 7 ; PSZ, ser. 3, vol. 25, pt. 1, nos. 26758 and 26759 (1 O ctober 1905); V iktor O bninskii, Polgoda russkoi revoliutsii: Sbomik materialov k istorii russkoi revoliutsii, oktiabr’ 1905-apreV 1906 gg. (M oscow: I. N. Kholchev, 1906), 25, 27 -2 9 ; R eichm an, Railwaymen and Revolution, 198-206. 58. R eference to execution in O bninskii, Polgoda russkoi revoliutsii, 47; L iubi­ m ov, “R u ssk aia sm u ta,” 26 7 ; T repov to governors, 12 O c to b er 1905, in D rezen, Tsarizm v bor’be s revoliutsiei, 47; Joseph L. Sanders, The Moscow Uprising o f De­ cember 1905: A Background Study (N ew York and L ondon: G arlan d P u b lishing, 1987), 124-26, 165-72, 191-96, 3 3 8-39, 37 4 -7 5 , 429; Ascher, Revolution o f 1905, 1 :1 8 4 -9 2 ; S c h a p iro , Communist Party, 5 6 - 6 7 ; V inaver, c ite d in K izev etter, Na rubezhe dvukh stoletii, 391. 59. Ascher, Revolution o f 1905, 1:214-17. 60. See A ndrew M. Vemer, The Crisis o f Russian Autocracy: Nicholas II and the 1905 Revolution (P rin ceto n, N .J.: P rinceton U niversity P ress, 1990), 2 4 6 -7 7 ; G alai, Liberation Movement, 2 6 3-64. 61. L iubim ov, “R usskaia sm uta,” 3 2 6 -2 8 ; Kurlov, GibeT, 48; Kokovtsov, Iz moego proshlogo, 1:94; M edem to P. N. D um ovo, 16 N ovem ber 1905, in D rezen, Tsarizm v bor’be s revoliutsiei, 9 9-100. 62. M artynov, Moia sluzhba, 59; Gerasim ov, Na lezvii, 41; Petrunkevich, “Iz zapisok,” 410; S. R. M intslov, “ 14 m esiatsev ‘svobody pechati*: 17 O ktiabria 1905 g .-l ianvaria 1907 g.: Z am etki bibliografa,” Byloe 15 (1907): 123; Iu r’ev, cited in “M oskovskii universitet v oktiabr’skie dni 1905 g.,” KA 74 (1936): 202; Police D e­ partm ent directive, 20 O ctober 1905, R G IA gM , f. 46, op. 17, d. 88,1. 1. 63. C harles A. Ruud, “T he Printing Press as an A gent o f Political C hange in E arly Tw entieth-C entury Russia,” Russian Review 40 (O ctober 1981): 3 87-90; “Novaia zh izn ’,” in Sankt-Peterburg, Petrograd, Leningrad: Entsiklopedicheskii slovar’ (M oscow : B o l’shaia R ossiiskaia entsiklopediia, 1992), 433; Rabe, Widerspruch, 115; Spiridovich, Istoriia boTshevizma v Rossii, 110-11. 64. Police D epartm ent directive, 26 O ctober 1905, ZA , X llld ( l) , 9; Szeftel, “P erso n al Inviolability,” 22n; R abe, Widerspruch, 86, 150; W itte, Vospominaniia, 3:119; Kokovtsov, Iz moego proshlogo, 1:95-96; M oscow Security Bureau to Interior M inistry, 21 and 27 O ctober 1905, GARF, f. 102, OO , 1905, d. 1350, ch. 26,11. 41^12 ob., 62. 65. G alai, Liberation Movement, 264; R oberta T hom pson M anning, The Crisis o f the Old Order in Russia: Gentry and Government (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton U ni­ v e rsity P re ss, 1982), 1 4 1 -4 5 , 146; A sch er, Revolution o f 1905, 1:232, 2 4 7 -5 6 , 2 6 7 -7 2 ; R obbins, Tsar’s Viceroys, 223—27; Sanders, Moscow Uprising, 511-39. 66. Provo, 25 O ctober 1905, no. 41:3397-400; Petrunkevich, cited in Terence E m m ons, The Formation o f Political Parties and the First National Elections in Rus­ sia (C am bridge, M ass.: H arvard U niversity Press, 1983), 414n86; Ascher, Revolution o f 1905, 1 :2 8 5 -9 0 ; H ild erm eie r, Sozialrevolutionäre Partei, 1 4 6 -4 7 ; Z enzinov,

Perezhitoe, 206.

230

Notes to Pages 173-77

67. Z enzinov, Perezhitoe, 205. Z enzinov’s assertion underm ines G erasim ov’s claim that he had stepped up his surveillance o f the revolutionaries during this period (Gerasim ov, Na lezvii, 50). 68. “Z apiski A. F. R ediger o 1905 g.,” KA 45 (1931): 90; Iarm ysh, “K aratel’nye organy tsarizm a,” 47; Police D epartm ent to gendarm e and security chiefs, 26 O ctober 1905, R G IA gM , f. 46, op. 21, d. 20,1. 290; Police D epartm ent to gendarm e and secu­ rity chiefs, 5 N ovem ber 1905, GARF, f. 102, OO , 1902, d. 825,1. 237. 69. Sanders, Moscow Uprising, 56 5 -6 7 , 5 9 2 -9 5 , 6 0 6 -8 ; E rm anskii, Iz perezhitogo, 83. 70. G urko, Features and Figures, 4 0 4 -6 ; Kurlov, GibeV, 49; G erasim ov, Na lezvii, 42; Petrunkevich, “Iz zapisok,” 438. B ulygin was shot by the C heka in 1919 for his “reactionary policies in 1905” (“B ulygin, A. G.,” in 01, 1:308). 71. Liubim ov, “R usskaia sm uta,” 253-54. 72. S ee D o n ald C. R aw son, Russian Rightists and the Revolution o f 1905 (Cam bridge: C am bridge U niversity Press, 1995), 127-41; Stepanov, Chernaia sotnia, 4 9 -8 2 . 73. “Iz sekretnogo d o k la d a . . . , ” Svatikov C ollection, B akhm eteff Archive, box 30, sheet 8. 74. F Dan, “O bshchaia politika pravitel’stva i izm eneniia v gosudarstvennoi organizatsii v period 1905-1907 gg.,” in Obshchestvennoe dvizhenie v Rossii v nachale XX-go veka, ed. L. Martov, P. Maslov, and A. Potresov, 4 vols. (St. Petersburg: Obshchestvennaia P o l’za, 1912), 4 :3 48-50; “K istorii nashei kontrrevoliutsii,” Provo, 30 A pril 1906, no. 17:1581. 75. Stepanov, Chernaia sotnia, 60, 6 7 -7 1 ; city governor to police forces, 21 O ctober 1905, RG IA gM , f. 46, op. 21, d. 20,1. 298; parents to city governor, 27 O cto­ ber 1905, RG IA gM , f. 46, op. 21, d. 20,1. 299. 7 6 . 1. F M anuilov to Zubatov, 31 O ctober 1905, in K oz’m in, Zubatov, 64; Zu batov to Burtsev, 12 D ecem ber 1906, in K oz’m in, Zubatov, 106; D um ovo to gover­ nors, 2 and 4 N ovem ber 19Ö5, G A RF, f. 102, OO , 1905, d. 2606, 11. 4 - 5 , 6; I. F Koshko, Vospominaniia gubematora (1905-1914 g.): Novgorod, Samara, Penza (Pe­ trograd: Sodruzhestvo, 1916), 13-16; Robbins, Tsar’s Viceroys, 231. 77. PSZ, ser. 3, vol. 25, pt. 1, nos. 26898 (11 N ovem ber 1905), 26956 (20 N ovem ber 1905), 26959 (22 N ovem ber 1905). See also “Tablitsa m estnostei Rossii, n ak h o d ia sh c h ik h sia na isk liu c h ite l’nom po lo zh en ii,” Pravo, 12 M arch 1906, no. 10:909-15. 78. PSZ, ser. 3, vol. 25, pt. 1, no. 26962 (24 N ovem ber 1905); C ouncil o f M in­ isters report in Sovet ministrov Rossiiskoi imperii, 6 8-70. 79. Ascher, Revolution o f 1905, 1:276-83; Bogdanovich, Tri poslednikh samoderzhtsa (diary entries for 15-23 N ovem ber 1905), 36 2 -6 3 ; G urko, Features and Fig­ ures, 440. 80. Seregny, “Peasant M ovem ent,” 6 0 -6 2 ; Interior M inistry to governors, 23 N ovem ber 1905, GARF, f. 102, op. 260, d. 13,11. 4 2 0 -2 3 ob. 81. PSZ, ser. 3, vol. 25, pt. 1, no. 26984 (29 N ovem ber 1905); report o f 10 F eb­ ruary 1906, Sovet ministrov Rossiiskoi imperii, 2 3 8 -3 9 ; Police D epartm ent to gover­ nors, 30 N ovem ber 1905, RG IA gM , f. 475, op. 19, d. 127,1. 102. 82. Ascher, Revolution o f 1905, 1:277-81, 2 9 8 -300; M intslov, “ 14 mesiatsev,” 123-24; Sovet ministrov Rossiiskoi imperii, 9 2 -9 3 ; Gerasim ov, Na lezvii, 49 -5 1 . 83. “Vospom inaniia V. F. D zhunkovskogo,” GARF, f. 826, d. 47,1. 131; M enshchikov, “C hernaia kniga,” GARF, f. 1723, op. 1, d. 375,11. 5 7 5 -7 6 ; D zhunkovskii to

