Autocracy under siege: security police and opposition in Russia, 1866-1905

Abstract

Jonathan W. Daly. Autocracy under Siege: Security Police and Opposition in 1866-1905. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1998. xi, 260 pp. Notes. Selected Bibliography. Index. $38.00, cloth. In this well written and judiciously argued volume, Jonathan Daly, Associate Professor of History at the University of Illinois at Chicago, opens a fascinating window on the inner workings of the security police administration in tsarist Russia. He argues that the central government developed a security police system only in response to terrorist attacks against government officials that began in the late 1870s. government confronted such attacks by granting itself emergency powers to close meetings, arrest suspected terrorists, try them in special judicial proceedings under the direct control of the government, and send suspected oppositionists to internal exile in Siberia. government also created a specialized security police force that ran a spy ring and conducted direct surveillance over revolutionary groups. Yet by 1904 a variety of factors had weakened the government's ability to compete with an increasingly complex array of political foes and left it vulnerable to the Revolution of 1905. These factors included competition within the security police apparatus, competition between regular police and security police officials, popular reaction against repressive police procedures, staunch opposition from a variety of opponents, and the October 1903 dismissal of the linchpin of this system, Sergei Zubatov. Daly supports this thesis with rich detail drawn from an extensive range of archival and published sources. He claims his work is only the second book published on security policing since the Soviet government began in 1989 to declassify 6,900 of the most politically sensitive archival units related to the use of secret informants (p. ix). Daly makes extensive use of security police files in the State Archive of the Russian Federation (GARF) and published materials, which, when combined with documents in the Central State Historical Archive of the city of Moscow and files from the Paris Security Bureau Collection, allow him to draw a fairly complete description of how Russia's security police system functioned. chronological and thematic organization of Autocracy under Siege makes the volume accessible even to undergraduate students who are new to the subject. Chapter One, The Origins of a Modern Security Police in Russia, assesses the Third Section's response to opposition movements in the 1870s, the creation of the Department of State Police and a parallel Moscow security bureau in 1880, and the security law of 1881. In Chapter Two, The Security Police System, Daly describes the structure of the gendarmes, the St. Petersburg and Moscow security bureaus, and the interaction of these units with regular police. …