Stolypin is perhaps best known for this official campaign of counter-terror and for his land reforms or 'wager on the strong' peasants, but his administration also reformed the security police system. From December 1906 to
January 1907, Stolypin's protege and director of the Police Department, Maksi- milian Trusevich, created eight regional security bureaus, each comprising six to twelve provinces and corresponding roughly to the spheres ofactivity ofthe Socialist-Revolutionary party. Their directors were the security bureau chiefs in St Petersburg, Moscow, Kharkov, Kiev, Odessa, Vilno, Riga, and the gendarme station chief in Samara. The directors were supposed to co-ordinate and improve the operations and information-gathering of the several gendarme stations and security bureaus within their jurisdictions but also had the right to order arrest and search operations. This angered gendarme station chiefs who were nearly all of higher rank. To alleviate these tensions and improve operations, Trusevich issued numerous directives and manuals on security police methods and organised periodic summit meetings.
The acrimony between government and public was even more bitter in the second Duma than in the first, and on 3 June i907 the emperor again peremptorily dissolved the assembly. Expecting massive popular disorders, Stolypin ordered administrative and police authorities to preserve public order at any cost.
Overall, however, a spirit of moderation prevailed among senior police officials. A series of directives rebuked lower administrative and police authorities for taking indiscriminate recourse to administrative exile and for insufficiently strict observance of legal procedure. These strictures were directed primarily at provincial gendarme and security chiefs who often found it difficult to penetrate the revolutionaries' conspiratorial defences. The major security bureaus, by contrast, disposed of well-placed informants permitting them to focus their attention on genuine subversion. This was an extremely important distinction. The police system was able to function within the framework of a legal, constitutional order only in so far as its security police apparatus possessed a reasonably effective intelligence-gathering capability. The efficiency of the security bureaus in the imperial capitals and a few provincial cities permitted them to undermine revolutionary organisations without harassing large numbers of innocent people. Only a really sophisticated police system can distinguish among mere malcontents and genuine subversives.
But perhaps Russia's security men were too sophisticated. The Social Democrat Osip Ermanskii thought so. In his experience, the security men who employed Zubatov's tactic often gave wider latitude than did ordinary gendarme officers to revolutionary activists in the hope that they would incriminate themselves further. Yet, asked Ermanskii, 'who gained more from this policy, the government or the revolutionaries? . . . While the Police Department carefully gathered material and then subjected it to scientific analysis, we were permitted to place a mine beneath the very edifice of absolutism and capitalism whose safeguard and perpetuation that clever [police] system had been designed to ensure.'[102]
Of course, Ermanskii was viewing the system from the point of view of the collapse of the monarchy, an event far from inevitable. Beginning in late 1907 and early 1908, the government gained the upper hand in its struggle against the revolutionaries. One senior official reported in early 1908 that 'Everywhere revolutionary newspapers bitterly complain about the intensification of the "reaction" and about the indifference of the population to the activity of revolutionaries, and this is a good sign of the return to tranquillity of the country.'[103] Indeed, the first issue of a new Socialist-Revolutionary partyjournal declared in April that 'The autocracy has re-established itself.'[104] Many radical activists remained, but they were driven largely underground, and senior police officials felt sufficiently tranquil over the next two years to return most of the empire to normal law, to issue relatively few death sentences and to seek to prevent excessive use of administrative punishments. The government seemed very much in control, the revolutionaries had been routed and constitutionalism and the rule of law were not entirely jettisoned to accomplish this.
On 7 January 1909, the Socialist-Revolutionary party repudiated one of its most celebrated terrorist leaders, Evno Azef, as a police informant. The perfect 'double agent', he had enjoyed the complete trust of both police and party.[105] Azefs exposure discredited both the Socialist-Revolutionary party, which seemed to be swarming with traitors (some two dozen more informants were unmasked over the next four years), and a government that would make use of assassins to fight assassins. Meanwhile, senior police officials, worried that it would become harder to recruit new informants, reassured existing ones that the Police Department had been able to protect Azef for sixteen years but also warned them that all provocation would be punished severely. It seems, in fact, that the recruitment of police informants did not suffer much from the Azef affair: most of the ninety-four informants employed by the St Petersburg security bureau in 1913 - it had never employed a larger number - had been hired during the previous three years.
The Police Department's success in devastating the revolutionary organisations did not cause it to become complacent. The Special Section cajoled, provoked, rebuked, encouraged and criticised the directors of both the regional and provincial security bureaus and the gendarme stations with great frequency and vigour. A steady stream of directives urged them to acquire more informants, to study the revolutionary organisations, to train more surveil- lants, to use conspiratorial methods, to send agents deep into the countryside, to co-operate more effectively, to provide more precise information and to use good judgement before searching suspects. Experienced gendarme officers were sent out to the provinces on inspection tours, a serious training course for gendarme officers was instituted in 1910 and for this purpose Special Section clerks drew up large, multicoloured diagrams of the major revolutionary parties.
The security system was definitely becoming more professional and productive, but its reputation suffered a further blow on i September i9ii when an erstwhile police informant, Dmitrii Bogrov, fatally shot Prime Minister Stolypin in Kiev. Public opinion waxed indignant that the security police were still relying on such unsavoury elements as Bogrov, that is, like Azef, a police informant out of control. The reactionary Prince Vladimir Meshcherskii called the security police 'the most harmful, immoral, and dangerous invention in the Russian bureaucratic system', a sort of 'Spanish Inquisition with a slight softening of manners'. Nikolai Gredeskul, a well-known Kadet jurist, admitted that in the face of massive political terror the government had had to adopt secret and underhand methods, but he added that this had led inevitably to the Azef and Bogrov affairs. Since political terrorism had by i9ii come largely to an end, the government, he argued, should put an end to its own covert operations.[106] Curiously, the Kadet was more sympathetic to the government's predicament than was the monarchist. Gredeskul was right: it is essentially impossible to combat a conspiracy without resorting to conspiratorial methods. This was true in the case of both People's Will and the Socialist-Revolutionary terrorists. But once the latter had been disorganised, was it not possible for the police to renounce such methods as Gredeskul urged? Unfortunately, the Socialist-Revolutionaries never officially repudiated the use of terror, and many Social Democrat leaders continued to lay plans to orchestrate the violent overthrow of the imperial order. Thus, in the interest of state security, the imperial security police continued to deploy secret informants among them, and quite successfully: the major revolutionary parties in 1912 were so disorganised that they could not turn much to their benefit the deep popular outrage provoked by the massacre of 172 striking workers in the Lena Goldfields on 4 April 1912.[107]
103
N. N. Ansimov, 'Okhrannye otdeleniia i mestnaia vlast' tsarskoi Rossii v nachale XX v.',
105
On the Azef Affair, see Anna Geifman,
106
107
See Robert B. McKean,