Notes to Pages 177-81

231

Stolypin, 17 O ctober 1906, GARF, f. 102, 0 0 (U), 1906, d. 828, ch. 18,1. 7; G erasi­ mov, Na lezvii, 49. 84. D um ovo to Interior M inistry, 15 N ovem ber 1905, GARF, f. 826, op. 1, d. 106, 1. 1; “Vospom inaniia V. F. Dzhunkovskogo,” GARF, f. 826, op. 1, d. 47, 1. 53; M edem to P. N. D um ovo, 16 N ovem ber 1905, in Drezen, Tsarizm v bor’be s revoliutsiei, 9 9 -1 0 0 . 85. “Vospominaniia V. F. Dzhunkovskogo,” GARF, f. 826, op. 1, d. 47,11.121,123. 86. Ascher, Revolution o f1905, 1:273, 308-14; Pavlov, Esery-maksimalisty, 68-70; “Tablitsa mestnostei Rossii,” 915-16; Reichman, Railwaymen and Revolution, 271-73. 87. F o r a d escrip tio n o f the assault, see M . A. O sorgin, ed., “D e k ab r’skoe vosstanie 1905 g. v M oskve v opisanii zhandarm a,” GM 5 (1917): 353-56. 88. M oscow Security B ureau to Police Departm ent, 10 D ecem ber 1905, GARF, f. 102, OO , 1905, d. 1350, ch. 6,1. 87; report on Zhuchenko, GARF, f. 102, op. 316, 1906, d. 1019,1. 31; N ikolaevskii, Istoriia odnogo predatelia, 132; Ascher, Revolution o f 1905, 1:315. 89. “V ospom inaniia V. F. D zhunkovskogo,” GARF, f. 826, op. 1, d. 4 7 ,1 .1 3 7 . 90. M oscow Security B ureau to Police D epartm ent, 12 D ecem ber 1905, GARF, f. 102, O O , 1905, d. 1350, ch. 6, 1. 98; O so rg in , “D e k a b r’skoe vo sstan ie,” 357; “V ospom inaniia V. F. Dzhunkovskogo,” GARF, f. 826, op. 1, d. 47,11. 139-40. 91. Osorgin, “D ekabr’skoe vosstanie,” 358; Ascher, Revolution o f 1905, 1:318. 9 2 . S p ir id o v ic h , “ P ri ts a rs k o m re z h im e ,” 147; O s o rg in , “ D e k a b r ’sk o e vosstanie,” 359; Ascher, Revolution o f 1905, 1:322. 93. “Spravka o naibolee vydaiushchikhsia tsirkuliam ykh predpisaniiakh M inisterstva vnutrennikh del,” 15 D ecem ber 1905, GARF, f. 102, OO, 1905, d. 2075, t. 1, 1. 366; Ascher, Revolution o f 1905, 1:320-22; G. Vetlugin, “S. Iu. Vitte i dekabr’skoe v o ssta n ie v M o sk v e: Iz v o sp o m in an ii ch in o v n ik a,” Byloe 34 (1925): 226; A. S. Val’din, “D ekabr’skoe vooruzhennoe vosstanie v M oskve,” in OÎ, 2:10; city governor to precinct captains, 16 D ecem ber 1905, R G IA gM , f. 475, op. 19, d. 127,11. 124-24 ob.; M oscow Security B ureau to Police D epartm ent, 4 M ay 1906, GARF, f. 102, OO, 1905, d. 1350, ch. 26,1. 203. 94. Osorgin, “D ekabr’skoe vosstanie,” 352; Keep, Rise o f Social Democracy, 25 1 -5 2 . 95. PSZ, ser. 3, vol. 25, pt. 1, no. 27008 (6 D ecem ber 1905) and no. 27043 (14 D ecem ber 1905); R eichm an, Railwaymen and Revolution, 29 0 -9 1 ; Police D epartm ent to governors, 16 D ecem ber 1905, GARF, f. 102, O O (II), 1906, d. 9, ch. 1,11. 1-1 ob.; binding order, 19 D ecem ber 1905, GARF, f. 102, O O (II), 1906, d. 9, ch. 1,1. 4; Po­ lice D epartm ent to governors, 21 D ecem ber 1905, R G IA gM , f. 475, op. 17, d. 88,1. 2; D zhunkovskii's proclam ation in Agramoe dvizhenie 1905-1907 godov v Moskovskoi oblasti: Sbomik dokumentov (M oscow: M oskovskii rabochii, 1936), 141-42; Seregny, “Peasant M ovem ent,” 6 1 -6 5 . 96. Police D epartm ent to governors, 24 D ecem ber 1905, R GIA gM , f. 475, op. 19, d. 127,11. 7 -8 . 97. Ruud, “Printing Press,” 3 9 1-95; R uud and Stepanov, Fontanka, 16, 252-53; M intslov, “ 14 mesiatsev,” 125.

Conclusion 1. Baberow ski, Autokratie und Justiz, 739; Rabe, Widerspruch, 148^49a; Gershuni, Iz nedavnego proshlogo, 208-12.

232

Notes to Pages 182-85

2. V. M , ed .f “K istorii karatel’nykh ekspeditsii v Sibiri,” KA 1 (1922): 329-33; N. I. Faleev, “S h e st’ m esiatsev voenno-polevoi iustitsii,” Byloe 2 (1907): 4 3 -4 4 , 6 9 -7 0 ; Ascher, Revolution o f 1905, 1:330-35. 3. G ordon W right, France in Modem Times, 4th ed. (New York: W. W. N orton, 1987), 2 1 6 -1 8 . 4. S truve, cited in R ich ard P ipes, Struve: Liberal on the Right, 1905-1944 (C am bridge, M ass.: Harvard U niversity Press, 1980), 27. 5. O n this problem , see D aniel R. Brower, The Russian City between Tradition and Modernity, 1850-1900 (B erkeley and L os A ngeles: U niversity o f C alifornia Press, 1990), 221; E ngelstein, “R evolution and the T heater o f Public Life,” 344. 6. B rian C hapm an, Police State (New York: Praeger, 1970), 28. 7. E m erson, Metternich and the Political Police, 38 -5 3 , 137-50, 1 7 7 -7 8 ,1 8 4 . 8. P. B. Struve, “R ossiia pod nadzorom politsii,” in Osvobozhdenie (Stuttgart), 18 A pril 1903, 357. 9. O ne cannot overestim ate the im portance o f the m ilitary to the survival o f continental E uropean governm ents throughout the nineteenth century. T he m ost strik­ ing exam ple is Prussia, w here m ore than h alf o f the nearly 4 m illion nonm ilitary urban residents in 1840 lived in garrison towns. See Bayley, Patterns o f Policing, 4 1 -4 2 ; Lüdtke, Police and State in Prussia, 131. 10. R ichard S. W ortm an, Scenarios o f Power: Myth and Ceremony in Russian Monarchy, 2 vols. (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton U niversity Press, 1995), 4 0 6 -7 . 11. B unge, “Z apiska naidennaia v bum agakh N. Kh. Bunge,” in Materialy i za-

piski, razoslannye chlenam Komiteta ministrov na zasedaniia 15, 22 i 23 marta, 5 i 6 aprelia 1905 goda (St. Petersburg, n. d.), 12.

Selected Bibliography

T his Selected B ibliography includes m ost o f the w orks cited in the notes, although m any w orks cited only once and those cited in full in the Abbreviations have been ex­ cluded. It does not provide separate entries for m em oirs, docum ents, and new spaper articles found in archival collections. M ore com plete classification data on the archival m aterials m ay be found in the notes.

Archival Material G osudarstvennyi fond 58 fond 63 fond 102 fond 109 fond 542 fond 586 fond 826 fond 1467 fond 1695 fond 1723 fond 5802 fond 5881

arkhiv Rossiiskoi federatsii (GARF, M oscow ) M oskovskoe zhandarm skoe upravlenie M oskovskoe okhrannoe otdelenie D epartam ent politsii T ret’e otdelenie Von W ahl, V.V. Von Plehve, V. K. D zhunkovskii, V. F. C hrezvychainaia sledstvennaia kom issiia Zubatov, S. V. M enshchikov, L. P. Burtsev, V. L. Kolektsiia otdel’nykh dokumentov i memuanov emigrantov, 1859-1944 gg.

H oover Institution Archives (Stanford, California) Valerian Ivanovich M oravskii C ollection B oris N icolaevsky (NIC) C ollection O khrana (ZA) C ollection E dw ard Ellis Sm ith C ollection R ossiiskii gosudarstvennyi istoricheskii arkhiv g. M oskvy (RG IA gM , M oscow) fond 46 G radonachal’stvo fond 475 U chastkovye pristava Yale University Archives (New Haven, Conn.) C ollection A lexander Ivanovich Spiridovich (YSP)

.

