outside and above the laws. Its chief, who was also called the Head of the Gendarmerie, was by right a member of the Council, and he was the most confidential servant of the Emperor, with whom he was ever in the most intimate relations. He exercised something like absolute power; his veto could in effect control all appointments, because he could adduce police reasons based on police knowledge against any person. He had, in fact, complete control over everyone and everything in the empire; he could arrest, lock up, exile, cause anyone he liked to disappear.
Under the enlightened régime of Alexander II., it seemed for a while as though the Third Section had lost much of its authority. But the first attempt upon the Czar’s life in 1866 at Kara Kossoff restored it to full activity, and one of the most prominent men in the empire, Schouvaloff, was placed at its head, thus restoring it to its ancient prestige, for the chief of the Third Section had invariably been a person of great consequence, as indeed the important functions he exercised demanded. But the revival of the Third Section was not justified by any subsequent success; in the years immediately following it proved itself singularly inefficient, unable either to prevent or to put down the outrages committed in broad day. It showed itself useless at St. Petersburg, at Kieff, at Odessa, at Karkoff, in all the great cities; it neither was able to defend itself against the conspiracies, nor could it detect or capture the conspirators. The first acts of the new revolution had been directed against the Third Section, and these attacks preceded those upon the Czar and his throne. The two last chiefs, General Mezentzoff and General Drenteln, fell victims to the Nihilists. The first was stabbed by some unknown person in the streets of St. Petersburg, the second was fired at in broad daylight by a young man on horseback, who was not arrested for a number of years. These attempts are to be placed to the credit of Nihilism, for they practically ended the Third Section.
Nominally this redoubtable office was abolished, but that did not mean that the arbitrary surveillance of the police was ended. Alexander II. hoped, perhaps, that he was wiping out a symbol of despotism, but he retained the substance while discarding the shadow. The change meant no more than the fusion of his private palace police with the ordinary public police. There was no longer a head of the Third Section, but there was a Minister of the Interior; it was the consolidation and concentration of power in one hand, and there it has remained.
There was good reason for the change; the various classes of police, instead of helping, hampered and interfered with each other. There were three police forces in the capital and all large cities; that of the Minister of the Interior, the city police, and the Third Section, already described. They were perpetually getting in each other’s way, and it was said that the State confided to their care was in as bad a way as the baby with five nurses. Often enough, like the famous detectives of the French farce, Tricoche et Cacolet, policemen hunted policemen; they were all suspicious of people who seemed too much on the alert, and the consequence was that much time and trouble was wasted in mutual surveillance. Sometimes it happened that the agents of the Third Section, fancying they had made an important arrest, found to their chagrin that they had only caught their comrades; meanwhile, the Nihilists had a practically free hand and terrorised the whole country.
The absolute incompetence of his protectors appears to have been brought home to Alexander II. by the incident known as the “Paris box of pills.” A parcel arrived one morning labelled “Pills for asthma and rheumatism: Dr. Jus, Paris.” It was addressed direct to the Czar, who was reported to be suffering from these complaints. Alexander handed the box over to his private physician for examination, and the moment it was opened one of the pills exploded. More care was shown in verifying the remaining pills, and it was found that they were filled with dynamite.
There have been times when the police of Russia were stirred to the utmost activity. After the murder of General Mezentzoff in broad daylight and in one of the principal squares of St. Petersburg, such profound dismay prevailed that the police were unceasingly on the qui vive. The perpetrators of the deed, nevertheless, had disappeared, leaving no trace, and the police in their frenzied eagerness turned the city upside down. Searches innumerable of all suspected houses were made, and the most arbitrary arrests took place on the slightest whisper of anything wrong. Reports at the time put the numbers taken into custody at quite a thousand.
Yet “illegal” or “irregular” people, as they were styled by the officers of the law, came and went, moving about with impunity under the very noses of the police, and, as a rule, escaping scot-free. They found shelter in houses of friends and sympathisers—persons of all classes, some of them least likely on the face of it to assist the Nihilists. Stepniak tells us in his “Underground Russia” that these likrivateli, as they are called in Russian, or “concealers,” were to be found among the highest aristocracy as well as in the ranks of Government officials, including even members of the police, all of them people who, for some reason or other, hesitated to give active support to the conspiracy, but who were nevertheless well disposed towards it, and proved this by hiding individuals for whom there was a hue-and-cry. Stepniak describes various types of this very numerous and varied class.