parts, the decree fully concentrated the struggle against subversion in the hands of the Ministry of the Interior. Two kinds of special situations were provided for: 'Reinforced Safeguard' (Usiknnaia Okh-rana) and 'Extraordinary Safeguard' (Chrezvychainaia Okhrana), corresponding to what in western practice was known as Minor and Major States of Siege. The power to impose Reinforced Safeguard in any part of the empire was entrusted to the Minister of the Interior and Governors General acting with his concurrence. Extraordinary Safeguard required the approval of the tsar and cabinet. The conditions under which either state could be imposed were not clearly specified.
Under 'Reinforced Safeguard', the milder of the two states, Governors General, ordinary governors, and governors of cities could do any or all of the following: imprison any resident up to a period of three months and fine him up to 400 rubles; forbid all social, public, and private gatherings; close down all commercial and industrial enterprises either for a specified period or for the duration of the emergency; deny individuals the right to reside in their area; and hand over troublemakers to military justice. They were furthermore empowered to declare any person employed by the zemstva, city governments or courts as 'untrustworthy' {neblagonadezhnyi) and to order his instantaneous dismissal. Finally, organs of the local police and gendarmerie were authorized to detain for up to two weeks all persons 'inspiring substantial suspicion' from the point of view of state security. When it deemed it necessary to have recourse to Extraordinary Safeguard, the government appointed a Commander-in-Chief who, in addition to all the powers enumerated above, enjoyed the right to dismiss from their posts elected zemstvo deputies (as distinct from hired employees) or even to shut down the zemstva entirely, as well as to fire any civil servants below the highest three ranks. The latter provision was not casually inserted. Ignatev, the Minister of the Interior when this decree came out, considered bureaucrats and their children to harbour some of the most subversive elements in the country, and suggested periodic 'purges' of unreliable elements from the civil service. Under Extraordinary Safeguard, the Commander in Chief could also suspend periodical publications and close for up to one month institutions of higher learning. He could jail suspects for up to three months and impose fines of up to 3,000 rubles. The same edict also substantially increased the powers of the gendarmes in areas under either Reinforced or Extraordinary Safeguard.
The significance of this legislation can perhaps be best summarized in the words of a man who, as head of the Department of the Police from 1902 to 1905, had a great deal to do with its enforcement, namely A. A. Lopukhin. After his retirement he published a remarkable pamphlet in
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which he stated that the decree of 14 August 1881 caused the fate of the 'entire population of Russia to become dependent on the personal opinions of the functionaries of the political police'. Henceforth, in matters affecting state security there no longer were any objective criteria of guilt: guilt was determined by the subjective impression of police officials.21 Ostensibly 'temporary', with a validity of three years, this law was regularly renewed every time it was about to expire until the very end of the imperial regime. Immediately upon the promulgation of the Decree of 14 August, ten provinces, including the two capital cities of St Petersburg and Moscow were placed under Reinforced Safeguard. The number was increased after 1900, and during the Revolution of 1905 some localities were placed under Extraordinary Safeguard. After the suppression of the revolution, under the prime ministership of P. Stolypin, in one form or another the provisions of this Decree were extended to all parts of the empire with the result that the laws pertaining to civil rights contained in the October Manifesto and in subsequent Duma legislation were effectively nullified.22
After 14 August 1881 Russia ceased to be an autocratic monarchy in any but the formal sense. As defined by Struve in 1903, the real difference between Russia of that time and the rest of the civilized world lay 'in the omnipotence of the political police' which had become the essence of the Russian monarchy; the instant this support were to be withdrawn, he predicted, it would collapse of its own weight no matter who controlled this autocratic power.23 Lopukhin agreed: the police, he wrote, 'constitutes the entire might of a regime whose existence has come to and end'; adding prophetically: 'It is to the police that the regime will turn to first in the event it tries to resuscitate itself." 'The paradox was that the steady encroachment on the rights of individual subjects carried out in the name of state security did not enhance the power of the crown; it was not the crown that benefited but the bureaucracy and police to whom ever greater latitude had to be given to cope with the revolutionary movement. And the absurdity of the situation lay in the fact that the challenge was entirely out of proportion to the measures taken to deal with it. In February 1880, at the height of terror, when Loris-Melikov was given dictatorial powers, the police knew of fewer than 1,000 active cases of anti-state crimes - this in an empire with nearly 100 million inhabitants!26
