But the tide was already turning. In August 1880 a centralised police institution subordinated to the Ministry of the Interior, with authority over both political and regular police forces, the Police Department, had replaced the Third Section. Henceforth the security service was just another wheel in the state machine. (The Gendarme Corps remained affiliated with the War Ministry, however.) In October a second security bureau was established in Moscow. Grigorii Sudeikin, chief of the security bureau in St Petersburg and one of a rare breed of professionally sophisticated gendarme officers, penetrated the People's Will with informants and arrested several of its members by early 1881. While he failed to prevent the regicide, over the next two years Sudeikin, his assistant, Petr Rachkovskii, and their key informant, Sergei Degaev, demolished People's Will, which, although using Degaev to help murder Sudeikin, never fully recovered.
Several informants whose identities were discovered by revolutionaries went on to occupy key positions in the police apparatus. In contrast to gendarme officers, men with military training and an abiding sense of hierarchy and authority, erstwhile informants knew the revolutionaries' mentality
5 See Jonathan W Daly, 'On the Significance of Emergency Legislation in Late Imperial Russia', SR 54 (1995): 602-29.
intimately, making them their most dangerous adversaries. Rachkovskii had worked briefly as an informant in 1879, then virtually created a security bureau in Paris, which he headed from 1884 to 1902. Sergei Zubatov, an informant for the Moscow security bureau in 1886-7, rose to head that bureau and transformed it into the heart and soul of the empire's security system. Zubatov, Rachkovskii and several others introduced into the system an inventiveness, a vitality, an enthusiasm, and a spirit of adventure and iconoclasm previously absent from Russia's security service.
The government's apparent inability to deal with the terrible famine of 1890-1 gave rise to underground organisations in the People's Will tradition and broad-based oppositional movements. Radical activists travelled to the famine- stricken areas, where they educated, healed and fed people and agitated for a revolutionary uprising. The peasants largely shunned them, however, driving some in summer 1893 to found the People'sJustice party aimed at overthrowing the monarchy. Co-ordinated arrests crushed the organisation.
The number of gendarme inquests into political crimes rose from 56 cases involving 559 people in 1894 to 1,522 cases involving 6,405 people in 1903, an increase of 1,259% and 608%, respectively.[84] Still, until the turn of the century, the security police had revolutionary conspirators well under control. Rachkovskii in Paris with a dozen informants kept abreast of developments among the radical emigres and occasionally arranged their arrest in collaboration with European police forces. The Police Department co-ordinated the information sent in from provincial gendarme stations, mail interception offices and the security bureaus in the imperial capitals and in Paris. It also recruited informants on an irregular basis. Often this was done without much genuine effort on the police's part. For example, in 1893 Evno Azef, a brilliant informant among leading Socialist-Revolutionaries, voluntarily offered his services.
The Social Democrats enjoyed more success in the late 1890s because the security service focused more on repressing Populists and neo-People's Will groups (though it also harassed the Marxists, especially in Moscow, prompting them to adopt strict methods of secrecy), and thanks to a shift in tactics towards agitation among artisans and workers, articulating their everyday concerns and frustrations in order to incite their anger and channel it towards revolt. This approach formed the core idea of the Union of Struggle for the Liberation of the Working Class, created in St Petersburg in autumn 1895 to unite the disparate Social Democrat circles.[85] Despite continuous repression, which landed many experienced revolutionaries in exile, the movement helped provoke and organise massive strikes in St Petersburg in 1896 and 1897, leading many manufacturers unilaterally to shorten the regular work day in their factories to eleven and a-half hours. The government extended this concession to the whole country in a law of 2 June 1897. Henceforth, however, the government would deal with strike instigators largely by administrative means, not in the regular courts. The Police Department would also pay far more attention to the labour movement.
Meanwhile, Zubatov was reforming the methods of security policing. Professing a 'profound love for and faith in his cause', he imparted to several of his proteges in the security bureau an ardent commitment rarely encountered in gendarme officers. Zubatov's closest assistant, Evstratii Mednikov, a clever Old Believer of peasant stock, refined the use of plain clothes police agents, called surveillants (filery). Before the early 1880s, the gendarmes, despite their easily recognisable blue uniform, were rarely allowed to undertake plain clothes operations. At the Moscow security bureau, surveillants memorised the city's physical layout, includingrestaurants, bars, factories, taxi stations and tramway routes, as well as streets, alleys and courtyards, to enable them to manoeuvre freely around suspects. During training, experienced agents accompanied fresh recruits and taught them to recognise and commit to memory facial features through systematic study of physiognomy and by poring over photographs of revolutionaries. Finally, the novices learned to employ makeup and disguises. Surveillants jotted down their observations in diaries, tens of thousands of which are preserved in the police archives. They are generally little more than a dull catalogue of pedestrian occurrences in the life of persons under surveillance, yet security bureau clerks used them to prepare a welter of 'finding aids', including weighty name and place registers and complex diagrams of relations among opponents of the government. The number of such trained surveillants in Moscow rose from seventeen in 1881 to fifty in 1902, after which the number fluctuated between fifty and one hundred. (After the turn of the century, the St Petersburg bureau employed slightly more.)
To pursue radical activists out into the provinces, where the majority of provincial gendarme authorities were ineffective, in 1894 a mobile surveillance brigade (Letuchii otriadfilerov) was created at the Moscow security bureau. As a sort of moveable security bureau, it was designed to uncover distribution networks of revolutionary literature, illegal printing presses and propaganda rings. It permitted Zubatov to co-ordinate major operations across the empire - from surveillance to mass arrests. The key to its success was its mobility: those under surveillance were less likely to recognise a surveillant constantly on the move than one permanently stationed in one place. The brigade achieved its success with a staff of only thirty surveillants in 1894 and fifty in January 1901.
More important than surveillants were informants. Zubatov was a master at recruiting and guiding them, winning their confidence and maximising their usefulness. Sometimes he used chance meetings with industrial workers or personnel of important public organisations as opportunities to recruit them as agents. A certain number of informants simply proposed their services. The majority of agents began to work for the police after arrest - and under interrogation. Zubatov questioned political suspects as though leading a radical discussion circle, showering them with attention, offering them food and drink, and arguing passionately that the people never profit from revolutionary violence, that only the emperor was capable of implementing needed reforms in Russia. His enthusiasm and energy were extremely attractive to revolutionaries lacking deep convictions and permitted him to turn some of them away from the paths of political opposition.
84
A. F. Vovchik,
85
See J. L. H. Keep,