In August 1880, on the recommendation of General Loris-Melikov, the Third Section was therefore abolished and replaced by a central political police called initially Department of State Police and after 1883, simply Department of Police. Administratively, the new organization formed part of the Ministry of the Interior which now became the chief guardian of state security in Russia. The instructions of the new Department as finally evolved were remarkably comprehensive. The Department was to be in charge of the preservation of public security and order, and the prevention of state crimes. In addition, it was made responsible for the guarding of state frontiers, the issuance of internal passports, supervision of foreigners resident in Russia and all Jews, as well as of taverns, fire-fighting equipment and explosives. It also had broad authority 'to approve the statutes of various associations and clubs and to grant permission for the holding of public lectures, readings, expositions, and conferences'.16 It was organized into several sections, one of
* Already in February 1873 the administration of all civil prisons had been entrusted to this Ministry.
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which dealt with 'secret' matters - that is, political counter-intelligence. Under the Department served three divisions of Gendarmes, headquartered in St Petersburg, Moscow and Warsaw, as well as many specialized detachments. The staff remained small; in 1895 the Police Department had only 161 full-time employees while the Corps of Gendarmes stayed under 10,000 men. However, in 1883 the regular police, numbering close to 100,000, were ordered to cooperate closely with the gendarmerie, which greatly increased the latter's effectives. The Minister of the Interior was ex officio Chief of Gendarmes but in time the actual responsibility was assumed by one of his deputies called Director of the Department of Police and Commander of the Corps of Gendarmes. On 9 June 1881, an order was issued exempting the gendarmerie from the authority of Governors and Governors Generaclass="underline" their responsibility was exclusively to the Chief of Police. By this measure, the Corps of Gendarmes was set apart from the regular administrative apparatus and made law unto itself. The Department of Police and the Corps of Gendarmes continued to concern themselves exclusively with political offences; when their members chanced upon evidence of an ordinary crime, they turned it over to the regular police. Once a year, the Chief of Gendarmes submitted to the emperor a report on campaigns his organization had waged against subversives which read somewhat like a summary of military operations.
To cover up its arbitrary activities with the mantle of legality, the Ministry of the Interior attached to the Police Department a special 'Juridical Section' (Sudebnyi otdel). This bureau handled the legal aspects of the cases which came within the purview of the Ministry of the Interior - that is, offences charged under the political clauses of the Criminal Code and withheld from regular courts, as well as those committed in violation of the numerous Extraordinary and Temporary laws issued during these years. In 1898, when political life in Russia showed once again signs of stirring after many years of quiescence, and there were fears that terrorism might be revived, the 'Secret' Division of the Police Department detached a 'Special Section' (Osoboe otdelenie), a top-secret organization to serve as the nerve centre of the campaign against subversives. This Section kept close track of revolutionaries in Russia and abroad, and engineered elaborate provocations designed to flush them out. Its offices, located in St Petersburg on the fourth floor on Fontanka 16, were so isolated that none but its own employees had access to them. On 14 August 1881, the government regularized the status of 'Protective Sections' (Okhrannye otdeleniia, or, for short, Okhranki), first established in the 1870s. These too fought revolutionaries, and they did so at a rather high professional level. Formally a branch of the Special Section, they seem to have operated independently of it. The Police Department had several foreign branches to shadow
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Russian imigrh, the principal of which was located in the Russian Embassy in Paris. In their work, these foreign agencies were often assisted by local police authorities, acting either out of political sympathy or greed.
The elaborate and rather flexible political police system established in Russia in the early 1880s was unique in at least two respects. Before the First World War no other country in the world had two kinds of police, one to protect the state and another to protect its citizens. Only a country with a deeply rooted patrimonial mentality could have devised such a dualism. Secondly, unlike other countries, where the police served as an arm of the law and was required to turn over all arrested persons to the judiciary, in imperial Russia and there alone police organs were exempt from this obligation. Where political offences were involved, after 1881 the Corps of Gendarmes was not subject to judiciary supervision; such controls as it had were strictly of a bureaucratic, in-house kind. Its members had the right to search, imprison and exile citizens on their own authority, without consulting the Public Prosecutor. In the 1880s, the whole broad range of crimes defined as political had become a matter largely disposed of administratively by security organs. These two features make the police institutions of late imperial Russia the forerunner, and, through the intermediacy of corresponding communist institutions, the prototype of all political police organs of the twentieth century. The government of Alexander 11 did not confine its response to terror to repression. In its administration served several high functionaries perceptive enough to realize that unless accompanied by some constructive measures repression would be futile and possibly even harmful. At various times in Alexander's reign, serious thought was given to projects of political reform submitted either by government officials or influential public figures which in varying degrees and by different means sought to involve in the making of policy what were then known as 'trustworthy' elements of society. Some urged that the State Council be enlarged by the addition of elected representatives; others proposed to convoke consultative bodies resembling the Muscovite Land Assemblies; others yet called for reforms of local administration which would expand the competence of zemstva and provide additional outlets for public service to the landowning gentry. The hope was that by means such as these it would be possible to isolate the tiny band of terrorists, and gain sympathy for the government's predicament among educated society where so far it tended to encounter indifference spiked with malice. Among officials favouring such measures were P. A. Valuev, the Minister of the Interior, D. A. Miliutin, the Minister ofWar, and Loris-Melikov, an army general who in the last year of the reign of Alexander 11 was given virtually dictatorial powers. The Emperor himself was not unattracted to these proposals but he was slow to act on them because he faced the solid opposition of the rank and file of the bureaucracy as well as that of his son and heir apparent, the future Alexander in. The radicals unwittingly assisted this conservative party; every time they made an attempt on the life of the tsar or assassinated some high official, opponents of political reform could press for yet more stringent police measures and further postponement of basic reforms. The terrorists could not have been more effective in scuttling political reform had they been on the police payroll.
In resisting political reform the bureaucracy was fighting for its very life. From its vantage point, zemstva were bad enough, disturbing as they did the smooth flow of administrative directives from St Petersburg to the most remote province. Had representatives of society been invited to participate in legislation, even if only in a consultative capacity, the bureaucracy would have found itself for the first time subject to some form of public control; this certainly would have cramped its style and could have ended up by undermining its power. Even the assurance that only the most 'trustworthy' elements were to have been involved did not calm its apprehensions. Russian monarchists of that time, while anti-constitutionally disposed, by no means favoured the bureaucracy. Most of them were influenced by Slavophile ideals and regarded the bureaucracy as an alien body which had improperly insinuated itself between the tsar and his people.