2. The political, or State, and for the most part secret police.
Let us consider these in turn.
1. The regular police is on the whole organised as in many other European countries, with the difference that the police officer often predominates in Russia over other local functionaries. For purposes of illustration it may be noted that where in France a sous-prèfet would act under the prefect of a department, the official in Russia next to the Governor is the ispravnik, with whom lesser members of the police hierarchy are in direct relations.
A great army of unofficial and unpaid attachés assists the regular police of the towns. This force was obtained through the clever device of enlisting the services of every house porter, the Russian dvornik, who answers to the French concierge and the German Hausknecht, and discharges much the same functions in an emphasised and more arbitrary fashion. The dvornik is bound to see and examine the papers and passports of all inmates of the house he serves, and especially of all visitors and new arrivals. The police regulation requires every dvornik to carry the passport to the police station within three days of the arrival of a new person, and to lodge it there in exchange for a ticket of residence. The same process is followed on departure. Thus the dvornik becomes a sort of permanent detective; he has not only to watch over all in the house, but he is held responsible that no revolutionary proclamations are posted on the external walls, no dangerous articles thrown out of the windows, and he is expected to lend a hand to the police if they make an arrest or give chase to a fugitive. Although he gets no pay from Government, he is expected to give much service under irksome conditions. He is forbidden to leave his post at any time during the long night watch, sixteen hours, from 4 p.m. to 8 a.m. next day, and he is liable to severe punishment if he fail in these duties. For all this the house proprietor really pays, and he may be still further mulcted, for he is held responsible for all illicit acts committed in his house, which may be sequestrated on proof of secret meetings held within it, or on any discovery of weapons, ammunition, explosives, or forbidden literature.
The police in the provinces is represented by a force of 5,000 or more, who were first appointed in 1878, were armed, mounted, given good pay and many rights. Each officer had his own beat, in which he ruled supreme, and he was thought quite a delightful institution. But within a year or two the police had developed into abominable petty tyrants, who held the country folk at their mercy, a prey to their exactions and brutality. They became, in fact, a perfect scourge in their districts, and even governors and high officials denounced them as brigands. It became clear that a bad police was worse than no police at all. Thus, an institution intended to help and protect the people soon degenerated into a new and terrible instrument of vexation and oppression. No name was too bad for the rural policeman, the uriadniki, who were nicknamed the kuriatniki, or “chicken stealers,” by the peasants, and likened by the better informed to the dread bodyguard of Ivan the Terrible.
A graphic picture has been painted by the famous Vera Zassoulich, in her Memoirs, of the visit of a rural policeman to a peasant’s house in company with the tax collector of the district. Vera, a young lady of high birth and much beauty, spent, in pursuit of the Nihilistic propaganda she was preaching, long periods under the roofs of villagers, and she was working as an ordinary seamstress in one house when a descent was made upon it. “I was sitting,” she writes, “at the door of the one room of the hut when the policeman appeared, accompanied by an old soldier in a dirty grey greatcoat, and followed by two peasants.... I was called upon to give my name, produce my passport, and state how long I meant to reside in that place.... Then, in reply to my questions, I was told that the police had come to back up the tax gatherer, and I saw what happened if the payments were in default. The stove of the hut was smashed, then smeared with tar, so were the walls, the furniture and wearing apparel; after that every piece of crockery in the place was broken and the pieces thrown out of the window. The horse and cow were taken out of the stalls and carried off to be sold.”
2. The political or State police was the invention of Nicholas I. Alexander I. had created a Ministry of the Interior, but it was Nicholas who devised the second branch, which he designed for his own protection and the security of the State. After the insurrection of 1865 he created a special bulwark for his defence, and invented that secret police which grew into the notorious “Third Section” of the Emperor’s own chancery. It has been said, with reason, that no Russian, in the days of its most dreaded activity, could mention its name without a shudder. It has been likened to that other secret tribunal, that so long oppressed Venice, the Council of Ten. It was the most powerful instrument an absolute Government ever called to its aid. The terrors it inspired were heightened by the mysterious silence that overshadowed its proceedings. It worked secretly, but struck with unerring severity; its methods were dark and devious; it was unjust, unfair, illegal, respecting neither caste nor sex. Women, ladies of rank and beauty and fashion, were said to have been seized ruthlessly by its unscrupulous agents, tried in secret conclave, and punished then and there with the whip. Many people were hurried away to Siberia without any form of trial at all—the first application of the system known as “administrative process,” which became very common in after years, when the publicity of the Courts would have been inconvenient, or convictions uncertain in due course of law. The Third Section, while it lasted, was the most dreaded power in the empire. It was practically supreme in the State, a Ministry independent of all other Ministries, placed quite above them, and responsible only to the Czar himself.
The Third Section had its prototype in the privileged bodyguard of Ivan the Terrible, which laid the whole country under contribution. Another Czar, Alexis, had his secret police, and his son, Peter the Great, invented a police system of a most formidable kind. It was known as the Preobrajenski, from the place where it had its headquarters, and was in fact a modern civil Inquisition, more terrible, more powerful even than the religious Inquisition of Spain. Peter the Great very likely felt that, with the many changes he introduced into national life, which so often roused the most obstinate resistance, he ought to have ready to his hand an instrument of coercion supported by espionage. It was in effect the Third Section, as we have seen it since, and although it was solemnly suppressed by Peter III. in 1762, it survived in that Third Section, just as the latter survives in the existing organisation of the Russian police.
For many years, under Alexander II., the Third Section was much more than a State police; it was a power apart in the Government, exercising independent authority, having many privileges, placed