Political Police and Revolution: The Impact of the 1905 Revolution on the Tsarist Secret Police

Abstract

Late Imperial Russia is often portrayed as an evolving modern police state whose political police system, reformed in 1880 by Count M.T. Loris-Melikov, spread its tentacles throughout Russian life - urban and rural, legal and illegal - eventually to take under its purview all things it perceived as having in any way presented a threat to the tranquillity and stability of the monarchy. This image of the Russian political police system spread among Russian and non-Russian contemporaries alike, abetted by rhetoric, from the floor of the Third Duma and, a few years earlier, from the chamber of the United States House of Representatives.' Russian life offered considerable evidence to support this imagery. During the reigns of Alexander III and Nicholas II (as well as earlier), the people of Russia endured a political system unconstrained by zakonnost' (legality); a society corrupted and made insecure by proizvol (arbitrariness) in which personal inviolability, even after the promulgation of the Fundamental Laws of 1906, was largely unknown. Tsardom's infamous exile system became the punishment for thousands of young Russians who were increasingly sentenced especially after 1881 - not by the due process of law, but by bureaucratic decision known as administrative authority, in effect by the order of the Imperial Command, that is by the tsar himself.2 No wonder that the various institutions, collectively and mistakenly known as the Okhrana, boasted their reputation as the most feared and despised political police of the day.3 A closer, more systematic analysis of the evolution of the tsarist political police system appears to confirm what the travails of contemporary Russian life suggest. As the years of the early twentieth century passed, Russia acquired most of the attributes of a modern police state. The centralization of all police services had been more or