Historic developments favored the liberal bureaucracy. The rapid growth of the Russian economy in the second half of the nineteenth century alone raised doubts about the feasibility of running Russia in a patrimonial manner. It was very well for Konstantin Pobedonostsev, the main ideologue of patrimonial conservatism, to argue that in Russia “there cannot exist separate authorities [vlasti], independent of the central state authority [vlast’].”51 This principle may have been enforceable in a static, agrarian society. But in a capitalist economy such as developed in Russia in the late nineteenth century with the government’s active encouragement, every corporation, every business entrepreneur, every commercial bank made, on its own, decisions affecting the state and society: they acted as “independent authorities” even under the autocratic regime. The conservatives instinctively understood this and resisted economic development, but they fought a losing battle inasmuch as Russia’s international standing and fiscal stability had come increasingly to depend on the growth of industry, transport, and banking.
Perhaps the monarchy would have moved decisively in the direction favored by its more liberal servants were it not for the revolutionary movement. The wave of terror that struck Russia in 1879–81 and again after 1902 had no parallel in the world to that time or since. Each terrorist assault played into the hands of those advocating repression. In August 1881, Alexander III put in place a set of emergency rules that made it possible for the officials in turbulent areas to impose martial law and govern as they would enemy territory. These laws, which remained on the statute books until the demise of the monarchy, foreshadowed some of the salient features of the modern police state.52 They greatly enhanced the arbitrary power of the right-wing bureaucrats, offsetting the gains of the liberals from economic and educational progress.
The contrary pulls to which the late Imperial Government was subjected can be illustrated in the example of legal institutions. In 1864, Alexander II gave Russia her first independent judiciary system, with juries and irremovable judges. It was a reform that the conservatives found especially galling because it created a formal enclave of decision-making independent of the monarch and his officials. Pobedonostsev accused the new courts of violating the principle of unity of authority: in Russia, irremovable judges were an “anomaly.”53 In terms of autocratic principles he was undeniably correct. The conservatives succeeded in having political offenses removed from the jurisdiction of civilian courts and transferred to administrative courts, but they could not undo the court reform because it had become too embedded in Russian life, and, in any event, they had no realistic alternative.
The squabbling between the two bureaucratic camps was typified by the rivalry between the ministries of the Interior and of Finance.
The Ministry of the Interior was an institution sui generis, virtually a state within a state, resembling less a branch of the executive than a self-contained system within the machinery of government.54 While the other ministries had clearly defined and therefore limited functions, Interior had the general function of administering the country. In 1802, when it came into existence, it had been responsible for promoting economic development and supervising transport and communications. Its sphere of competence was immensely broadened in the 1860s, partly as a result of serf emancipation, which deprived landlords of administrative authority, and partly in response to the revolutionary unrest. By 1900, the Minister of the Interior was something of a Chief Imperial Steward. The ambitions of the holders of the post knew no bounds. In 1881, in the wake of a campaign of terror that culminated in the assassination of Alexander II, the Minister of the Interior, N. P. Ignatev, proposed that in order to extirpate dissent not only in society but also in the government, which he believed was filled with subversives, his ministry be authorized to engage, in effect, in what one historian has described as “administrative-police supervision … of all other government agencies.”55 A proposal in the same spirit was made twenty years later by Minister of the Interior Viacheslav Plehve on behalf of the governors.56 Both proposals were rejected, but it is indicative of the authority of the ministry that they dared to make them. It was logical that after 1905, when the equivalent post of Prime Minister was created, its holder usually also held the portfolio of the Interior.
