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Reform, war and revolution
networks of revolutionary literature, illegal printing presses and propaganda
rings. It permitted Zubatov to co-ordinate major operations across the empire
– from surveillance to mass arrests. The key to its success was its mobility: those
under surveillance were less likely to recognise a surveillant constantly on the
move than one permanently stationed in one place. The brigade achieved its
success with a staff of only thirty surveillants in 1894 and fifty in January 1901.
More important than surveillants were informants. Zubatov was a mas-
ter at recruiting and guiding them, winning their confidence and maximising
their usefulness. Sometimes he used chance meetings with industrial work-
ers or personnel of important public organisations as opportunities to recruit
them as agents. A certain number of informants simply proposed their ser-
vices. The majority of agents began to work for the police after arrest – and
under interrogation. Zubatov questioned political suspects as though leading
a radical discussion circle, showering them with attention, offering them food
and drink, and arguing passionately that the people never profit from revolu-
tionary violence, that only the emperor was capable of implementing needed
reforms in Russia. His enthusiasm and energy were extremely attractive to
revolutionaries lacking deep convictions and permitted him to turn some of
them away from the paths of political opposition.
Zubatov emphasised that case officers must win their agents’ trust, protect
them from discovery, assist them in adversity and increase their faith in the
Russian monarchy. He urged his officers, according to one of them, to treat
their informants as ‘a beloved woman with whom you have entered into illicit
relations. Look after her like the apple of your eye. One careless move and you
will dishonour her ...Takethis to heart: treat these people as I am advising,
and they will understand your needs, will trust you, and will work with you
honestly and selflessly.’
8
The number of informants was never great, and before Zubatov they were
few indeed. Nikolai Kletochnikov, a revolutionary infiltrator who had access
to the security police’s most sensitive files in 1879–80, found a record of only
115 permanent informants in the whole empire – at the height of terrorist
attacks against the emperorand his officials.
9
Later, part-time police informants
worked within nearly every major social group and profession, although even
the security bureau in St Petersburg never employed more than 94 informants.
The most important ones were students in the 1880s and 1890s and members
of the two principal revolutionary parties (the Socialist-Revolutionaries and
8 A. Spiridovich, Zapiski zhandarma (Moscow: Izd. ‘Proletarii’, 1930), p. 50.
9 See Orzhekhovskii, Samoderzhavie,p.122.
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Police and revolutionaries
Social Democrats) after the turn of the century. People became informants for
a variety of reasons. Some agreed to inform in order to take revenge upon their
erstwhile comrades (Zubatov claimed this of himself ), some sought adventure
or took a liking to their case officers,probablyall fearedpunishment and desired
material benefits. A few earnestly wished to serve their government in its
struggle against the onslaught of revolutionary sedition.
10
Wages ranged from
5–10 roubles to 100–200 roubles (or up to 1,000 for a few ‘stars’) monthly. (By
contrast, surveillants and skilled metalworkers earned 50 roubles per month.)
Valuable, long-time informants could hope to receive a solid annual pension
(from 1,000 to 3,000 roubles) or a one-time lump-sum subsidy (as much as 5,000
roubles).
Zubatov’s development of new police methods, especially the systematic
and extensive employment of informants, was undoubtedly the most signif-
icant advance in Russian political policing since the creation of the Third
Section. It also set him at odds with the majority of Russian security police-
men, the gendarmes. Such policemen, even when lacking precise information
about criminal activity, sometimes arrested dozens of people in order to dis-
cover a few political criminals: that is, not on the basis of evidence of political
wrongdoing, but in order to obtain evidence. Zubatov argued, by contrast,
that suspects should be arrested or exiled administratively only upon discovery
of strong evidence of their involvement in political crime, to avoid creating
innocent victims and alienating the population from the government. Zubatov
preferred to wait patiently for an underground group to come into posses-
sion of incriminating evidence (illegal literature, forged passports, explosives
or weapons) or for the arrival of a major revolutionary leader from abroad,
before arresting its members. The point was to let the group reveal its purposes
in order both to learn more about the broader movement of which it was a
part and to catch it in flagrante delicto.
