312
for revolutionary activity, continued until her death to draw the government pension due to her as a civil servant's widow. The existence of private capital and private enterprise nullified the many police measures intended to cut off 'untrustworthy' elements from their means of livelihood. Political unreliables could almost always find employment with some private firm whose management was either unsympathetic to the government or politically neutral. Some of Russia's most radical journalists were subsidized by wealthy eccentrics. Zemstva openly engaged radical intellectuals as statisticians or teachers. The Union of Liberation, a clandestine society which' played a critical role in sparking off the 1905 Revolution, was likewise supported from private resources. Private property created all over the empire enclaves which the police was powerless to trespass in so far as the existing laws, cavalier as they were with personal rights, strictly protected the rights of property. In the end, Zubatov's attempt at 'police socialism' could never have succeeded in imperial Russia because sooner or later it had to run afoul of private business interests.
Another loophole was foreign travel. Granted to dvoriane in 1785 it was gradually extended to the other estates. It survived even during the darkest periods of repression. Nicholas I tried to limit it by threatening to deprive dvoriane, who between the ages often and eighteen studied abroad, of the right to enter state service. In 1834 he required dvoriane to confine their foreign residence to five years, and in 1851 he reduced it further to two years. In the Criminal Code there were provisions requiring Russian citizens to return home from abroad when so ordered by the government. But none of these measures made much difference.Russians travelled in western Europe frequently and stayed there for long periods of time; in 1900, for instance, 200,000 Russian citizens spent abroad an average of 80 days. In Wilhelmian Germany, they constituted the largest contingent of foreign students. To obtain a passport valid for travel abroad one merely had to send an application with a small fee to the local governor. Passports were readily granted even to individuals with known subversive records, evidently on the assumption that they would cause less trouble abroad than at home. It is not in the least remarkable that the revolutionary party which in October 1917 took control of Russia had had its leader and operational headquarters for many years in western Europe.
Thirdly, there were powerful factors of a cultural nature inhibiting the full use of the existing machinery of repression. The elite ruling imperial Russia was brought up in the western spirit, and it dreaded disgrace. It hesitated to act too harshly for fear of being ridiculed by the civilized world. It was embarrassed to appear even in its own eyes as behaving in an 'Asiatic' manner. The imperial elite certainly was psychologically
TOWARDS THE POLICE STATE
incapable of applying violence regardless of its consequences. There exists a touchingly prim note from Nicholas 11, a kind of epitaph of his reign, which he sent late in 1916 to relatives who had interceded on behalf of a Grand Duke implicated in the assassination of Rasputin: 'No one has the right to engage in murder.'33 Such an ethic simply did not go with police rule.
The result of the conflict between the old patrimonial psychology and modern western influences, was to yield a police force that was ubiquitous, meddlesome, and often brutal, but on the whole inefficient. The powers given to the political police were entirely out of proportion to the results achieved. We have seen some statistics bearing on political offences: the small number of people under surveillance or in exile, and the insignificant proportion of books intercepted by censorship. Between 1866 and 1895, there were only forty-four persons executed for political crimes, all of them perpetrators of assassination or assassination attempts. During the reign of Alexander ill - a period of severe repression - a total of four thousand persons were detained and interrogated in connection with political offences. These are very insignificant figures when one considers Russia's size and the massiveness of the machinery set up to deal with subversion.
The principal if unintended accomplishment of the proto-police regime was to radicalize Russian society. Its definition of political crimes was so comprehensive that the far-flung nets of security precautions caught and united people who had next to nothing in common with one another. From the legal point of view, hardly any distinction was drawn between conservative, nationalist, liberal, democratic, socialist and anarchist forms of discontent. A monarchist landlord outraged by the incompetence or corruption of the bureaucracy in his district became in the eyes of the law and the gendarmerie an ally of the anarchist assembling bombs to blow up the imperial palace. With its proscriptions, the government actually pushed its citizens into opposition ranks, where they became receptive to extremist appeals. For example, the laws in force in the 1880s forbade university students to form corporate organizations of any kind. Given the loneliness, poverty and natural social inclinations of young men it was inevitable that they would seek each other out and, in contravention of the law, form associations; these by their very existence acquired clandestine status and as such were easily infiltrated and taken over by radicals. It was the same with labour legislation. Stringent prohibitions against the formation of worker associations transformed even the most harmless labour activities into anti-state crimes. Workers whose sole interest might have lain in self-education or economic betterment were driven into the arms of radical students whom they actually mistrusted and disliked. Thus it
3H
was the government itself which helped accomplish the seemingly impossible, namely an alliance of all shades of public opinion, from the Slavophile right to the socialist-revolutionary left, which under the name 'Liberational Movement' (Osvoboditel'noe Dvizhenie) in 1902-5 at long last wrung a constitution out of the government.
That the existing legislation, far from stamping out revolution actually contributed to it, did not escape perceptive contemporaries. Among those who foresaw the disastrous consequences of such policies was Lopukhin, the ex-Director of the Police Department, who has been cited before. In 1907 he wrote prophetically:
Given its lack of elementary scientific notions of law, given its acquaintance with public life only as it manifests itself within the walls of military academies and regimental barracks, the whole political outlook of the ranks of the Corps of Gendarmes boils itself down to the following propositions: that there are the people and there is state authority, that the latter is under constant threat from the former, for which reason it is subject to protective measures, and that to execute these measures any means may be used with impunity. When an outlook such as this happens to coincide with a poorly developed spirit of service responsibility and the lack of sufficient intelligence to make sense of complex public occurrences, then observations based on this outlook confine themselves to the external manifestations of these occurrences and fail to assimilate their inner meaning. Hence, every public occurrence assumes the character of a threat to state authority. As a result, the protection of the state as carried out by the Corps of Gendarmes turns into a war against all of society, and, in the final analysis, leads to a destruction also of state authority, whose inviolability can be assured only by a union with society. By widening the gulf between state authority and the people, it engenders a revolution. This is why the activity of the political police is inimical not only to the people; it is inimical to the state as well.34