234

Selected Bibliography

Primary Sources Agramoe dvizhenie 1905-1907 godov v Moskovskoi oblasti: Sbornik dokumentov. M oscow: M oskovskii rabochii, 1936. A inzaft, S. “Zubatov i studenchestvo.” Katorga i ssylka 34 (1927): 6 5 -69. Akim ov, V. [V. P. M akhno vets]. Ocherk razvitiia sotsial-demokratii v Rossii. 2d ed. St. Petersburg: Izd. O. N. Popovoi, 1906. A ksel’rod, Pavel. Perezhitoe i peredumannoe. Introduction by A. Ascher. Berlin, 1923; Cam bridge: O riental R esearch Partners, 1975. Aleksandrov, M. S. “ ‘G rappa narodovol’tsev,’ 1891-1894 gg.” Byloe 11 (1906): 1-27. Alekseev, I. V. Provokator Anna Serebriakova. M oscow: Izd. Politkatorzhan, 1932. ---------- , ed. Istoriia odnogo provokatora: ObviniteVnoe zakliuchenie i materialy k protsessuA. E. Serebriakovoi. M oscow: Izd. M oskovskogo G ubsuda, 1925. Andrieux, Louis. Souvenirs d ’un préfet de police. 16th ed. 2 vols. Paris: J. R ouff & Cie., 1885. B akh, A. N. Zapiski narodovoVtsa. M oscow: M olodaia gvardiia, 1929. Bakharev, V. Kak derzhat’sebia na doprosakh. Geneva: Tip. Soiuza, 1900. B aum an, N ikolai. “D oklad N. E. B aum ana o sotsial-dem okraticheskom dvizhenii v M oskve.” In Nikolai Ernestovich Bauman: Sbornik statei, vospominanii i doku­ mentov. M oscow: M oskovskii rabochii, 1937. B elokonskii, I. R , ed. ‘“ G orokhovoe p a l’to ’: P am iatnaia knizhka professional’nogo shpiona.” Minuvshie gody 9 (1 9 0 8 ): 290-312. B ogdanovich, A. Tri poslednikh samoderzhtsa. M oscow : Novosti, 1990. Bogucharskii, V. la. Iz istorii politicheskoi bor’by v 70-kh i 80-kh gg. XIX veka: Partiia uNarodnaia volia,” ee proiskhozhdenie, sud’by i gibeV. M oscow : R ussaia m y s l\ 1912. ---------- , ed. “T ret’e otdelenie sobstvennoi e. i. v. kantseliarii o sebe sam om : N eizdannyi dokum ent.” Vestnik Evropy 2 (M arch 1917): 85-125. B onch-B ruevich, V. D. “R ossiia pod glasnym nadzorom .” In Izbrannye sochineniia. Edited by V. D. Bonch-Bruevich. Vol. 2. Moscow: Izd. Akadem ii nauk SSSR, 1961. B orozdin, K. A. “ ‘S viashchennaia d razh in a’ i ‘N arodnaia volia.” ’ Byloe 10 (1907): 123-67. B u k h b in d er, N. A . “N e z a v isim a ia e v re isk a ia ra b o c h a ia p a rtiia : P o n e iz d an n y m arkhivnym dokum entam .” Krasnaia letopis ’ 2 -3 (1922): 208-14. ---------- . “ R azg ro m e v reisk o g o ra b o ch e g o d v iz h e n iia v 1898 g.: P o n e izd an n y m arkhivnym m aterialam .” Krasnaia letopis ’ 4 (1922): 147-97. ---------- . Zubatovshchina i rabochee dvizhenie v Rossii. M oscow: Izd. Politkatorzhan, 1926. ---------- . “Z ubatovshchina v M oskve.” Katorga i ssylka 1 (1925): 9 6-133. B ukhshtab, B. “Posle vystrela K arakozova.” Katorga i ssylka 5 (1931): 50 -8 8 . Burtsev, Vladim ir, com p. Za sto let (1800-1896): Sbornik po istorii politicheskikh i obshchestvennykh dvizhenii v Rossii. London: R ussian Free Press Fund, 1897. Chem ov, V. M. Pered burei: Vospominaniia. New York: Izd. im eni Chekhova, 1953. ---------- . Zapiski sotsialista-revoliutsionera. Berlin: Izd. Z. I. G rzhebina, 1922; C am ­ bridge: O riental Research Partners, 1975. Chistiakov, O. I., ed. ZakonodateVstvo pervoi poloviny XIX veka. Vol. 6, Rossiiskoe zakonodateVstvo X-XX vekov. M oscow : Iuridicheskaia literatura, 1988. Chudkovskii, S. L. Iz davnikh let: Vospominaniia. M oscow : Izd. Politkatorzhan, 1934. Dan, F. Iz istorii rabochego dvizheniia i sotsial-demokratii v Rossii, 1900-1904 gg. 2d

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ed. St. Petersburg: Tip. Ia. B olianskogo, 1906. “D egaevshchina: M aterialy i dokum enty.” Byloe 4 (1906): 18-38. D eich , Lev. Za polveka. In tro duction by E zra M endelsohn. 2 vols. B erlin: G rani, 1923; Cam bridge: O riental R esearch Partners, 1975. Delo A. A. Lopukhina v osobom prisutstvii praviteVstvuiushchego senata: Stenograficheskii otchet. St. Petersburg: Tip. P. I. Artsivi, 1910. Delo provokatora Okladskogo: Tridtsad’ sent ' let v Okhranke. L eningrad: R abochii sud, 1925. “ D ep artam en t p o litsii v 1 8 9 2 -1 9 0 8 gg.: Iz vospom inanii chinovnika.” Byloe 5 - 6 (1917): 17-24. “D nevnik A. A. Polovtsova.” Krasnyi arkhiv 3 (1923): 75-172. “D nevnik A. N. K uropatkina.” Krasnyi arkhiv 2 (1922): 9 -117. Dnevnik E. A. Perettsa (1880-1883). Preface by A. E. Presniakov. Moscow: Gos. izd., 1927. Dnevnik Gosudarstvennogo sekretariaA. A. Polovtsova. Vol. 1 , 1883-1886. M oscow: N auka, 1966. “D oklad direktora departam enta politsii L opukhina M inistru vnutrennikh del o sobytiiakh 9-go ianvaria.” Krasnaia letopis’ 3 (1922): 330-38.

Dokladnaia zapiska direktora departamenta politsii Lopukhina, rassmotrennaia v Komitete Ministrov. . . ianvaria 1905 g. Preface by N. Lenin. Geneva: Vpered, 1906. “D oklady gen.-leit. Seliverstova i gen.-ad. D rentel’na A leksandru II.” Krasnyi arkhiv 4 9 (1 9 3 1 ): 112-43. D rezen, A. K ., ed. Tsarism v bor’be s revoliutsiei 1905-1907 g.: Sbomik dokumentov. M oscow : Gos. sotsial’no-ekonom icheskoe izd., 1936. Dubnov, S. M ., and G. la. K rasnyi-A dm oni, eds., Dobussarskoe i Kishinevskoe delà 1903 goda. Vol. 1 o f Materialy dlia istorii antievreiskikh pogromov v Rossii. Petrograd: Tip. K adim a, 1919. “D va dokum enta iz istorii Zubatovshchiny.” Krasnyi arkhiv 19 (1926): 210-11. Erm anskii, O. A. Iz perezhitogo (1887-1921). M oscow -Leningrad: Gos. izd., 1927. “Evno Azef: Istoriia ego pred atel’stva.” Byloe 2 (1917): 187-215. Faleev, N. I. “R ossiia pod okhranoi: Istoricheskii ocherk.” Byloe 2 (1907): 1-43. ---------- . “ Sh est’ m esiatsev voenno-polevoi iustitsii.” Byloe 2 (1907): 4 3 -8 1 . Figner, Vera. “Lev Tikhom irov: Po povodu zapisok Tikhom irova.” In Polnoe sobranie sochinenii. Vol. 5. M oscow : Izd. Politkatorzhan, 1929. ---------- . Zapechatlennyi trud: Vospominaniia v dvukh tomakh. Vol. 1. Moscow: My si’, 1964. Fleer, M . G ., ed. “R evoliutsiia 1905-1906 gg. v doneseniiakh inostrannykh diplom atov.” Krasnyi arkhiv 16 (1926): 220-24. 40 let provokatsii (Okladskii-Petrovskii): Sbomik. B erlin-M oscow : Izd. M ezhrabpom , 1925. F ru m k in , B. M . “ Z u b ato v sh c h in a i ev reisk o e rab o ch e e d v izh e n ie.” Perezhitoe 3 (1911): 199-230. G arvi, P eter A. Zapiski sotsial-demokrata, 1906-1921. New tonville, M ass: O riental R esearch Partners, 1982. “G azeta D epartam enta Politsii.” Byloe, parts 1 and 2 (1908): 7:104-18, 8:43-57. Gerasim ov, A. V. Na lezvii s termristami. Paris: Y M C A Press, 1985. G em et, M . N. Istoriia tsarskoi tiur’my. 3d ed. 5 vols. M oscow: Gos. izd. iuridicheskoi literatury, 1961-1963. ---------- . Smertnaia kazn’. M oscow : la. D ankin i Ia. Khom utov, 1913. G em et, M . N., O. B. G o l’dovskii, and I. N. Sakharov, eds. Protiv smertnoi kazni. 2d ed. M oscow : Tip. I. D. Sytina, 1907.

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“Namdnaia volia” i uChemyi peredel”: Vospominaniia uchastnikov revoliutsionnogo dvizheniia v Peterburge v 1879-1882 gg. L eningrad: Lenizdat, 1989. Nestroev, Gr. Iz dnevnika maksimalista. Paris: R usskoe knigoizdatel’stvo, 1910. N ikitenko, A. V. Dnevnik v trekh tomakh. M oscow: Gos. izd. khudozhestvennoi liter­ atury, 1955. N ikolaevskii, Boris. KonetsAzefa. Leningrad: Gos. izd., 1926. “N ikolai II i sam oderzhavie v 1903 g.” Byloe 30 (1918): 190-222. N ovitskii, V. D. Iz vospominanii zhandarma. L eningrad: Priboi, 1929. ---------- . “Z apiska gen. N ovitskogo, podannaia na vysochaishee im ia cherez kn. Sviatopolka-M irskogo.” Sotsialist-revoliutsioner 2 (1 9 1 0 ): 5 3 -113. “N ovoe o zubatovshchine.” Krasnyi arkhiv 1 (1922): 289-328. O bninskii, Victor. Polgoda russkoi revoliutsii: Sbomik materialov k istorii russkoi revoliutsii, oktiabr’ 1905-aprel* 1906 gg. Part 1. M oscow: I. N. Kholchev, 1906. O lsu f’ev, D. “Tsareubiistvo 1-go m arta i M oskva: Iz vospom inanii ob uchenicheskikh godakh.” Vozrozhdenie, 14 M arch 1931.