If Zubatov’s methods were more effective and fruitful in the long run, they
were also more dangerous. By allowing the revolutionaries room to manoeu-
vre, the police risked letting them perpetrate crimes. Likewise, informants
were obliged to participate more fully in the work of the illegal organisations,
laying them open to charges of provocation. Given the difficulties and dangers
inherent in the new approach, it is hardly surprising that many gendarmes
continued to prefer the older, more heavy-handed methods. Yet Zubatov was
surely right that by the mid-1890s the security police had to ascend to a higher
10 The best place to start exploring the lives of informants is Leonid Men’shchikov, Okhrana
i revoliutsiia. K istorii tainykh politicheskikh organizatsii v Rossii, 3 vols. (Moscow: Izd.
politkatorzhan, 1925–8).
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level of professional sophistication. Whereas the opposition ‘movement’ had
comprised a few dozen members under Nicholas I and only a few thousand
under Alexanders II and III, it fell to Nicholas II’s lot to rule an empire plagued
by mass social discontent. The security system was no longer equipped to
punish or otherwise neutralise all such ‘suspicious’ people in Russia. Further-
more, as a former radical himself, Zubatov was convinced that much popular
discontent was justified.
The massive strikes of 1896–7 underscored these points. Moreover, the Social
Democrats were enjoying considerable success in spreading their revolution-
ary theories and agitation among the ranks of the industrial workers. In this
context, Zubatov conceived of an astonishing programme: to organise indus-
trial workers on behalf of the government and to strive to improve the material
conditions of their life in order to win them away from the revolutionary oppo-
sition. He argued that onlythe absolutist monarchy, an institution above classes
and estates, could advance the industrial workers’ interests. The revolutionar-
ies, he asserted, wished to use them only to further their own political goals.
The patronage of Moscow’s powerful governor-general, the emperor’s uncle,
Grand Duke Serge Aleksandrovich, permitted him to implement this bold
policy.
11
Apparently in response to a coalescing of revolutionary organisations in the
late 1890s, in January 1898 the Police Department created a Special Section for
co-ordinating security policing operations throughout the empire. The Spe-
cial Section’s staff of five assistants, seven clerks and three typists (1900)were
nearly all civilians until 1905, when a few gendarme officers took important
positions. The institution was cloaked in secrecy, its offices hidden, and its
chief and his assistants, a few of them erstwhile informants, claiming to be
professors, writers or merchants. While the actual fighting against the rev-
olutionary opposition was left to Zubatov in Moscow, the Special Section in
St Petersburg analysed, classified and interpreted data furnished by police insti-
tutions, informants and perlustration; surveyed the various opposition groups
and movements and prepared assessments of their strength and significance;
compiled, organised and indexed information on social disorders, students,
workers and the general mood of the Russian population; and co-ordinated
the search for political criminals.
The Social Democrats held their first congress in Minsk on 1–2 March 1898,
but the police immediately arrested every delegate – save three whom Zubatov
11 On Zubatov’s approach to workers, see Jeremiah Schneiderman, Sergei Zubatov and
Revolutionary Marxism: The Struggle for the Working Class in Tsarist Russia (Ithaca: Cornell
University Press, 1976).
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deliberately left at liberty, in the hope that they would lead him to their col-
leagues in revolution. Both police repression (Vladimir Lenin, Julius Martov
and Aleksandr Potresov were exiled to Siberia) and philosophical and pro-
grammatic differences among Social Democrats delayed the convocation of a
second party congress until 1903. In the meantime, there erupted in February
1899 student disorders that marked the beginning of Russia’s revolutionary
era. They radicalised the bar by expanding the number of radical law students,
stimulated the publication of the Social Democrat newspaper Iskra and pro-
moted the formation of the Socialist-Revolutionary party and of the Liberation
Movement by awakening Marxists, neo-Populists and left-wing liberals to the
immense power available to opponents of the imperial government if only
they roused the population against it. The government first overreacted to
the student unrest, then relented: it conscripted into the army and expelled
hundreds of students from the universities, only to readmit them in the fall.
12
The message was clear: the government was arbitrary and repressive, but not
overly to be feared by committed radicals.
The Socialist-Revolutionary party grew up around the newspaper Revoliu-
tsionnaia Rossiia, which began publication in late 1900 in Moscow and in early
1901 in Finland. The party evolved from two currents, the People’s Will’s
tradition of political terrorism and a peasant-centred programme of revolu-
tionary propaganda.
