The Russian Revolution полностью

The security services evolved over time into a highly effective political counterintelligence using an array of techniques to combat revolutionaries, including a network of informants, agents who shadowed suspects, and agents provocateurs who infiltrated subversive organizations. The police intercepted and read private mail. It employed as informers residential superintendents. It had branches abroad (it maintained a permanent bureau in Paris) and collaborated with foreign police to keep track of Russian revolutionaries. In the years immediately preceding the outbreak of World War I, through arrests and penetration it succeeded in virtually eliminating the revolutionary parties as a threat to the regime: suffice it to say that both the head of the Socialist-Revolutionary terrorist organization and Lenin’s chief deputy in Russia were on the police payroll. The security police was the best informed and politically the most sophisticated agency of the Imperial Government: in the years immediately preceding the Revolution it submitted remarkably prescient analyses of Russia’s internal conditions and prospects.

Of all the services of the Russian bureaucracy, the police were the least constrained by law. All its operations, affecting the lives of millions, were carried out free of external controls, save those of the Minister of the Interior and the director of the Department of Police. Under regulations issued in 1881, the police organs had no judiciary powers. However, in areas subject to the August 1881 provisions for “Safeguard,” high officials of the Corps of Gendarmes had the right to detain suspects for two weeks, and for two weeks longer with a governor’s authorization. After one month, a detainee was either released or turned over to the Ministry of the Interior for further investigation. Once that was completed, if the evidence warranted, the suspect was brought to trial either before a court (sometimes the Senate) or before administrative boards of the Ministry of the Interior composed of two representatives each of that ministry and the Ministry of Justice: a bureaucratic body functioning in a judiciary capacity.⁵⁸ Under such procedures, Russians could be sentenced for up to five years of administrative exile. The population had no recourse against the security organs, least of all in areas placed under Safeguard, where the police could act with complete impunity.

The authority of the Minister of the Interior was enhanced by virtue of the fact that his police and gendarmerie were the only vehicles for enforcing directives of the other ministries. If Finance ran into a taxpayers’ revolt, or War had trouble recruiting, they had to go to Interior for help. In the words of a contemporary source,

the outstanding position of the Ministry of the Interior is determined not only by the number, variety, and importance of its functions but also and above all by the fact that it administers the police force, and that the enforcement of all government decrees, regardless of which ministry’s competence they happen to fall under, is, as a rule, carried out by the police.⁵⁹

In the closing decades of the century, Interior Ministers supported and implemented various “counterreforms” designed to emasculate the liberal reforms of the 1860s. Among them were restrictions on zemstva, the introduction of land commandants, expulsion of Jews from areas where law forbade them to reside, and repression of student unrest. Had they had their wish, Russia would have been frozen not only politically but also economically and socially.

The inability of the Interior Ministers to carry out their programs provides a telling commentary on the limitations that life imposed on the practices of patrimonial autocracy. From considerations of state security, its proponents opposed nearly every measure designed to modernize the Russian economy. They fought currency reform and the adoption of the gold standard. They disliked railroads. They opposed foreign borrowing. Above all, they resisted industrialization on the grounds that it hurt cottage industries, without which peasants could not make ends meet, led to dangerous concentrations of industrial labor, and enabled foreigners, especially Jews, to penetrate and corrupt Russia.

There were weighty reasons of state why this resistance was ignored. Russia had no choice but to industrialize. Witte, the Minister of Finance and chief advocate of industrialization, made his case largely in political and military terms, because he knew that they would appeal to Nicholas II. In February 1900, in a memorandum to the Tsar, he argued, consciously or unconsciously echoing the nineteenth-century German political economist Friedrich List, that

without her own industry [Russia] cannot achieve genuine economic independence. And the experience of all nations indicates palpably that only countries which enjoy economic independence have also the capacity fully to unfold their political might.*