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Index

Abaza, A. A., 33 Absolutism in Russia, 5, 10,17, 28, 37,185; opposition to, ix, 3,6, 38, 122,150,168; public attitudes toward, 32,46, 51, 149-50; and struggle against opposition, 4 ,6 -7 Administrative banishment, 36,113,122,141 Administrative exile, 15,49, 50, 143, 156; to eastern Siberia, 23,47,145; effectiveness of, 101; and governors general, 26; and industrial unrest, 103; and Justice Min­ istry, 21, 50,52, 144; and Police Depart­ ment, 29; and political unreliability, 24, 48; rules governing, 34-37,41,46,50; and security bureaus, 64; and security law of 1881, 34-37, 156; and student unrest, 119; and Third Section, 12, 21 ; and S. V. Zubatov, 76 Administrative officials, 10-11, 35,41,171; arbitrariness of, 8-10, 20,26,183; effec­ tiveness of, 8-9, 115,154; outlook of, 10-11; powers of, 18, 33, 147, 152-54, 156; self-perception of, 164; and surveil­ lance of society, 114. See also Govern­ ment officials Agentura. See Informants Akimov, M. G., 181 Akimova, T., 89,99 Aksel’rod, P. B., 88 Alekseevich, Ivan, 121 Alexander 1,9 Alexander II, 4, 17, 22, 26, 31-32,41,62,75, 126; and Third Section, 23; assassination of, 4 ,6 ,7 3 ; reforms of, ix, 17, 20, 56,103 Alexander HI, 29, 33, 37-38,40,75; at­ tempted assassination of, 47, 57, 99 Alexandra Fedorovna, 65

Amfiteatrov, A. V, 122-23 Andreushkin, V. I., 47 Andrieux, Louis, 45 Annenskii, N. F., 113, 129 Anthropometry, 70 Arendt, Hannah, 106 Aronson, I. Michael, 37-38,175 Ascher, Abraham, 158 Austrian Empire, 24,67,184; Joseph n , 3; Leopold II, 3; Klemens von Metternich, 5,41, 184; police system of, 3 ,5,14,24, 41,66; Vienna, 24, 39 Azef, E. F , 85, 88,90,93,96, 112,143, 166-67, 178; and assassination of V. K. Plehve, 148-49; revolutionaries’ suspi­ cions about, 148-49, 169-70; and SR combat organization, 136,143, 152; and SR Party, 169-70 Badazhan, I. S., 101 Bakai, M. E., 58 Bakh, A. N., 46-47 Bakharev, V, 50, 99,119 Bakunin, M. A., 21 Balmashev, S. V, 127, 129 Baltic region, 147, 156, 162,181; Estland, 158; Kurland, 147; Lifland, 153, 175; Riga, 63,70 Baranov, N. M., 45 Bauman, N. E., 91, 101, 115, 117, 134, 142 Belov, S. K., 44 Benckendorff, A. Kh., 13 Benua, A. N., 32 Berdiaev, N. A., 80 Berdiaev, N. S., 74-75,77, 84, 86 Bernstein, Eduard, 103 Bessarabia, 40,138

250

Index

Bismarck, Otto von, 18,103 Blavatskaia, E. R, 85 Bobrikov, G. I., 148 Bogdanovich, A. V., 123 Bogdanovich, lu. N., 31 Bogdanovich, N. M., 136,138-39, 160 Bogolepov, N.P., 112-13,153 Bonch-Bruevich, V. D., 114 Border patrol, 28,46 Breshko-Breshkovskaia, E. K., 149,167 Brasnev, M. I., 77 Bulgakov, S. N., 110 Bulgarin, F. V., 14 Bulygin, A. G., 155, 158, 173 Bulygin Duma, 168 Bunge, N. Kh., 185 Burtsev, V. L., 123 Capital punishment, 15-16,36,47,152,157 Catherine the Great, 13, 31, 62, 111 Caucasus region, 57,136,140,147,156,162, 166, 181; Kutaisi, 89; Tiflis, 42,63,70, 133 Censorship, 58,65,150, 176; and control of media outlets, 68,100* 111,113,180; ef­ fectiveness of, 16,46,111; and Interior Ministry, 28,100,111; and literary fig­ ures, 14; public perceptions of, 20,46; and regular police, 69; relaxation of, 162, 176,180; and Third Section, 12,14,16 Chapman, Brian, 184 Chamoluskii, V. I., 129 Cherevin, P. A., 33 Chernov, V. M., 85-86, 111 Chemyshevskii, N. G., 16,20, 74 Chicherin, B. N., 9 City governors, 34-35,40,62; and administra­ tive exile, 35; of Moscow, 36,77; of St. Petersburg, 19,23,27, 36 Civil society in Russia, 10; and conflicts with state, 3,95,122; development of 3, 5, 14-15,95, 147, 183; and opposition to absolutism, 3,122,147,183; weakness of, 3 Conspiratorial organizations, 4 ,7 , 8,18, 23, 44,147; and mass movements, 8,72; number of members in, 6; police control of, 72; secretive methods of, 78,92,94, 101, 119,129,144. See also Social De­ mocrats; Socialist-Revolutionaries Constitutionalism, 18; in Russia, x, 8, 17,22, 31-32, 39, 144,172

Constitutionalists in Russia, 8,9,25,62,182 Corporal punishment, 50,150 Cossacks, 90,112,169,177 Courts, 10,15,20,23,36; and capital punish­ ment, 157; circuit courts, 16; and indus­ trial unrest, 103; judicial tribunals, 16, 21; jury trials, 23; and prosecutors, 76,144; and Revolution of 1905,181; and statecrime cases, 8,10,16,21-23,47,144-45, 150,152,164 Crimea, 40; Crimean War, 164; Kerch’Enikal’sk, 40; Sevastopol, 147; Simfer­ opol’, 40, 133; Yalta, 40, 156 Dan, F. I., 121, 141 Davydov, N.V., 128 Decembrist Uprising, 4, 12, 14 Dediulin, V. A., 155 Degaev, S. R, 44,45, 82,130; People’s Will and, 82,95; assassination of G. P. Sudeikin, 45 Deich, L. G., 23,46,51 Denunciation of suspected criminals, 16,26, 32,44,51,61; nature of, 61-62; use by policemen, 78 Dobrzhinskii, A. E, 26, 29 Dostoevsky, E M., 16,21, 51 Dubasov, E V., 177 Dubrovinskii, I. E, 101 Duma. See State Duma Dumovo, I. N., 29 Dumovo, P. N., 156, 173,175-77, 179, 181 Dumovo, P.P., 164, 171, 177 D vom iki, 66, 70, 83,114,173 Dzhunkovskii, V. E, 177,179-80 Eidel’man, B. L., 52 Ekaterinoslav, 107-8, 133, 135, 143 Elagin, V., 101 Emergency legislation, 9,18, 24-26, 147-48, 183; martial law, 147-48; in other coun­ tries, 39. See also Security law of 1881 Engelstein, Laura, 8 Ermanskii, O. A., 121,165, 173 Esipov, S. A., 58 Europe, 9, 10, 18-19,45,46; administrative officials in, 36; Geneva, 45-46, 114; Ire­ land, 4, 10; Italy, 10; Prussia, 10,17, 39, 46; security police institutions in, 58, 106-7; Switzerland, 46,166 Europeanization, 3,17,40,185. See also Modernization

Index Exile, 8,14-15,24-25, 36, 38,50; attitude of revolutionaries toward, 85; conditions in, 49, 115, 150; escape from 46 Factories: inspectors of, 102, 104; legislation, 29, 100,103; opposition activists and, 160; police and, 100, 104; surveillance of, 100,102,104 Fal’bork, G. A., 129 Faleev, N. I., 23,38 February Revolution, 91, 121 Fiedler, I. L, 178 Figner, V. N., 22,30 Filippeus, K. F , 17 Finland, 147, 173; opposition activists in, 112-13,147,161 Fomin, A. D., 42 Fondaminskii, M. I., 74 Fouché, Joseph, 4, 5 France, 9,10, 39,42,46,107; Estates General of, 151; Napoleon Bonaparte, 5,12; and Paris Commune, 182; and Paris prefects, 5 ,9 ,4 5 , 107,111 ; police authorities of, 46; police system of, 5 ,9 ,1 2 ,1 4 ,2 8 , 45-46,107; press of, 46; and Revolution of 1789,184; and Revolution of 1848,15; and Russian political exiles, 39,45,166 Frumkina, F. M., 139 Fullon, I. A., 154-55 Fullon, P. A., 177 Galai, Shmuel, 129 Gapon, Georgii, 102, 154-55; and S. V. Zubatov, 142,154 Garin, N. P, 166,175 Garting, A. M., 46,130, 159, 166 Geiking, G. E., 51 Gekel’man-Landezen, A. M See Garting, A. M. Gendarme Corps, 4,12, 13,19,22,28, 33, 54-56,59, 160; chiefs of, 28,41,56; cre­ ation of, 12,128; entrance examinations for, 56-58; functions of, 12, 13, 20, 57; directors of, 23,43; funding of, 133; and gendarme stations, 64; and Interior Min­ istry, 4,28,5 2 ,1 6 0 ; and local official­ dom, 52; organization of, 19; personnel of, 12, 25,28,53,107; and Police Depart­ ment, 52-53,64; public perceptions of, 59; size of, 12; and Third Section, 4, 13, 52; and War Ministry, 52 Gendarme Directorate, 20, 28, 52-52, 56, 64;