13
The party’s programme of terrorism received its motor
impulse from the assassination in February 1901 of the education minister,
Nikolai Bogolepov, whom critics of his handling of the student disorders called
‘Mr Absurd’ (Nelepov). That summer, Zubatov admitted that despite a whole
series of successful arrests the revolutionary movement was growing and con-
solidating itself. Russia’s revolutionaries viewed themselves as a kind of holy
brotherhood of men and women dedicated to bringing down the imperial gov-
ernment and to putting a more just order in its place. In their quest for right
they expected to fall prey to snares and to suffer pain and privations, including
arrest, imprisonment and exile. One counted devotion to the cause in terms
of jails visited and places of exile known. The Bolshevik Viktor Nogin’s tally,
for example, reached fifty.
14
By late 1901 and early 1902, industrial workers and university students joined
forces in major demonstrations. In St Petersburg, radical intellectuals also
12 On the student unrest see Samuel D. Kassow, Students, Professors, and the State in Tsarist
Russia (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1989).
13 See Manfred Hildermeier, The Russian Socialist-Revolutionary Party Before the First World
War, English edn (New York: St Martin Press, 2000).
14 ‘Nogin, Viktor Pavlovich’, in Politicheskie deiateli Rossii. 1917 (Moscow: Bol’shaia Rossi-
iskaia entsiklopediia, 1993), p. 237.
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took part. This seems to have been another important step along the road
towards the 1905 Revolution, when students, industrial labourers and liberal
and radical intellectuals banded together to launch a united attack on the
imperial government. To make matters worse, in spring 1902 massive peas-
ant disorders shook Poltava and Kharkov provinces. It was precisely at this
moment that Lenin argued that the revolutionary movement would triumph
only if a ‘few professionals, as highly trained and experienced as the imperial secu-
rity police, were allowed to organise it’.
15
It seems, however, that the greatest
threat to the government was less the revolutionary conspirators, whom the
Russian security police generally managed to control, but mass opposition
movements.
Neither the provincial gendarme stations, nor the security bureaus, nor
even Zubatov’s mobile brigade could cope with the growing and diversi-
fying opposition. Few provincial gendarmes were prepared to match wits
with anti-government activists, and the mobile brigade was now stretched
to the limit of its resources. Thus, in mid-1902 Zubatov persuaded the inte-
rior minister, Viacheslav Plehve (his predecessor, Dmitrii Sipiagin, was assas-
sinated in April 1902), to authorise the creation of a network of provincial
security bureaus staffed by dynamic gendarme officers and surveillants trans-
ferred from the mobile brigade. Zubatov was named Special Section chief in
August and twenty bureaus were created. The new institutions occupied an
ambiguous position within the imperial bureaucracy. In matters affecting ‘state
security’ they were independent and authoritative – being empowered, ‘in
extreme circumstances’, to launch searches or arrests outside their provinces
without contacting either local authorities or the Police Department – but in
all other affairs they were partially subordinated to the provincial gendarme
station chiefs. This was a prescription for disastrous intra-bureaucratic rela-
tions, and many gendarme chiefs were justifiably furious. Even so, the new
bureaus, especially in Kiev, Odessa, Kharkov and Ekaterinoslav, seemed to
deliver impressive results.
Yet within months Russia began its slide towards revolution. In July 1903
massive strikes swept the Black Sea littoral and the Caucasus: a foretaste of the
October 1905 general strike.
16
Zubatov urged moderation in dealing with the
unrest, the more so as his labour experiment was well entrenched in Odessa.
Yet on Plehve’s orders, the general strike in that city was brutally crushed
in mid-July. Zubatov rebelled. Plehve dismissed and banished him from the
15 V. I. Lenin, Chto delat’?,inPolnoe Sobranie Sochineniia, vol. 6,pp.126–7. Italics supplied.
16 See ‘K istorii vseobshchei stachki na iuge Rossii v 1903 g.’, KA 88 (1938): 76–122.
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Police and revolutionaries
major cities of Russia, depriving the security system of its most talented direc-
tor. A year later Plehve himself fell before an assassin’s bomb. By November
Mednikov lamented that the entire security system was crumbling before his
eyes.
