In the theory, of course, the crown might have reverted to the Muscovite system, expropriating all private property, reharnessing the classes in service or tiaglo, hermetically sealing off Russia from the rest of the world, and declaring itself the Third Rome. Such a transformation would have enabled Russia to close the loopholes which made mockery of its police system. But to have done so required a veritable social and cultural revolution. Given their upbringing, the leaders of imperial Russia were not the men to carry out such an upheaval. This required entirely new people, with a different psyche and different values. The system of repression just sketched is usually labelled in the historical literature as 'reactionary'. However, techniques are neutral. Methods of suppressing dissidence can be applied by regimes of a 'left' orientation as readily as by those considered 'right'. Once tried and proven successful,
TOWARDS THE POLICE STATE
they are certain to be used by any government, which - on whatever grounds - regards itself as entitled to a monopoly in politics.
Just as the tactics of massive breakthrough by mechanized armour, inaugurated but not exploited in the First World War by the British at Gambrai were perfected by their enemies, the Germans, in the Second World War, so the techniques of police rule, introduced piecemeal by the Russian imperial regime, were first utilized to their fullest potential by their one-time victims, the revolutionaries. The people who came to power in Russia in October 1917 had grown up under the regime of 'Extraordinary' and 'Temporary' Laws: this was the only Russian constitution that they had ever known. All of them had been shadowed, searched, arrested, kept in jail, and sentenced to exile by the political police of the imperial government. They had battled with the censorship. They had had to contend with agents provocateurs planted in their midst. They knew the system intimately, from the inside, which meant that they also knew its shortcomings and loopholes. Their vision of a proper government was a mirror image of the imperial regime's to the extent that what the latter called 'subversion' (kramola) they labelled 'counter-revolution'. Long before they came to power, Social Democrats like Plekhanov and Lenin made no secret of the fact that they thought it proper to kill their ideological opponents.36
So it was not in the least surprising that almost the instant they took power, the Bolsheviks began to put together the pieces of the imperial proto-police apparatus which the short-lived and democratic Provisional Government had dismantled. A political police, Cheka, was formally founded in December 1917, but its functions had been informally exercised from the day of the coup by the Military-Revolutionary Committee. The Cheka enjoyed much vaster powers than the old Department of Police, Okhrana, or Corps of Gendarmes, being given complete licence to deal with whomever it chose to define as 'counterrevolutionaries'. In September 1918, with the proclamation of Red Terror, it executed in one day over five hundred 'enemies of the state', some of them hostages, others persons often guilty of nothing more criminal than having been born in the wrong social class. Within seven months of the Bolshevik seizure of power, the opposition press was silenced and orders were issued for the apprehension of leading political opponents. There was already then talk of concentration camps for 'subversives' and soon forced labour was reintroduced. The Criminal Code of 1927, as has been noted (p. 294) contained provisions against anti-state crimes which neither in the breadth of definition nor in the severity of punishments differed substantially from those instituted by the imperial regime. All this was done shortly after power had been seized. Then with each
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passing year the mechanism of repression was perfected until under Stalin's dictatorship it attained a level of wanton destructiveness never before experienced in human history.
Lenin and his fellow-revolutionaries who so quickly on taking power began the reconstruction of the police state certainly regarded these moves as emergency measures, exactly as in its day did the imperial government. The Cheka and the 'Revolutionary Tribunals', the mass executions, forced labour camps, exile, censorship and all the other repressive measures which they instituted were conceived by them as necessary to uproot what was still left of the old regime. This done, they were to be dissolved. But the same fate befell communist 'temporary' repressive measures as their predecessors: regularly renewed, the indiscriminate application of their violence came to overshadow the order they were meant to protect. Had they read more history and fewer polemical tracts the Bolshevik leaders might have been able to foresee this outcome. For the very idea that politics can be isolated from the vicissitudes of life and monopolized by one group or one ideology is under conditions of modern life unenforceable. Any government that persists in this notion must give ever wider berth to its police apparatus and eventually fall victim to it.
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