A People's Tragedy: The Russian Revolution, 1891-1924

To its critics the Peter and Paul Fortress was a microcosm of the tsarist system. Russia, remarked the Marquis de Custine after visiting the fortress in the 1830s, is 'in itself a prison; a prison whose vast size only makes it the more formidable'. The basic structure of the tsarist police state had been built up under Nicholas I after the Decembrist uprising of 1825, when a small coterie of liberal noblemen had conspired — as Pushkin put it, 'between the claret and champagne' — to impose a constitution on the monarchy after Alexander Is death. Nicholas introduced sweeping laws — including a new code of censorship in 1826 that (uniquely in Europe at the time) obliged all printed matter to gain clearance from the censor before publication — to stamp out all political dissent.

* Chernyshevsky's novel was published while he was still in the Peter and Paul Fortress — only to be subsequently banned!

The Third Section, or secret police, established that year, had — and this was once again unique in Europe — the power to detain and even send into administrative exile in Siberia anyone suspected of 'political crimes'. No other country in the world had two kinds of police — one to protect the interests of the state, the other to protect its people.

Yet it was not until the late nineteenth century, with the arrival of telegraphs and telephones, that the machinery of the police state became really efficient. The Okhrana, which took over the functions of the Third Section in 1881, fought what can only be described as a secret war, using special powers outside the law, to stamp out revolutionaries. It had thousands of agents and informers, many of them posing as revolutionaries, who reported on conditions in the factories, the universities, the army and the institutions of the state itself. House porters filed daily reports to the police. Hundreds of bureaucrats were employed in a 'Black Office' to read people's intercepted mail. 'The whole of St Petersburg is aware that its letters are read by the police,' complained Countess Vorontsova to Nicholas II. There was a huge list of activities — from putting on a concert or opening a shop to consulting the works of Darwin — for which even the most high-born citizen required a licence from the police. Indeed, from the perspective of the individual, it could be said that the single greatest difference between Russia and the West, both under Tsarism and Communism, was that in Western Europe citizens were generally free to do as they pleased so long as their activities had not been specifically prohibited by the state, while the people of Russia were not free to do anything unless the state had given them specific permission to do it. No subject of the Tsar, regardless of his rank or class, could sleep securely in his bed in the knowledge that his house would not be subject to a search, or he himself to arrest.²

This constant battle with the police state engendered a special kind of mentality among its opponents. One can draw a straight line from the penal rigours of the tsarist regime to the terrorism of the revolutionaries and indeed to the police state of the Bolsheviks. As Flaubert put it, 'inside every revolutionary there is a policeman'. Felix Dzerzhinsky (1877—1926), the founding father of the Cheka, was a classic case in point. By 1917 he had spent the best part of his adult life in jails and penal exile, including the last three in the Orel prison, notorious for its sadistic tortures, where, as the leader of a hunger strike, he was singled out for punishment (his body was said to be covered with scars). Once installed in power, he was to copy many of these torture methods during the Red Terror. Yet Dzerzhinsky was only one of many poachers turned gamekeepers. By 1917, the average Bolshevik Party activist had spent nearly four years in tsarist jails or exile; the average Menshevik nearly five. Prison hardened the revolutionaries. It prepared them for 'the struggle', giving them a private reason to hate the old regime and to seek revenge against its representatives. Kanatchikov,

who spent several years in tsarist jails, claimed that for Bolshevized workers like himself prison acted as a form of 'natural selection': 'the weak in spirit left the revolution, and often life, but the strong and steadfast were toughened and prepared for future battles'. Many years later, in 1923, Kanatchikov was told that one of the judges who had sentenced him to jail in 1910 had been shot by the Bolsheviks. 'When I heard this', Kanatchikov confessed, 'it gave me great satisfaction'.³