The extent of police interference in everyday life of late imperial Russia is difficult to convey. One of the most powerful weapons in the hands of the police was its authority to issue certificates of'trustworthiness' [blagonadezhnost') which every citizen was required to have before being allowed to enroll at the university or to assume a 'responsible' post. To have been refused such a certificate, condemned a Russian to the
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status of a second-rate citizen, and sometimes virtually forced him to join the revolutionaries. Furthermore, a vast range of activities was impossible without prior permission of the police. As listed in 1888-9 by a knowledgeable American observer, George Kennan (the great uncle of his namesake, die later Ambassador to Moscow), a Russian citizen of the late 1880s was subject to the following police restrictions:
If you are a Russian, and wish to establish a newspaper, you must ask the permission of the Minister of the Interior. If you wish to open a Sunday-school, or any other sort of school, whether in a neglected slum of St Petersburg or in a native village in Kamchatka, you must ask the permission of the Minister of Public Instruction. If you wish to give a concert or to get up tableaux for the benefit of an orphan asylum, you must ask permission of the nearest representative of the Minister of the Interior, then submit your programme of exercises to a censor for approval or revision, and finally hand over the proceeds of the entertainment to the police, to be embezzled or given to the orphan asylum, as it may happen. If you wish to sell newspapers on the street, you must get permission, be registered in the books of the police, and wear a numbered brass plate as big as a saucer around your neck. If you wish to open a drug-store, a printing-office, a photograph-gallery, or a book-store, you must get permission. If you are photographer and desire to change the location of your place of business, you must get permission. If you are a student and go to a public library to consult Lyell's Principles of Geology or Spencer's Social Statics, you will find that you cannot even look at such dangerous and incendiary volumes without special permission. If you are a physician, you must get permission before you can practice, and then, if you do not wish to respond to calls in the night, you must have permission to refuse to go; furthermore, if you wish to prescribe what are known in Russia as 'powerfully acting' medicines, you must have special permission, or the druggists will not dare to fill your prescriptions. If you are a peasant and wish to build a bath-house on your premises, you must get permission. If you wish to thresh out your grain in the evening by candle-light, you must get permission or bribe the police. If you wish to go more than fifteen miles away from your home, you must get permission. If you are a foreign traveler, you must get permission to come into the Empire, permission to go out of it, permission to stay in it longer than six months, and must notify the police every time you change your boarding-place. In short, you cannot live, move, or have your being in the Russian Empire without permission. The police, with the Minister of the Interior at their head, control, by means of passports, the movements of all the inhabitants of the Empire; they keep thousands of suspects constantly under surveillance; they ascertain and certify to the courts the liabilities of bankrupts; they conduct pawnbrokers' sales of unredeemed pledges; they give certificates of identity to pensioners and all other persons who need them; they superintend repairs of roads and bridges; they exercise supervision over all theatrical performances, concerts, tableaux, theater programmes, posters, and street advertisements; they collect statistics, enforce sanitary regulations, make searches and seizures in private houses, read the correspondence of suspects, take charge of the bodies of persons found dead, 'admonish' church members who neglect too long to partake of the Holy Communion, and enforce obedience to thousands of multifarious orders and regulations intended to promote the welfare of the people or to insure the safety of the state. The legislation relating to the police fills more than five thousand sections in the Svod Zakonov, or collection of Russian laws, and it is hardly an exaggeration to say that in the peasant villages, away from the centers of education and enlightenment, the police are the omnipresent and omnipotent regulators of all human conduct -a sort of incompetent bureaucratic substitute for divine Providence.29