17
The conciliatory attitude of Plehve’s successor, Petr Sviatopolk-Mirskii,
merely encouraged oppositional sentiment, which had been building despite
government repression, to burst forth into a fever of social militancy exac-
erbated by Russia’s sagging fortunes in its war with Japan. Bloody Sunday
(9 January 1905) ignited massive popular unrest and throughout the year the
opposition movements grew into a mighty phalanx of anti-government forces–
agrarian and urban, educated and illiterate, left-liberal and revolutionary. Offi-
cials were continuously threatened by terrorist attacks. From February 1905 to
May 1906, 1,075 of them were killed or wounded.
18
Since the security police,
by their very nature, were powerless to forestall spontaneous, disorganised
outbursts of mass popular discontent, the government would have been less
endangered had the regular police apparatus held firm. Yet it did not: under
Alexander Bulygin, the entire Interior Ministry was in complete disorganisa-
tion by late summer.
The crisis peaked in October 1905 with a general strike that immobilised
much of urban Russia and prompted the emperor to issue his October Man-
ifesto, diminishing the power of officialdom and reinforcing the rights of his
subjects.
19
Many police officials had no idea how to act or react: in early Novem-
ber the Police Department denied rumours that the security police would be
abolished. To make matters worse, terrible agrarian violence broke out in
nearly every province of European Russia from late October through Decem-
ber and an armed uprising erupted in Moscow in mid-December. The entire
imperial order might have collapsed had not the hardline Petr Nikolaevich
Durnovo been appointed interior minister in late October over the indignant
protests of nearly all the public figures in Russia. The new interior minister and
other proponents of law and order drew three conclusions from the anarchy
of late 1905. First, signs of weakness and concessions to the opposition tended
to undermine the government. Second, only decisive leadership and timely
repression had a prayer of holding the system together. Third, the peasantry
and petty urban dwellers could not be relied upon to oppose the radicals. In
a word, only a harshly authoritarian state could survive in Russia given the
17 Mednikov to Spiridovich, 7 November 1904, in ‘Pis’ma Mednikova Spiridovichu’, KA 17
(1926), 211.
18 A. M. Zaionchkovskii, ‘V gody reaktsii’, KA 8 (1925): 242.
19 The standard work is Abraham Ascher, The Revolution of 1905, 2 vols. (Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 1988–92).
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Reform, war and revolution
strength of the opposition and the complexity of the social and economic
problems facing the country. By January 1906, this view held sway within a
large portion of officialdom.
The confrontation between government and revolutionaries remained
bloody for another two years. The regular and especially military courts heard
thousands of state-crime cases beginning in 1906. Whereas 308 alleged political
criminals had passed before military judges in 1905, 4,698 did so in 1906.
20
‘Puni-
tive expeditions’ restored order along the Trans-Siberian railway, in Ukraine,
in the Caucasus and, most notoriously, in the Baltic region. In all perhaps
6,000 people were executed from 1905 to 1907, some 4,600 by court sentence
and perhaps 1,400 without trial.
21
Even so, the revolutionary terror did not
abate. As many as 1,126 government officials were also killed, and another
1,506 wounded, in 1906. These figures more than doubled the following year;
non-official casualties were just as gruesome.
22
Russia was embroiled in a quasi
civil war.
At the same time, state and opposition confronted one another uneasily in
the State Duma, the new parliament of the Russian Empire. On 26 April, the
less despised Petr Arkadievich Stolypin replaced Durnovo as interior minister
and was appointed premier on 8 July, the day before the Duma’s sudden disso-
lution. During the inter-parliamentary period that followed, which witnessed
massive agrarian unrest and mutinies in key naval bases, Stolypin intended to
implement a whole raft of reforms, but his notorious first major act (one week
after a terrorist attempt on his life which left twenty-seven people dead) was
to institute military field courts for trying persons alleged to have committed
violent attacks on state officials or institutions. The field courts, which were
obliged to pass judgement in no more than two days and to carry out the sen-
tence (usually death) within one day, operated until April 1907, and executed
as many as 1,000 alleged terrorists.
