More university strikes followed at Kharkov, Moscow, and Warsaw. Hundreds of students were expelled by administrative procedures. In 1901, hoping to calm the situation, the government appointed Vannovskii, then seventy-eight years of age, to take Bogolepov’s place. Vannovskii introduced modifications in the university rules, authorizing student gatherings and relaxing the ancient language requirements. The concessions failed to appease the students; indeed, student organizations rejected them on the grounds that they indicated weakness and should be exploited for political ends.12 Having failed to calm the universities, Vannovskii was dismissed.
Henceforth, Russian institutions of higher learning became the fulcrum of political opposition. Viacheslav Plehve, the arch-conservative director of the Police Department, was of the opinion that “almost all the regicides and a very large number of those involved in political crimes” were students.13 According to Prince E. N. Trubetskoi, a liberal academic, the universities now became thoroughly politicized: students increasingly lost interest in academic rights and freedoms, caring only for politics, which made normal academic life impossible. Writing in 1906, he described the university strikes of 1899 as the beginning of the “general crisis of the state.”14
The unrest at institutions of higher learning occurred against a background of mounting oppositional sentiment in zemstva, organs of local self-government created in 1864. In 1890, during the era of “counterreforms,” the rights of zemstva were restricted, which caused as much unhappiness among its deputies as the 1884 University Statutes did among students. In the late 1890s, zemtsy began to hold semi-legal national conclaves with political overtones.15
The government at this point had two alternatives: it could seek to placate the opposition, so far confined mainly to the educated elements, with concessions, or it could resort to still harsher repressive measures. Concessions would have certainly been the wiser choice, because the opposition was a loose alliance of diverse elements from which it should have been possible, at a relatively small cost, to satisfy the more moderate elements and detach them from the revolutionaries. Repression, on the other hand, drove these elements into each other’s arms and radicalized the moderates. The Tsar, Nicholas II, was committed to absolutism in part because he believed himself duty-bound by his coronation oath to uphold this system, and in part because he felt convinced that the intellectuals were incapable of administering the Empire. Not entirely averse to some concessions if they would restore order, he lacked patience: whenever concessions did not immediately produce the desired results, he abandoned them and had recourse to police measures.
When in April 1902 a radical student killed the Minister of the Interior, D. S. Sipiagin, it was decided to give the police virtually unlimited powers. The appointment of Viacheslav Plehve as Sipiagin’s successor signaled the beginning of a policy of unflinching confrontation with “society,” a declaration of war against all who challenged the principle of autocracy. During Plehve’s two-year tenure in office, Russia came close to becoming a police state in the modern, “totalitarian” sense of the word.
To contemporaries, Plehve was a man of mystery: even his date and place of birth were unknown. His past has come to light only recently as a result of archival researches.16 Of German origin, he had been raised in Warsaw. He attended law school, following which he served for a time as procurator. His bureaucratic career began in earnest in 1881 with the appointment to the post of director of the newly formed Department of Police, established to fight sedition. He is said to have feigned liberalism to qualify for this post under the relatively enlightened ministry then in office.17 Henceforth, he lived and worked in the shadow world of political counterintelligence. Introducing the technique of infiltration and provocation, he achieved brilliant successes in penetrating and destroying revolutionary organizations. He had excellent understanding of the issues touching on state security, an indomitable capacity for work, and skill in adjusting to the shifting winds of Court politics. The personification of bureaucratic conservatism, he was unwilling to grant the population a voice in affairs of state. Such changes as were required—and he did not oppose them in principle—had to come from above, from the Crown: in the words of his biographer, he was “not so much opposed to change as to loss of control.”18 While intolerant of public initiatives, he was prepared to have the government take direct charge of everything that required reforms in the status quo. The police in his view had not merely a negative function—that is, preventing sedition (kramola)—but also the positive one of actively directing the forces that life brought to the surface and that left to themselves could undermine the government’s political monopoly. In this extraordinary extension of police functions into the realm of positive management of society lay the seed of modern totalitarianism. Because Plehve refused to distinguish between the moderate (loyal) and radical opposition, he inadvertently forged a united front which, under the name Liberational Movement (OsvoboditeVnoe dvizhenie) would in 1904–5 compel the government to give up its autocratic prerogatives.
3. Viacheslav Plehve.
On assuming office, Plehve tried to win over the more conservative wing of the zemstvo movement. But he persisted in treating zemstvo deputies as government functionaries and any sign of independence on their part as insubordination. His effort to make the zemstva a branch of the Ministry of the Interior not only lost him the sympathy of the zemstvo conservatives but radicalized the zemstvo constitutionalists, with the result that by 1903 he had to give up his one effort at conciliation.
Plehve’s standing with society suffered a further blow with the outbreak of a vicious anti-Jewish pogrom on Easter Sunday (April 4) of 1903 in the Bessarabian town of Kishinev. Some fifty Jews were killed, many more injured, and a great deal of Jewish property looted or destroyed. Plehve made no secret of his dislike of Jews, which he justified by blaming them for the revolutionary ferment (he claimed that fully 40 percent of the revolutionaries were Jews). Although no evidence has ever come to light that he had instigated the Kishinev pogrom, his well-known anti-Jewish sentiments, as well as his tolerance of anti-Semitic publications, encouraged the authorities in Bessarabia to believe that he would not object to a pogrom. Hence they did nothing to prevent one and nothing to stop it after it had broken out. This inactivity as well as the prompt release of the Christian hooligans strengthened the widely held conviction that he was responsible. Plehve further alienated public opinion with his Russificatory policies in Finland and Armenia.
The epitome of Plehve’s regime was a unique experiment in police-operated trade unions, known as “Zubatovshchina,” after S. V. Zubatov, the chief of the Moscow political police (Okhrana). It was a bold attempt to remove Russian workers from the influence of revolutionaries by satisfying their economic demands. Russian workers had been stirring since the 1880s. The nascent labor movement was apolitical, confining its demands to improvements in working conditions, wages, and other typically trade-unionist issues. But because in Russia of that time any organized labor activity was illegal, the most innocuous actions (such as the formation of mutual aid or educational circles) automatically acquired a political and, therefore, seditious connotation. This fact was exploited by radical intellectuals who developed in the 1890s the “agitational” technique which called for inciting workers to economic strikes in the expectation that the inevitable police repression would drive them into politics.19