State principle is the leading principle of writing and explaining Russian history in nineteenth-century and, with some modifications, twentieth-century national historiography.
Professor Johann Philipp Georg Ewers (1781-1830) was the first to apply to the study of ancient Russian law the Hegelian theory of peoples’ evolution from family or kin phase to that of a state. This idea was adopted and further elaborated by the founders of the so-called state (or juridical) school in Russian historiography, Konstantin Kavelin (1818-1885) and Sergei Soloviev (1820-1879). According to Soloviev, the transition from kin relations as the dominant system to the strong state organization in Russia took about four hundred years, from the end of the twelfth century till the reign of Ivan IV. Only after that, having endured severe experience in the Time of Troubles, the young Russian state found its place among other European powers. Thus the whole course of Russian history was presented as a progressive and logically necessary movement toward the modern centralized and autocratic state.
Though Soviet scholars, unlike Soloviev, considered Kievan Rus to be a feudal state, and thus found state organization even in the ninth century, they remained loyal to the state principle in their own way. Thus, disunity of the Rus lands in the twelfth through fourteenth centuries was regarded as a negative phenomenon, and historians explicitly sympathized with the process of gathering Rus’
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The political police and other organs of state security have played a prominent role in Russian and Soviet history. For almost two hundred years they have served a variety of state interests, including among their functions the surveillance of the population; censorship; the quashing of political and intellectual dissent; foreign and domestic espionage; and the guarding of borders. At times they have shared duties or been subsumed within the Ministry (or Commissariat) of Internal Affairs, and at other times they have been self-standing organs, often operating in parallel with the regular police or militia.
Although the political police in the modern understanding of the term originated in Russia in the early nineteenth century, various forms of special security forces existed well before this. The first such organ to play a prominent role was Ivan IV’s (the Terrible) infamous oprichniki, who terrorized the Russian aristocracy in the late sixteenth century in order to root out Ivan’s real and imagined foes. In the mid-seventeenth century Tsar Alexei Mikhailovich (r. 1645-1676) made use of a “Secret Department” (tainy prikaz) to keep him informed of events in the capital and to confirm the accounts of his foreign embassies. Crimes of “word and deed,” that is, either speech or action deemed inimical to the tsar, were vigorously investigated.
Alexei’s successors continued to keep private security forces. Peter I (the Great) (r. 1682-1725) maintained the “Preobrazhensky Department” and later a “Secret Investigative Chancellery” staffed with
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close friends and trusted allies to maintain his personal power and to guard against insurrection. These institutions were preserved in various forms throughout the century, despite occasional gestures toward limiting their power; their agents became powerful instruments of the throne and were often feared and loathed among court circles. Despite reaffirming her ill-fated husband Peter III’s (r. 1761-1762) abolition of the Secret Chancellery, Catherine II (the Great, r. 1762-1796) made much use of an agency called the “Secret Expedition” to root out opposition. Its leader, Stepan Sheshkovsky, was particularly noted for his brutal methods of interrogation, especially in the latter years of Catherine’s reign, when the French Revolution prompted an intensification of repression.
These institutions (in general) had a narrower focus and scope than would the genuine political police that originated in the nineteenth century. This had its root not only in the ideals of the Enlightenment-era “well-ordered police state,” but also, ironically, in the French Revolution, which attempted to protect itself through institutions such as the Committee for Public Safety. Hence the organs of state security in Imperial Russia were concerned not only with the possibility of immediate rebellion within court circles, but with dissent in a more general sense.
The early reforming efforts of Alexander I (r. 1801-1825) included the aspiration to establish a more rational government system. Of course this did not appear all at once, but it did involve the creation of a ministry system, including the Ministry of Internal Affairs, which soon acquired competence over all policing matters. In the latter years of Alexander’s reign, several different groups functioned as secret police forces, including the Secret Chancellery within the Ministry of the Interior.
The true consolidation of a secret police force came early in the reign of Nicholas I (r. 1825-1855). Nicholas’s accession had been met with a revolt of military officers known to history as the Decembrist uprising, and Nicholas became adamant that such an occurrence not repeat itself. As part of his efforts to strengthen his own autocratic powers vis-?-vis the ministerial system erected by his brother Alexander, he had formed a set of agencies under his own personal dominion, known collectively as His Majesty’s Own Chancery. The infamous “Third Section” of His Majesty’s Own Chancery formed the first modern secret police force in Russia. It was originally headed by General Alexander Benckendorff and included much of the
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staff of Alexander’s Secret Chancery. The Third Section vastly expanded the range of surveillance functions and incorporated other government officials in its scope, using army gendarme units to spy on the populace; the censors within the Ministry of Education to detect subversive writings; and the postal service to begin the practice of perlustration, or examining the contents of letters. Benckendorff also served as the head of the Corps of Gendarmes, an army unit that came to serve as the Third Section’s information-gathering apparatus.
The power of Nicholas’s secret police grew during a time when political opposition in Russia was relatively muted. It concentrated therefore on rooting out intellectual dissidents. During the European Revolutions of 1848, the Gendarmes rounded up members of the so-called Petrashevsky circle, including the young Fyodor Dostoyevsky. It was under Alexander II (r. 1855-1881), the Tsar-Liberator who at last emancipated the serfs, that revolutionary opposition began truly to appear. In the early 1860s, student riots broke out at St. Petersburg University, and in 1866 a demented ex-student attempted to assassinate the tsar. From this time the Third Section under Count Peter Shuvalov was given immense powers to eradicate subversives. It soon became involved in a number of high-profile prosecutions, including the notorious Nechayev Affair. Despite the judicial reforms of 1864, Shuvalov continued to use extralegal means whenever security and expediency required it. Through the 1870s, however, public sympathy increasingly rested with the defendants in a series of celebrated trials prosecuting revolutionary terrorists and other radicals. This culminated in the scandalous acquittal in 1878 of the man who had shot and wounded the much- loathed St. Petersburg police chief General Trepov. Political crimes were soon transferred to military courts to better control the outcome. In 1880, in an effort to better consolidate control, Alexander II transferred the responsibilities of the Third Section to a newly created Department of State Police within the Ministry of Interior, then headed by the moderate Count Mkhail Loris-Melikov.
On March 1, 1881, Alexander II was assassinated by a conspiracy of the People’s Will terrorist organization led by Andrei Zhelyabov and Sofia Perovskaya. His son and successor, Alexander III (1881-1894), and his chief advisor Konstantin Pobednostsev demanded a firm accounting. The remnants of People’s Will and other terrorist groups of the late 1870s were ruthlessly sought out and expunged. Loris-Melikov was replaced by
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Nikolai Ignatiev, who soon promulgated a set of temporary measures providing for greater emergency policing powers. Establishing a system of quasi-martial law, these measures were renewed periodically until 1917, and they were used by the government when necessary to circumvent its own legal institutions.
Henceforth the minister of the Interior would have broad powers to quell real and potential disturbances and dissent to maintain public order. Within the Interior Ministry’s Police Department was formed a new section in charge of political crimes, called the Division for the Protection of Order and Public Security, better known as the Okhrana. During the 1880s, political proceedings were much less publicized than they had been, and the authorities began to expand the practice of administrative exile of political prisoners-that is, deportation with no trial at all.
The Okhrana expanded the business of state surveillance further than it had ever been before, using
