The Russian Revolution полностью

There was a wide gulf separating the provincial officialdom from that ensconced in the ministries and chanceries of St. Petersburg. One historian notes that “men who started work in the provinces rarely moved to central agencies. In the provinces at mid-century, only at the highest levels do we find any significant group that had started work in the center.”⁴² This situation did not change in the final decades of the old regime.

It is in the higher ranks of St. Petersburg officialdom that one can discover something resembling an ideology. Before the Revolution this was not considered a subject worthy of investigation, since the intelligentsia considered it to be obvious that Russia’s bureaucrats were a herd of self-seeking dunderheads. Events were to prove the intelligentsia a poor judge in such matters: for on coming to power in February 1917, it allowed the state and society to disintegrate in a matter of two or at most four months—the same state and society that the bureaucrats had somehow managed to keep intact for centuries. Clearly, they knew something that the intelligentsia did not. The Menshevik Theodore Dan had the honesty to admit in retrospect that “the extreme reactionaries of the tsarist bureaucracy much sooner and better grasped the driving forces and the social content of [the] coming revolution than all the Russian ‘professional revolutionaries,’ and, in particular, the Russian Marxist Social Democrats.”⁴³

Theodore Taranovsky distinguishes in the upper layers of the Russian bureaucracy toward the end of the nineteenth century two principal groups: one which espoused the ideal of a police state (Polizeistaat), the other which wanted a state based on the rule of law (Rechtsstaat).⁴⁴ They agreed that Russia required firm autocratic authority, but the former stressed repression, while the latter preferred to bring society into some kind of limited partnership. Their differing programs derived from different perceptions of the population: the right-wing conservatives saw it as a savage mob while the liberal-conservatives felt it could be nurtured and taught citizenship. By and large, the more liberal bureaucrats were better educated, many of them having completed legal and other professional training. The conservatives tended to be administrative “generalists,” lacking in professional skills or higher education.

The advocates of the police state saw Russia as under permanent siege by her inhabitants, believed ready to pounce and tear the country apart at the slightest hint that government authority was weakening. To prevent this from happening, Russia had to be ruled with an iron hand. They were not troubled by charges of arbitrary behavior: that which their opponents labeled “arbitrariness” (proizvol) they saw as the correct technique for managing a country as spacious and undisciplined as Russia. Law to them was an instrument of administration rather than a higher principle binding both rulers and ruled, in the spirit of the police chief of Nicholas I who hearing complaints that his agents were acting unlawfully retorted, “Laws are written for subjects, not for the government!”⁴⁵ They treated all criticism of the bureaucracy by “society” as camouflage to disguise the critics’ political ambitions.

The police state, as they conceived it, was an eighteenth-century mechanism, managed by professionals, which provided minimum opportunity for the free play of political, social, and economic forces. They objected to every institution and procedure that disturbed administrative unity and the smooth functioning of the bureaucratic chain of command, such as the independent judiciary and organs of local self-government. To the extent that such institutions had a right to exist, they had to be subordinated to the bureaucracy. They opposed glasnost’ on the grounds that revelations of dissent within the government or admission of failure would undermine its most precious asset, namely prestige. Centralized bureaucratic administration was in their view unavoidable until such time as “the population’s general level has risen, until there [are] in the provinces enough genuine public servants, until society [has developed] intelligent attitudes toward the nation’s problems.”⁴⁶ Officials of this school pleaded for time without indicating how, under their strict tutelage, the population could ever develop “intelligent attitudes toward the nation’s problems.” They wanted to preserve the existing social caste system, with the leading role assigned to the landed gentry and the peasantry kept isolated. Their headquarters were in the Ministry of the Interior.