251

and security bureaus, 137 Gendarme divisions, 53 Gendarme officers, 6,13,20,49-62,183; atti­ tudes toward revolutionaries, 50-51,59, 71; attitudes toward security policing, 6-7,58,62-63, 83,132; capabilities of, 48.62- 63,96,137; character of, 6-7,15, 29,58,76; effectiveness of, 58-59, 61-63,72, 81,125-26,129; and formal investigation (doznanie), 21,29,42, 49-50,57,59-62,98, 125,144; functions of, 6,21,41,59-60,141, 152,167,173; and interrogation of suspects, 49-50, 60-61; methods of, 6,15,52,62; number of, 53, 55,63, 114; professionalism of, 58.62- 63; public perceptions of, 52,55, 58-59,183; ranks of, 56,63; and rela­ tions with security officers, 6-7,10,29, 58,76,132, 136-37; salaries of, 52,63; self-perceptions of, 58-59, 136-37; social and religious background of, 55; training of, 29,56-57,61-62; uniforms of, 13,55, 59,78,183; and use of informants, 6, 60-63, 83; and use of surveillants, 6,62, 78. See also Gendarmes Gendarme stations, 57,62; creation of, 7, 19; functions of, 57; in Kiev, 43,51,63; in Moscow, 22,53-54,63,97; number of, 53,91; and officers of the reserve, 63, 143; personnel of, 63; and Police Depart­ ment, 61, 88; and security bureaus, 125, 136; special surveillance personnel of, 7, 19,55,107; in St. Petersburg, 63-64; and use of informants, 91,144 Gendarmes, 4 ,15,19,30,49-62,173; func­ tions of, 13,14,20-24,35,40,54,152; mounted, 151; number of, 53; official views of, 54,60; powers of, 34,50-51; public perception of, 13,50-51,55; on the railroads, 53,57, 82, 180; salaries of, 25. See also Gendarme officers Gerardi, B. A., 134 Gerasimov, A. V., 125,128,168,174; and Evno Azef, 96; and St. Petersburg Secu­ rity Bureau, 96, 158,171 Germany, 24,43,46,67,147; and antisocialist laws, 24,39,103; Berlin, 39,45,130,166; and cooperation with Russian police, 159; Leipzig, 39; police system of, 5,66; politi­ cal terrorism in, 24; and Social Democratic Party, 24 *

252

Index

Gemgross-Zhuchenko, Z. F , 89-90,99,165, 178; recruitment of, 107 Gershuni, G. A., 50,115-16,122, 136, 181 Gessen, I.V., 10,115,130, 146 Glazov, V. G., 168 Gogol’, N. V., 13 Gol’denberg, G., 26 Golovnin, A. V., 32 Goremykin, I. L., 8-9,29, 99 Gorinovich, N. E., 83 Gots, M. R., 74,148 Government institutions, 4 -5 ,7 , 13; arbitrari­ ness of, 8-10,38-39; committee on ad­ ministrative punishments, 35, 129,164; Committee of Ministers, 25,38,111,147, 152-53,156; Council of Ministers, 170, 176; Education Ministry, 85; Finance Ministry, 104; Ministry of the Imperial Court, 150; nature of, 71; rivalry among, 4,10, 15,21,30,52-53,71,153,166; Senate, 10,22; special investigating com­ mission, 16,21; State Council, 10,37-38, 166; State Duma, 182-83; Supreme Exec­ utive Commission, 26-27, 37; surveil­ lance over, 13; War Ministry, 52 Government officials, 18,20,24,34, 39,46; and anti-Jewish violence, 174-75; atti­ tude toward security police, 52; and in­ dustrial workers, 102; land captains, 56, 114; powers of, 114; public attitude to­ ward, 24,114; and right-wing groups, 169; surveillance over, 6; and table of ranks, 63; violence against, 18,21, 23-24, 34. See also Administrative offi­ cials Government in Russia: nature of, ix, 9,10-11, 13,40,185; public perception of, 8,25, 183 Governors. See City governors; Provincial governors Governors general, 26,34,62; and emergency legislation, 26; powers of, 34, 37, 147, 176; temporary, 26 Great Britain, 4,22; courts in, 123; London, 22,62; police institutions of, 58,66,79; policemen in, 83; Special Branch of the London Metropolitan Police, 4 Great Reforms, ix, 8,17, 19-20,183 Grinevitskii, 1.1., 31 Grodno, 147,163 Gurko, V. I., 17,139,145, 158,162,165-66, 176

Gurevich, M. I., 87,90,92,95,155,158; and Nachalo, 110-11 ; and Social Democrats, 115; and Socialist-Revolutionaries, 161; and Special Section, 115,166; and stu­ dent unrest, 109; unmasking of, 115 Heard, A. F., 15 Herzen, Alexander, 15,62 Holy Brotherhood, 32-33 Iakovlev-Bogucharskii, V. Ia., 90,110 Iankulio, A. K., 56 Iaroslavl’, 114,121 Ignat’ev, A. R, 156 Ignat’ev, N. P, 33, 38,40 Ikov, V. K., 11 Independent Jewish Workers Party. See Zubatovism Industrial workers, 7,11,29, 32; and clashes with police, 116,138; informants among, 84-85; Jewish, 101,104,117; and labor movement, 72,100,102,141-42,160; and labor unrest, 163; officialdom’s atti­ tudes toward, 118; on railroads, 170,180; and strikes, 102-3,138,144, 154-55, 178; surveillance over, 100,102; and Zubatovism, 118,126,141-42 Informants, 5,13, 30,44,46,65, 82-96,144; attitudes of revolutionaries toward, 90-91,115,120, 169-70; “central infor­ mants,” 96; conspiratorial apartments for, 64, 87; and dangers of work, 94,164-65, 169-70; direction of, 86-88,93; effec­ tiveness of, 13, 82,91; funding for, 6,60, 62-64,91; gender of, 91; motives for serving as, 84-85; nature of, 78,83-84; number of, 6,13, 82-83, 86,91; promo­ tion of, 72,88,90; protection of, 6,64, 85, 87, 88-94,116,144; and pw vokatsiia, 82, 88,91,94-96; recruitment of, 83-86, 89; and relationship to surveil­ lants, 78, 81, 83; social and professional background of, 13,84; and threats to case officers, 93,96; use of, ix, 6,44,61-63, 75; wages of, 84,87,89,91 Inquisition, 5 Interception of mail. See Perlustration Interior Ministry, 4,15,28, 34,47; and admin­ istrative exile, 35,37; and agrarian unrest, 176; Censorship Department of, 111, 113; and deputy interior ministers, 150; func­ tions of, 28; and labor unrest, 104,161;

Index and local officials, 40,180; and Police Department, 27; and political reliability, 69; and purview of, 4,40; responsibilities of, 41 Investigations, formal (doznanie), 21,59-60, 144; number of, 98. See also Gendarme officers; Prosecutors Ioganson, A. A., 107 Iretskii, V. Ia., 94 Iurkovskii, E. K., 74 Ivanchin-Pisarev, A. I., 53 Ivanov, A. L, 62-63 Ivanova, P. L, 87 Ivanovskaia, P. S., 148 Jews, 47,139,147; and gendarme corps, 56; and informants, 84; and Pale of Settle­ ment, 101,104,117; and Zionism, 139, 141-42. See also Pogroms Judicial reform of 1864, 8, 17-19, 37, 39,56 Justice Ministry, 10,17,34,111; and adminis­ trative punishments, 21, 35,144; and op­ position movements, 104; and Police De­ partment, 144; and prosecutors, 17-18, 21,29,51, 144; responsibilities of, 41; and Third Section, 21 Kadet Party, 122, 146,170-71 Kakhanov, M. S., 38; Kakhanov Commission, 33, 38,59 Kaliaev, I. P., 156-57 Kanatchikov, Semen, 119 Karabchevskii, N. P, 17,139 Karakozov, D. V., 18,22-23,62 Karamzin, N. M., 9 Karpovich, P.V., 112-13, 153 Kassow, Samuel, 109 Katorga, 8,15, 36,47, 152 Kavelin, K. D., 20 Keep, John, 179 Keller, B. A., 85 Kennan, George, 49 Kerenskii, A. F., 80 Khalturin, S. N., 26 Khar’kov, 63,71,99, 116,119,128,136, 158, 170; agrarian unrest in, 123,128,180; governor general of, 26; perlustration in, 42; reinforced security declared in, 40; security bureau in, 133,135 Kiev, 52,71,96, 137,157, 165; governor gen­ eral of, 26; opposition movements in, 107-9,116, 119,161,170; police institu­

253

tions in, 42,63,70; police operations in, 76,107-8; reinforced security declared in, 40,175; security bureau in, 133, 135-35; worker unrest in, 140 Kireev, A. A., 9, 32 Kleigels, N.V., 138 Kletochnikov, N. V., 30-31,44-^5,62, 82,91, 94 Klitchoglu, S., 148 Kogan-Grinevich, M. G., 116-17 Kokovtsov, V. N., 150,152, 171 Konashevich, V. P, 45 Koni, A. F., 59 Konspiratsiia, 6,62, 87,94; definition of, 94 Kornilov, A. A., 122 Korolenko, V. G., 26,49,59 Korvin-Krukovskii, 45 Koshko, I. F , 175 Kostroma, 49,121 Kovalenskii, S. G., 158-59, 166 Koval’skii, I. M., 23 Kovno, 147,170 Kozlov, A. A., 157,164 Kravchinskii, S. M., 23 Kremenetskii, L. N., 143,148,155 Kremer, A. I., 101,103 Kronstadt, 172 Kropotkin, P. A., 9-10,51 Krupskaia, N. K., 121 Kryzhanovskii, S. E., 41,113, 150 Krzhizhanovskii, G. M., 121 Kurlov, P G., 171,174 Kuropatkin, A. N., 139,151 Kuskova, E. D., 99 Kuz’min-Karavaev, V. D., 164 Land and Freedom, 23, 26, 30, 83 Laporte, Maurice, 94 Lekukh, G. D., 129 Lemke, M. K., 162 Lenin, V. I., 43,77,91,100,160-61; on con­ spiratorial methods, 119-20; exile to Siberia, 101-2,115, 120; on security po­ lice, 102,120; and Zubatovism, 120 Leroy-Beaulieu, Anatole, 41 Liberation movement, 124,157,162; forma­ tion of, 108. See also Union of Liberation Liubimov, A. N., 121 Liubimov, D. N., 75,167 Lopatin, G. A., 47 Lopukhin, A. A., 29,42, 128, 131, 152; and EvnoAzef, 136,149,152; background of,