23
Stolypin is perhaps best known for this official campaign of counter-terror
and for his land reforms or ‘wager on the strong’ peasants, but his admin-
istration also reformed the security police system. From December 1906 to
20 N. N. Polianskii, Tsarskie voennye sudy v bor’be s revoliutsiei, 1905–1907 gg. (Moscow:
Izd. MGU, 1958), p. 33. See also W. C. Fuller, Civil–Military Conflict in Imperial Russia
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985).
21 Saul Usherovich, Smertnye kazni v tsarskoi Rossii: K istorii kaznei po politicheskim protsessam
s 1824 po 1917 god, 2nd edn, intro. M. N. Gernet (Kharkov Izd. politkatorzhan, 1933), pp.
493–4.
22 Anna Geifman, Thou Shalt Kill: Revolutionary Terrorism in Russia, 1894–1917 (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1993), p. 21.
23 N. I. Faleev, ‘Shest’ mesiatsev voenno-polevoi iustitsii’, Byloe 2 (February 1907): 43–81.
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January 1907, Stolypin’s prot
´
eg
´
e and director of the Police Department, Maksi-
milian Trusevich, created eight regional security bureaus, each comprising six
to twelve provinces and corresponding roughly to the spheres of activity of the
Socialist-Revolutionary party. Their directors were the security bureau chiefs
in St Petersburg, Moscow, Kharkov, Kiev, Odessa, Vilno, Riga, and the gen-
darme station chief in Samara. The directors were supposed to co-ordinate
and improve the operations and information-gathering of the several gen-
darme stations and security bureaus within their jurisdictions but also had
the right to order arrest and search operations. This angered gendarme sta-
tion chiefs who were nearly all of higher rank. To alleviate these tensions and
improve operations, Trusevich issued numerous directives and manuals on
security police methods and organised periodic summit meetings.
The acrimony between government and public was even more bitter in
the second Duma than in the first, and on 3 June 1907 the emperor again
peremptorily dissolved the assembly. Expecting massive popular disorders,
Stolypin ordered administrative and police authorities to preserve public order
at any cost.
Overall, however, a spirit of moderation prevailed among senior police offi-
cials. A series of directives rebuked lower administrative and police authorities
for taking indiscriminate recourse to administrative exile and for insufficiently
strict observance of legal procedure. These strictures were directed primar-
ily at provincial gendarme and security chiefs who often found it difficult
to penetrate the revolutionaries’ conspiratorial defences. The major security
bureaus, by contrast, disposed of well-placed informants permitting them to
focus their attention on genuine subversion. This was an extremely important
distinction. The police system was able to function within the framework of
a legal, constitutional order only in so far as its security police apparatus pos-
sessed a reasonably effective intelligence-gathering capability. The efficiency
of the security bureaus in the imperial capitals and a few provincial cities
permitted them to undermine revolutionary organisations without harassing
large numbers of innocent people. Only a really sophisticated police system
can distinguish among mere malcontents and genuine subversives.
But perhaps Russia’s security men were too sophisticated. The Social Demo-
crat Osip Ermanskii thought so. In his experience, the security men who
employed Zubatov’s tactic often gave wider latitude than did ordinary gen-
darme officers to revolutionary activists in the hope that they would incrim-
inate themselves further. Yet, asked Ermanskii, ‘who gained more from this
policy, the government or the revolutionaries? . . . While the Police Depart-
ment carefully gathered material and then subjected it to scientific analysis,
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we were permitted to place a mine beneath the very edifice of absolutism and
capitalism whose safeguard and perpetuation that clever [police] system had
been designed to ensure.’
24
Of course, Ermanskii was viewing the system from the point of view of the
collapse of the monarchy, an event far from inevitable. Beginning in late 1907
and early 1908, the government gained the upper hand in its struggle against
the revolutionaries. One senior official reported in early 1908 that ‘Every-
where revolutionary newspapers bitterly complain about the intensification
of the “reaction” and about the indifference of the population to the activity
of revolutionaries, and this is a good sign of the return to tranquillity of the
country.’
25
Indeed, the first issue of a new Socialist-Revolutionary party journal
declared in April that ‘The autocracy has re-established itself.’
26
Many radi-
cal activists remained, but they were driven largely underground, and senior
police officials felt sufficiently tranquil over the next two years to return most
of the empire to normal law, to issue relatively few death sentences and to
seek to prevent excessive use of administrative punishments. The government
seemed very much in control, the revolutionaries had been routed and con-
stitutionalism and the rule of law were not entirely jettisoned to accomplish
this.
