Yet it was not until the late nineteenth century, with the arrival of telegraphs and telephones, that the machinery of the police state became really efficient. The Okhrana, which took over the functions of the Third Section in 1881, fought what can only be described as a secret war, using special powers outside the law, to stamp out revolutionaries. It had thousands of agents and informers, many of them posing as revolutionaries, who reported on conditions in the factories, the universities, the army and the institutions of the state itself. House porters filed daily reports to the police. Hundreds of bureaucrats were employed in a ‘Black Office’ to read people’s intercepted mail. ‘The whole of St Petersburg is aware that its letters are read by the police,’ complained Countess Vorontsova to Nicholas II. There was a huge list of activities — from putting on a concert or opening a shop to consulting the works of Darwin — for which even the most high-born citizen required a licence from the police. Indeed, from the perspective of the individual, it could be said that the single greatest difference between Russia and the West, both under Tsarism and Communism, was that in Western Europe citizens were generally free to do as they pleased so long as their activities had not been specifically prohibited by the state, while the people of Russia were not free to do anything unless the state had given them specific permission to do it. No subject of the Tsar, regardless of his rank or class, could sleep securely in his bed in the knowledge that his house would not be subject to a search, or he himself to arrest.2
This constant battle with the police state engendered a special kind of mentality among its opponents. One can draw a straight line from the penal rigours of the tsarist regime to the terrorism of the revolutionaries and indeed to the police state of the Bolsheviks. As Flaubert put it, ‘inside every revolutionary there is a policeman’. Felix Dzerzhinsky (1877–1926), the founding father of the Cheka, was a classic case in point. By 1917 he had spent the best part of his adult life in jails and penal exile, including the last three in the Orel prison, notorious for its sadistic tortures, where, as the leader of a hunger strike, he was singled out for punishment (his body was said to be covered with scars). Once installed in power, he was to copy many of these torture methods during the Red Terror. Yet Dzerzhinsky was only one of many poachers turned gamekeepers. By 1917, the average Bolshevik Party activist had spent nearly four years in tsarist jails or exile; the average Menshevik nearly five. Prison hardened the revolutionaries. It prepared them for ‘the struggle’, giving them a private reason to hate the old regime and to seek revenge against its representatives. Kanatchikov, who spent several years in tsarist jails, claimed that for Bolshevized workers like himself prison acted as a form of ‘natural selection’: ‘the weak in spirit left the revolution, and often life, but the strong and steadfast were toughened and prepared for future battles’. Many years later, in 1923, Kanatchikov was told that one of the judges who had sentenced him to jail in 1910 had been shot by the Bolsheviks. ‘When I heard this’, Kanatchikov confessed, ‘it gave me great satisfaction’.3
Justifying violence in the name of revolution was not exclusive to the revolutionaries. Among the educated élite there was a general cult of revolutionism. The Russian ‘intelligentsia’ (a Russian word by derivation) was less a class than a state of mind: it meant by definition a stance of radical and uncompromising opposition to the tsarist regime, and a willingness to take part in the struggle for its overthrow. The history of the revolutionary movement is the history of the intelligentsia. Most of the revolutionary leaders were first and foremost intellectuals. Their heads were full of European literature and history, especially the history of the French Revolutions of 1789 and 1848. ‘I think’, recalled Lydia Dan, a Menshevik, ‘that as people we were much more out of books than out of real life.’4 No other single group of intellectuals has had such a huge impact on the twentieth-century world.