254

Index

128; career of, 128,158; and criticism of police system, 152-53, 156; and opposi­ tion activists, 139; and police reforms, 133,152-53; and state-crime cases, 145; and S. V. Zubatov, 128 Loris-Melikov, M. T , 26-29, 31-32, 37,166 Lunacharskii, A. V., 88,101 Maiskii, S., 43 Makarov, N. A., 142 Manasevich, M. V., 134 Manasevich-Manuilov, I. E, 159 Martov, lu. 0 . . 4 9 , 101, 111 Martynov, A. R, 56-58,60, 64,93,132, 171 Martynov, N. R, 57 Marx, Karl, 74; Capital, 100 Marxists, 35,44,99-100; and industrial labor, 100; and Marxist theory, 102; revisionism of, 110-11,115; and student movements, 108 May Day demonstrations, 127,136, 161 Medem, G. R, 171, 177-79 Mednikov, E. R, 92,97,135,155; character of, 78; on security system, 135-36, 143-44; and surveillants, 78-81,137, 144,165 Meller-Zakomel’skii, A. N., 181 Mel’nikov, lu. D., 99 Mel’nikov, M. M., 136 Men’shchikov, L. R, 90,92,97,134,169-70, 177; major police operations of, 92-93, 119,121; and Special Section, 134; and S.V. Zubatov, 93-93 Merezhkovskii, D. S., I l l Mezentsev, N. I., 23,25,60 Miakotin, V. A., 113,129 Mikhail Nikolaevich, Grand Duke, 37 Mikhailov, I. K., 164 Mikhailovskii, N. E., 111, 129 Mikhina, A. N .,74 Military courts, 23, 30, 34,36,46,157, 164; transfer of state-crime cases to, 26, 36-39, 145,152 Military forces: commanders of, 34, 173; and Moscow armed uprising, 178-80; and punitive expeditions, 181-82; and repres­ sion, 11, 113,127,163,168-69,172 Miliukov, R N., 129, 146, 150,153, 158 Miliutin, D. A., 20, 37-38 Min, G. A., 179, 182 Minsk, 108, 111, 138, 171 Mintslov, S. R., 155,171

Mitskevich, S. L, 100,134 Mobile surveillance brigade, 81-82,116,119, 137-38; abolition of, 134; creation of, 81; effectiveness of, 82,99,122, 125; func­ tions of, 81-82, 137-138; funding for, 110; personnel of, 82,110; and S. V. Zu­ batov, 81 Modernization, 3,10; and opposition, 8. See also Europeanization Modi’, V.F., 155,171 Morozov, S. T., 141-42 Moscow: armed uprising of, 177-79,182; city governors of, 64,70,77,157,160, 171, 175; extraordinary security declared in, 178; governors general of, 26,77,146, 157,160,177; as Imperial capital, 37,69; opposition movements in, 99-100,107, 119,151,161,169, 172; passport system in, 67; perlustration in, 42; police institu­ tions in, 53,63,70, 81, 86,91,171; rein­ forced security declared in, 40; surveil­ lance in, 67,70, 80-81 Moscow Security Bureau, 4 ,6 ,7 , 27,43, 137, 179; creation of, 27; effectiveness of, 77, 142; explosions at, 178; funding of, 63, 65, 133-34; important role of, 7,63-64, 76-77, 81,129,142; organization of, 65; and passport system, 67; personnel of, 65-66,91; and Police Department, 27, 77; police reforms of, 81; rules govern­ ing, 64-65; and subordination to city gov­ ernor, 64; training programs of, 7, 78, 112; and use of informants, 96,112; and S. V. Zubatov, 74 Mouchi, Antoine de, 5 Murav’ev, N. V., 104 Nechaev, S. G., 21-22 Neidgardt, D. B., 174 Nestroev, G. A., 71, 115 Newspapers and journals: Iskra, 108, 116-18, 120-21, 126,134; Izvestiia, 170; M oskovskie vedomosti, 161 \Nachalo, 110-111 ; Novaia zhizn \ 172; Novoe vremia, 58; Osvobozhdenie, 124,146-47, 150; Pravo, 146, 172; Revoliutsionnaia Rossiia, 112 Nicholas 1 ,12-17,60,65,75,183, 185 Nicholas II, 54,75,98,136,150; and adminis­ trative officials, 147; and government re­ form, 150-51,158; and October Mani­ festo, 170, 172; and V. K. Plehve, 150;

Index reign of, 152; and security police, 105, 131; terrorist attempts against, 89; and D. F. Trepov, 155 Nihilism, 20,24, 32,43 Nikiforov, A. L., 157 Nikitenko, A. V., 16,20 Nizhni Novgorod, 97,133,153, 157, 165 Nogin, V.P., 115 Novitskii, V. D., 22,51,61,132-33, 139, 159-60; capabilities of, 96; and S. V. Zubatov, 82,108,137,160 Obolenskii, I. M., 136 Obolenskii, V. A., 102 October Manifesto, 171-72,182,186 Octobrist Party, 146 Odessa, 26 ,4 0 ,4 2 ,4 6 ,7 0 , 165,174; opposi­ tion organizations in, 107; security bureau in, 133,135,145; worker unrest in, 138, 140-41; Zubatovism in, 138, 141 Okhrana, 5. See also Security police institu­ tions O khranitel’naia komanda, 5, 19, 33,65 Okhranniki, 63,70,94,97. See also Security officers Okladskii, I. F., 30-32 Opposition movements: coalescing of, 124, 129,145,150-51,154,162; development of, 3 ,6 ,1 1 , 14-15,44,48,52-53,66,72, 125, 145; nature of, 184; number of mem­ bers of, 104; police reforms in response to, 4,11, 27,3 9 ,9 1 ,9 5 ,9 8 ; police under­ standing of, 75,156; public attitudes to­ ward, 38-39,51; reasons for development in Russia, 10,38-39, 122; repression against, 8-11,14-16,24, 36,44,46-47, 51,60,168; self-perception of members, 8,95,114-15,162, 184. See also Con­ spiratorial organizations; Constitutional­ ists in Russia Orzhevskii, P. V , 41,43 Ozerov, I. Kh., 117, 142 Pankrat’ev, N. E., 64 Paris, 12, 15,45-46,151,184; security bureau in, 45, 84,96,143,166 Passport system, internal: effectiveness of, 153,165; in Russia, 6,14, 28, 66-67, 153; statute on passports and fugitives of 1845,14; in western Europe 6 ,1 4 ,2 4 ,6 7 Peasantry, 9-10,11, 3 2 ,36,40,50,66,174; and agrarian unrest, 123, 161-63,172,

255

176; condition of, 163; opposition move­ ments and, 99,161; and peasant unions, 161,176,180; and redemption payments, 150, 176-77 People’s Justice Party, 77,99 Peoples’ Will, 26,30,32-33,44-46, 82; de­ cline of, 47, 82-83,95,99; organization of, 44, 166; political terrorism of, 31,47, 51,64,98-99,112; repression against, 47,74,98 Peretts, E. A., 37-38 Perlustration, ix, 13,27,41,47,92,143; black offices, 42-43,128; bureau for diplomatic correspondence, 42; effectiveness of, 42, 47; personnel of, 42; and other police in­ stitutions, 42,143; rules governing, 42-43,61,143; scope of, 41; use of, 42-43,62,78; in western Europe, 13,41 Peshekhonov, A. V., 113 Peter the Great, 3,14,40 Peterson, A. G., 177 Petrashevskii Circle, 15-16 Petrunkevich, 1.1., 25,28,49,58,146,157, 164,171-72,174 Pipes, Richard, 35,108,161 Piramidov, V. M., 64,116 Pisarev, D. I., 20,73-74 Plehve, V. K., 29,41-43,122, 127,146; assas­ sination of, 42,96,148-50; censorship under, 113; and Kishinev Pogrom, 139, 148; legal training of, 127; outlook of, 127,139-40; and police reforms, 83,127, 140; public attitudes toward, 146-49; and P. I. Rachkovskii, 130; and repressive measures, 140,145-47; on social unrest, 138; and S. V. Zubatov, 140-41,145; and Zubatovism, 127,140 Pobedonostsev, K. R, 33,56,122 Pogroms, 37, 138-39,144,148; government officials and, 174-75; in Kishinev, 133, 138-39,148-49; in 1905,160,174 Pokotilov, A. D., 112 Poland, 26, 37,40,46,53, 156; L6dz, 156, 163; rebellion in, 14,32; unrest in, 156, 163 Police Department, 33, 36,45,56-57,143; and administrative exile, 35,50; assistant directors of, 28,107,166; and coopera­ tion with foreign police, 45; creation of, 27-28; directors of, 29,41, 107, 153, 166, 175; effectiveness of, 48,127, 158; func­ tions of, 28-29; and industrial workers,

256

Index

102t 104; and informants, 90,93; institu­ tions subordinate to, 30,52-53,61, 81, 104-5, 132-33,143-44,165,173; and Justice Ministry, 144; and military intelli­ gence, 159; and mobile surveillance brigade, 135; organization of, 28-29, 35, 100,104,107,166; and passport system, 66; and perlustration, 42-43,143; person­ nel of, 28-29,42,90,95; and police re­ form, 131; and political reliability, 68-69; public attitudes toward, 50; reform of, 29, 166; relations with other government in­ stitutions, 74,77; and reporting on oppo­ sition movements, 61,67,105-6,116; and Revolution of 1905,165; and rightwing groups, 160; and rule of law, 95, 175; and security police conference of 1902,125; senior officials of, 28-29; and S. V. Zubatov, 76,107,110 Police institutions, 4-5,62; in continental Eu­ rope, 4-5; coordination of, 10,27; crimi­ nal investigation police, 19,62,70,179; Department of Executive Police, 28; De­ partment of State Police, 27-28, 30; in factories, 104; nature of, ix; powers of, 34; public perceptions of, 123; reform of, 25,27-31,43,45-48,51,125-38; and Revolution of 1905,173,176; rural, 23, 30, 140; urban, 30 Police officials, 4-5 ,3 0 ,4 1 ; attitudes toward gendarmes, 59,96,127,133; attitudes to­ ward members of opposition, 8,22; capa­ bilities of, 48; city police captains, 66, 110; city police chiefs, 28,51; education level of, 29; number of, 9; rural police captains, 65,71,114; rural police sergeants, 25,140; social and religious background of, 29-30 Police probation (nadzor), 12,41,126 Political crimes. See State crimes Political reliability (politicheskaia blagonadezhnost’), 24,40-41,58-59; defini­ tion of, 67-68; punishment for unreliabil­ ity, 35,48; similar policy of French revolutionaries, 68; uses of, 68-69; verifi­ cation of, 24,65,67-69 Political terrorism, 10, 18,99-100,122,129, 146,152, 156,163; against emperors, 6, 26,31-32 ,4 7 ,5 7 ,6 4 , 89; against govern­ ment officials, 10,18,23-24, 37,42,51, 129,149-51,157, 164; extent of, 157; and military courts, 23,37; official atti­