On 7 January 1909, the Socialist-Revolutionary party repudiated one of
its most celebrated terrorist leaders, Evno Azef, as a police informant. The
perfect ‘double agent’, he had enjoyed the complete trust of both police and
party.
27
Azef’s exposure discredited both the Socialist-Revolutionary party,
whichseemed to be swarming with traitors (some two dozen more informants
were unmasked over the next four years), and a government that would make
use of assassins to fight assassins. Meanwhile, senior police officials, worried
that it would become harder to recruit new informants, reassured existing
ones that the Police Department had been able to protect Azef for sixteen
years but also warned them that all provocation would be punished severely.
It seems, in fact, that the recruitment of police informants did not suffer much
from the Azef affair: most of the ninety-four informants employed by the
St Petersburg security bureau in 1913 – it had never employed a larger number –
had been hired during the previous three years.
24 O. A. Ermanskii, Iz perezhitogo (1887–1921) (Moscow: Gos. izd., 1927), pp. 47–9.
25 N. N. Ansimov, ‘Okhrannye otdeleniia i mestnaia vlast’ tsarskoi Rossii v nachale XX v.’,
Sovetskoe gosudarstvo i pravo, 5 (1991): 123.
26 Revoliutsionnaia mysl’ 1 (April 1908): 1.
27 On the Azef Affair, see Anna Geifman, Entangled in Terror: The Azef Affair and the Russian
Revolution (Wilmington, Del.: Scholarly Resources, 2000); L. G. Praisman, Terroristy i
revoliutsionery, okhranniki i provokatory (Moscow: Rosspen, 2001).
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Police and revolutionaries
The Police Department’s success in devastating the revolutionary organisa-
tions did not cause it to become complacent. The Special Section cajoled, pro-
voked, rebuked, encouraged and criticised the directors of both the regional
and provincial security bureaus and the gendarme stations with great fre-
quency and vigour. A steady stream of directives urged them to acquire more
informants, to study the revolutionary organisations, to train more surveil-
lants, to use conspiratorial methods, to send agents deep into the countryside,
to co-operate more effectively, to provide more precise information and to use
good judgement before searching suspects. Experienced gendarme officers
were sent out to the provinces on inspection tours, a serious training course
for gendarme officers was instituted in 1910 and for this purpose Special Sec-
tion clerks drew up large, multicoloured diagrams of the major revolutionary
parties.
The security system was definitely becoming more professional and pro-
ductive, but its reputation suffered a further blow on 1 September 1911 when
an erstwhile police informant, Dmitrii Bogrov, fatally shot Prime Minister
Stolypin in Kiev. Public opinion waxed indignant that the security police were
still relying on such unsavoury elements as Bogrov, that is, like Azef, a police
informant out of control. The reactionary Prince Vladimir Meshcherskii called
the security police ‘the most harmful, immoral, and dangerous invention in
the Russian bureaucratic system’, a sort of ‘Spanish Inquisition with a slight
softening of manners’. Nikolai Gredeskul, a well-known Kadet jurist, admit-
ted that in the face of massive political terror the government had had to
adopt secret and underhand methods, but he added that this had led inevitably
to the Azef and Bogrov affairs. Since political terrorism had by 1911 come
largely to an end, the government, he argued, should put an end to its own
covert operations.
28
Curiously, the Kadet was more sympathetic to the gov-
ernment’s predicament than was the monarchist. Gredeskul was right: it is
essentially impossible to combat a conspiracy without resorting to conspir-
atorial methods. This was true in the case of both People’s Will and the
Socialist-Revolutionary terrorists. But once the latter had been disorganised,
was it not possible for the police to renounce such methods as Gredeskul
urged? Unfortunately, the Socialist-Revolutionaries never officially repudiated
the use of terror, and many Social Democrat leaders continued to lay plans to
orchestrate the violent overthrow of the imperial order. Thus, in the interest
of state security, the imperial security police continued to deploy secret
28 Grazhdanin, 36 (18 September 1911): 15–16; N. A. Gredeskul, Terror i okhrana (St Petersburg:
Tip. ‘Obshchestvennaia pol’za’, 1912), pp. 28–9.
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