tudes toward, 10, 37, 86,129,158; police control of, 25-26,31-32,47-49,122; provisional decline of, 48-49; public per­ ceptions of, 18,24-26, 32-33,51,122, 146,152,157-58; and social revolution, 23,26,158,163; and security law of 1881,9,33,37; worldwide incidence of, 4 ,1 8 ,2 4 ,6 4 Polizeistaat, 3,18,40; and Rechtstaat, 10 Polovtsev, A. A., 43, 119,141 Populists, 22,98-99,101; destruction of, 99; Going to the People, 22-23, 25; and in­ dustrial workers, 100; and political terror­ ism, 100 Porter, Bernard, 58 Postal and Telegraph Service, 28,42-43,62, 170; Department of Censorship of For­ eign Newspapers and Journals, 42; in Moscow, 74-75; in S t Petersburg, 143; strike of workers of, 176. See also Perlus­ tration Potapov, A. L., 22 Potresov, A. N., 111 Prisons, 60; conditions in, 16,71, 109,115, 181 Prosecutors: and formal investigations (doznanie), 21,26,59,144; and rule of law, 76. See also Justice Ministry Provincial governors, 6 ,1 8 -19,28,35,46,51; and administrative exile, 35,113; and agrarian unrest, 176; authority of, 4-5, 19, 28,34,36-37,50, 164,175-7ti, 180; and political reliability, 68; position in ad­ ministrative hierarchy, 52,133; public perceptions of, 164; and security law of 1881,113,147,153,156, 164,175; and security police, 52; and surveillance of in­ dustrial workers, 104; and surveillance of peasants, 123 Rachkovskii, P. I., 45-46,92,125,130, 158; and Evno Azef, 166-67; career of, 45-46, 131; and French Government, 46; and Moscow armed uprising, 177; and Paris Security Bureau, 45,77; at Police Depart­ m ent 158-59,166-67; and police re­ form, 128-29,167; and propaganda schemes, 130,159 Radtsig, R. A., 155 Rasputin, I., 77, 89,99 Rataev, L. A., 107, 109,127,146,160; and Evno Azef, 96,107, 136, 143, 148-49,

Index 167; capabilities of, 107,112,137,167; and Paris Security Bureau, 130,137,143, 148,159,166; and police reform, 126-27,129-31; and Special Section, 104-5,112,116,119,130; and S. V. Zubatov, 107,110,119,143 Ratko, V. V., 134,137,142,151 Regular police, 4, 34,50,66-71,163-64; as­ sistance to security police, 4,53,65-71, 109-10,184; attitudes toward revolution­ aries, 71,164,171; efficiency of, 66; and factories, 103; functions of, 28,37, 40-41,66-71; funding of, 134; and Revo­ lution of 1905,171,179,184; and sur­ veillance, 65-69,152-53; training of, 66, 109-110; varieties of, 65; wages of, 66; in western Europe, 66; and S. V. Zubatov, 109. See also Police institutions Religious groups and institutions, 28; clergy, 6 ,2 3 ,6 0 ,6 9 ; Holy Synod, 111; Roman Catholics, 56; Russian Orthodoxy, 29-30, 55,69; sects, 12. See also Surveillance Rennenkampf, P. K., 181 Revolution of 1905, ix, 86,97,108,154-82; and Battleship Potemkin, 163; Bloody Sunday, 155-56,160; and right-wing groups, 160, 169,172, 174-75; and St. Petersburg Soviet, 170,172,176-77 Revolution of 1917, ix, 108 Revolutionary movements, 10-11,21;and Revolution of 1917, ix; revolutionary ac­ tivism, ix; revolutionary sentiment, ix; and violence, 15-16, 21. See also Con­ spiratorial organizations Robbins, Richard, 164 Rodichev, F. I., 8 Rœdiger, A. F., 173 Rostov-na-Donu, 4 0,70,9 0 ,9 3 , 133 Rozanov, N., 101 Rubakin, N. A., 148 Rudenko, Petr, 157 Rule of law, 11,17-18,40,58,69,146, 156, 164,175 Ruma, Leopold, 94 Russo-Japanese War, 42,98,145, 147,182; military reversals of, 150,152, 161; and patriotic sentiment, 148; Port Arthur, 152 Ruud, Charles, x Rydzevskii, K. N., 150,155 Rysakov, N. I., 31 Saratov, 16, 62,99, 122-23, 153,175; security

257

bureau in, 133 Savinkov, B. V., 149, 167 Sazonov, E. S., 149-50 Sazonov, la. G., 116,125,140,142 Security bureaus, 4,5 ,1 9 ,2 7 ,1 5 5 ; authority of, 131-33; creation of, 4,19,27,91, 131-33; functions of, 131-33; funding of, 65,133-34; and gendarme stations, 65, 125.131- 33,136-137; network of, 7,43, 63.91.110.125.128.131- 38,142; oper­ ations of, 6; organization of, 64-65; and other police institutions, 132; personnel of, 5,65, 86,132,135; and Police Depart­ ment, 61, 88,131-32; rules governing, 64-65,131-33; and S. V. Zubatov, 125, 131,142 Security law of 1881,5,9,33-41,144,148, 152-53,171; and administrative exile, 35, 66,144; and constitutionalism, 39; effec­ tiveness of, 152-53,156; extraordinary security, 33-34,36,178; powers given to officials by, 33,147,152-53,156,164, 185; public reaction to, 38-39,153,156; reasons for adoption, 37-40; and regular police, 69-70,152,171; reinforced secu­ rity, 33-34, 36, 39-40,66, 163,175-76; revision of, 156; uses of, 36 Security officers, 5 ,6 ,7 , 29,62-63,145; char­ acter of, 63, 143,183-84; duties of, 131-33,173; effectiveness of, 184; num­ ber of, 143; promotion of, 63,132; public perceptions of, 183-84; rank of, 7,63, 132; and relations with gendarme officers, 6-7,10,55,63,131-33; and relations with prosecutors, 29; rivalries among, 143, 148,166; salary of, 63,141; training of, 7,143; and use of informants, 60,64, 83 Security police institutions, 4-5; conflict among, 30; conspiratorial nature of, x; in continental Europe, 4-5; and defense of Imperial regime, ix, 3,8; definition of 4-5; effectiveness of, ix, 6,10-11,16, 101; functions of, ix, 4 -5 ,6 ; laws govern­ ing, 5; methods of, ix-x, 6,27; personnel of, ix, 4,7 ,2 7 ; reform of, ix, 16,25, 27-31; tension among, 134, 143. See also Police institutions; Surveillance Security police system, 5 ,6 -7 ,1 1 ,1 2 ,1 6 ,1 9 , 143,185-86; arbitrariness of, 9; develop­ ment of, 26,64,128; effectiveness of, 31, 125, 142-44,156,167; funding of, 134;

258

Index

professionalization of, 7, 11, 27; public attitudes toward, 13,152-53,157; reform of, 125-38,143, 166-67. See also Secu­ rity police institutions Seditious literature, 11,46,62,70,74, 88; col­ lections of, 106,131; control of, 121,180 Sekerinskii, P. V., 64 Seliverstov, N. D., 25 Semevskii, V. I., 162 Semiakin, G. K., 93, 104,107 Serebriakov, P. A., 88 Serebriakova, A. E., 88-89,107,115-16, 134-35 Seregny, Scott, 161 Sergei Aleksandrovich, Grand Duke, 126,146, 150-51; assassination of, 96,156-58, 160; and support for S. V. Zubatov, 77, 104,116,118,141 Shaevich, K., 138 Shamshin, 1.1., 27 Shapovalov, A. S., 8,50 Shcheglovitov, I. G., 10 Shchegolev, P. E., 30,162 Shebeko, N. I., 32 Shipov, D. N., 146 Shuvalov, P. A., 19,22 Shuvalov, P. R, 160,165, 171 Shveitser, M , 161 Siberia, 15, 81,130; eastern, 23,119, 145, 147; exile to, 14,16, 35-36,49-51,90, 101,116,119,145,156; Irkutsk, 119, 133; katorga in, 47; and George Kennan, 49; and Revolution of 1905, 181; Tomsk, 116,133,153; Yakutsk, 25, 145 Sipiagin, D. S., 10, 113-14,122,127, 129, 136,160 Skandrakov, A. S., 43, 140, 148 Skvortsov-Stepanov, I. L, 116 Social Democratic Party, 160; Bolsheviks, 114, 161; combat organization of, 178; con­ gresses of, 121,142,161; foundation of, 108; Mensheviks, 161,165; in Moscow, 101,115,134,172,178 Social Democrats, 100,161; Bund, 89,108, 111,117; and industrial workers, 101, 111; informants among, 84,94, 107, 120, 142; in Moscow, 100; police repression against, 101-2, 107,134; and political terrorism, 114; and Revisionism, 111, 117, 124; andZubatovism, 111, 117-18, 141-42 Socialist-Revolutionaries, 169-70; informants

among, 84,90,165,169-70; number of, 104; police repression against, 161; and political propaganda, 112, 172; and politi­ cal terrorism, 74,96,112,122,143, 157, 172-73, 178 Socialist-Revolutionary Party, 149, 152, 160-61; central committee of, 148,165; combat organization of, 136,156,161, 167; formation of, 108,112; membership of, 91; and political terrorism, 148-49, 151,161,172 Sokolov, M. E., 161 Solov’ev, A. K., 26, 32 Special Section, 96, 112, 119,142; creation of, 104; effectiveness of, 135, 155, 167; functions of, 104-5, 135; and military in­ telligence, 159; organization of, 105; per­ sonnel of, 105,144, 146,155-56; regis­ tration system of, 105-6,131,155; and security bureaus, 133,135,142 Spiridovich, A. I., 55-57,61,132, 136,143, 157,175; and emperor’s security, 134; and informants, 84,93; and Kiev Security Bureau, 97,136; on revolutionary move­ ments, 77,108,112; on security police, 92,97,107,143,158, 179; and S. V. Zu­ batov, 75,96-97, 140; and Zubatovism, 138 St. Petersburg, 97; city governors of, 19, 154-55,165; governors general of, 26, 155; as Imperial capital, 15,22,95; and industrial agitation, 102, 116; judicial tri­ bunal of, 21,175; opposition movements in, 16,47,77,113,119,155, 161, 169-70; passport system in, 66-67; perlustration in, 42; police institutions in, 51, 53,56,63,66, 91; reinforced security de­ clared in, 40; security police in, 30; sur­ veillance in, 67; Zubatovism in, 138 St. Petersburg Security Bureau, 4 ,6 ,1 9 ,2 7 , 43,47,63-64; creation of, 19; effective­ ness of,77,116, 158; funding of, 65, 133-34; importance of, 63-64,75-76; and industrial labor, 102; operations of, 66; and People’s Will, 63; personnel of, 65-66,134,143,155, 158; rules govern­ ing, 64-65; and use of informants, 96, 116 Starodvorskii, N. R, 45 Stasova, E. D., 119 State crimes, 15-16,21-22,24, 137; and amnesties, 145,150,171-72; and criminal

Index code of 1903,144,164; investigation of, 16,21,98; membership in secret societies, 15,19,22; number of cases of, 145,164; and penal code of 1845,15,19,38,65, 123; prosecution of, 34,144-45; and Third Section, 12 Stepanov, S. A., x, 174 Stolypin, P. A., 29,175 Strikes. See Industrial workers Strumilin, S. G., 115 Struve, R B., 90, 113,115, 124, 146-47,149, 182,184 Students: and police, 108-10,112; public per­ ceptions of, 109,112,122; repression of, 112, 119,151; surveillance of, 153; un­ rest among, 7,108-10, 118-19,126,151, 168-69 Sudeikin, G. R, 6, 27, 33,44,51,60,62-63, 148,166; assassination of, 45,93-94; and S. R Degaev, 44-45,93; and Holy Broth­ erhood, 33; and People’s Will, 33,44,47, 64,127; and police reforms, 27,43,76,78, 83; and St. Petersburg Security Bureau, 43, 64; and use of informants, 44,75,83,94 Surveillance, 3, 5 -6,11-13,16, 20,42,47, 62; of administrative exiles, 41,46; in continental Europe, 5, 12,67; covert (nabliudenie), 40-41,60,64,67; effec­ tiveness of, 153,155; of government offi­ cials, 6, 141; of government institutions, 13,60; of industrial workers, 104; meth­ ods of, 6, 13,24,66-69, 105; of religious groups, 54,60; in rural areas, 123; of so­ ciety, 13-14,22,24,46,54,59-61, 65-69,114,152-53 Surveillants, 65,78-82, 144,164; attitudes to­ ward revolutionaries, 80; dangers of work, 165,173; funding for, 6; and E. P. Mednikov, 78; methods of operation, 79-81; number of, 78; and relationship to informants, 78, 81; recruitment of, 79; rules governing, 135, 144; training of, 78-80; use of, 6,62 Suvorin, A. S., 51,58 Sviatopolk-Mirskii, P. D., 130,139,147,155, 157; attitudes of officialdom toward, 150; as interior minister, 150,155; and overtures to society, 150; and social unrest, 151; and S. V. Zubatov, 141 Szeftel, Marc, 17 Tarie,E.V., 111

259

Tatarov, N. Iu., 161,169-70 Thiers, Adolphe, 182 Third Section, 4,6,13,16-17,19,21-22,28,30, 62,82; abolition of, 4,23,27; and advocacy of reform, 14; archives of, 162; creation of, 4,12,24,44,76,128; directors of, 23-24; ef­ fectiveness of, 16,24-25; functions of, 4, 12-14,17; and Gendarme Corps, 4; methods of, 13-16,44,106; nature of, 12-14; pater­ nalism of, 13-14; personnel of, 14,25,30; petitions to, 13; use of informants, 13-14,83 Tikhomirov, L. A., 24-25,47,56, 86; and S. V. Zubatov, 111 Timofeev, A. N., 167 Tiutchev, F. I., 14 Tocqueville, Alexis de, 9 Tolstoi, D.A., 19,29,41,43 Town dumas, 8,10,158,164; congresses of, 172 Trepov, D. F., 126,151-52,158,161,170; as deputy interior minister, 162,165,168-69; and R I. Rachkovskii, 158-59; special powers of, 162; as S t Petersburg governor general, 155; and S. V. Zubatov, 77,109, 116,118,141 Trepov, F. F., 19,23 Troitskii, N. A., 95 Trotsky, L. D., 177 Trubetskoi, S. N., 128 Trusevich, M. I., 29 Trutkov, G. M., 131 Tügan-Baranovskii, M. I., 110,115 Ufa, 133,136, 138-39 Ukraine, 37-40,81,181; Chernigov, 37,40, 114, 174-75; Poltava, 37,40,123,133 Ul’ianova-Elizarova, A. I., 91,117-18 Union of Liberation, 122,147,151,161, 168; and banquet campaign, 151 Union of Struggle for the Liberation of the Working Class, 35,77,102; creation of, 101; repression against, 101-2 Union of Unions, 129,161-62,166,168, 170-71 Universities, 10, 14,20,168; political demon­ stration in, 168-69; restrictions on, 20, 108, 168; in Moscow, 109; in St. Peters­ burg, 109 Urusov, S. D., 173 Valuev, P. A., 38 Vasil’ev, N. V., Ü7, 138

260

Index

Viatka, 15,137 VU’bushevich, Mania, 89,93; arrest of, 111; and Zubatovism, 117 Vilnius, 57,59,92,101,128,148; governor general of, 147; security bureau in, 133,135 Vinaver, M. M., 170 Vinogradov, S., 92 Vissarionov, S. E., 29 Vladimir, 15,121,140,151,163,170; Ivanovo-Voznesensk, 163 Vodovozov, V.V., 52,96 Voeikova, A. A., 110 Voiloshnikov, A. I., 179 Volkov, E. N., 160 Von Koten, M. E , 88 VonRaaben, K. S., 139 Von Wahl, V. V., 122,129,136,140,150 Voronezh, 40, 116,121 Vorontsov-Dashkov, I. L, 33 Vorovskii, V. E., 101 Vuich, E. L, 175 Warsaw, 26,42,53,63,148,161; judicial tri­ bunal of, 158; political violence in, 163; reinforced security declared in, 156; secu­ rity bureau in, 43,91,’ 132-34 Witte, Sergei, 46,138,152-53,168,172,181; as chairman of Council of Ministers, 170, 173; and Holy Brotherhood, 32; and po­ lice, 104, 156; and S. V. Zubätov, 104, 118,126,138,140-41,175 Wortman, Richard, 17,185 Zagorskii, K. Ia., 36 Zaionchkovskii, R A., 26, 32, 37-38 Zamiatnin, D. M., 16 Zasulich, V. I., 23,59 Zavarzin, R R, 59,90, 139 Zelikson-Bobrovskaia, Ts., 50 Zemstvo activists, 8-9,25,113,158; collabo­ ration with radicals, 124,151; congresses of, 151,160, 172 Zemstvos, 8,10 ,1 9 ,3 4 ; creation of, 20 Zenzinov, V. M., 51,173 Zheliabov, A. I., 30-31 Zhitomirskii, I. A., 121 Zhuchenko, Z. E See Gemgross-Zhuchenko, Z .E Zinov’ev, A. D., 180 Zlatoust, 138-39 Zubatov, S. V, 6-7,27,42,92-93,99,148,151, 154,175; appearance of, 73,75; attitude to­

ward other police officials, 107; attitude to­ ward public opinion, 76,109-110; and Evno Azef, 136; and Bund, 108,111,117; career of, 7,63,74-77,127,130; character of, 6-7,61,72-75,140-41; dismissal of, 140-41 ; education of, 72; and konspiratsiia, 6,94; labor program of, 7,103, 111-12,117-18,127; and E. R Mednikov, 78; methods of, 6-7,63,76,85-88,92,94, 96,107,137; and monarchism, 7,75, 85- 86,103-4,111-12,118,141; and Moscow Security Bureau, 6,63,74-77; and Nachalo, 110-11 ; and V. K. Plehve, 127,140-41,146; and police reforms, 6, 27,112,125,142; and questioning of sus­ pects, 85-86; rank of, 137; and relations with other police officials, 64,75-76,109, 118-19; and relations with subordinates, 7, 61,75,93,97,116,125,134-35; and secu­ rity police system, 134-35,137,141-42; and Social Democrats, 107-8,112, 116- 17,121; and Socialist-Revolutionar­ ies, 116; and Special Section, 107,130, 134-35,137; and student unrest, 7, 109-10,118; suicide of, 141; talents of, 72, 97,137; and use of informants, 6,61,84, 86- 89,96; and use of surveillants, 81 ; vi­ sion of, 76,112,141 Zubatovism, 7,103-4,117-18, 126,141; de­ cline of, 138; definition of, 104; and Inde­ pendent Jewish Workers Party, 117, 138-41; organization of, 117-118; and “police socialism,” 104; success of, 117- 18,141-42 Zuev, N. R, 29, 166 Zverev, V.N., 42 Zvolianskii, S. E., 29,99,107, 118,128, 158; and police reform, 125,127 Zybin, I. A., 42