The Minister of the Interior headed the national administration by virtue of authority to appoint and supervise the country’s principal administrative officials, the governors. These tended to be selected from among the less educated and more conservative bureaucrats: in 1900, half of them had no higher education. Governors chaired provincial boards (gubemskie pravleniia) and a variety of committees, of which the most important were the bureaus (prisutstviia) charged with overseeing the industrial, military, and agricultural affairs of their province. They also had responsibility for the peasants: they appointed, from among trustworthy local landed gentry, land commandants (zemskie nachal’niki), who acted as wardens of the volost’ administration and enjoyed broad authority over the peasantry. The governors also supervised the zemstva. In case of unrest, they could request the Minister of the Interior to declare their province under either Reinforced or Extraordinary Safeguard, which resulted in the suspension of all civil rights and rule by decree. With the exception of the courts and agencies of fiscal control, the governors encountered few barriers to their will. Through them, the Minister of the Interior ran the Empire.*
Within the purview of the Interior Minister fell also the supervision of non-Orthodox subjects, including the Jews, as well as the dissenting branches of the Orthodox faith; censorship; and the management of prisons and forced labor camps.
But the greatest source of the Interior Minister’s power derived from the fact that after 1880 he was in charge of the police: the Department of Police and the Corps of Gendarmes, as well as the regular constabulary force. In the words of Witte, “the Minister of the Interior is the Minister of Police of an Empire which is a police state par excellence.”* The Department of Police was unique to Russia: only Russia had two kinds of police, one to protect the interests of the state, the other to maintain law and order among the citizens. The Police Department was charged exclusively with responsibility for combating crimes against the state. It constituted, as it were, a private security service of the patrimonial sovereign, whose interests were apparently perceived as separate from those of his subjects.
The constabulary was to be seen mainly in the urban centers. “Outside the cities the central authorities relied essentially upon a mere 1,582 constables and 6,874 sergeants to control a village population of ninety million.”57 Each district (uezd) had, as a representative of the Interior Ministry, a police chief called ispravnik. These officials enjoyed broad powers, including that of issuing internal passports, without which members of the lower classes could not travel thirty kilometers beyond their place of residence. But as is clear from their numbers, they would hardly have been said to police the countryside.
As constituted in 1880, the security police consisted of three elements, all subject to the Minister of the Interior: the Department of Police in St. Petersburg, the Okhrana (security police) with branches in some cities, and the Corps of Gendarmes, whose personnel was distributed in all the metropolitan areas. A great deal of Russian administration was carried out by means of secret circulars sent to the officials in charge of security from the minister’s office.
There was a certain amount of duplication among the three services in that all had the mission of preventing anti-governmental activities, which included industrial strikes and unauthorized assemblies. The Okhrana, at first established only in St. Petersburg, Moscow, and Warsaw, and later installed in other cities, engaged principally in counterintelligence, whereas the Gendarmes were more involved in formal investigation of individuals apprehended in illegal activities. The Gendarmes had a paramilitary force to control railroads and to quell urban disorders. There were 10,000 to 15,000 gendarmes in the Empire. Each city had a Gendarme official, clad in a familiar light blue
uniform, whose responsibility it was to gather information on all matters affecting internal security. The force was very thinly distributed. Hence in time of massive unrest the government had to call in the regular army, the force of last resort: and when the army was engaged in war, as happened in 1904–5 and again in 1917, the regime was unable to cope.
The security services evolved over time into a highly effective political counterintelligence using an array of techniques to combat revolutionaries, including a network of informants, agents who shadowed suspects, and agents provocateurs who infiltrated subversive organizations. The police intercepted and read private mail. It employed as informers residential superintendents. It had branches abroad (it maintained a permanent bureau in Paris) and collaborated with foreign police to keep track of Russian revolutionaries. In the years immediately preceding the outbreak of World War I, through arrests and penetration it succeeded in virtually eliminating the revolutionary parties as a threat to the regime: suffice it to say that both the head of the Socialist-Revolutionary terrorist organization and Lenin’s chief deputy in Russia were on the police payroll. The security police was the best informed and politically the most sophisticated agency of the Imperial Government: in the years immediately preceding the Revolution it submitted remarkably prescient analyses of Russia’s internal conditions and prospects.
Of all the services of the Russian bureaucracy, the police were the least constrained by law. All its operations, affecting the lives of millions, were carried out free of external controls, save those of the Minister of the Interior and the director of the Department of Police. Under regulations issued in 1881, the police organs had no judiciary powers. However, in areas subject to the August 1881 provisions for “Safeguard,” high officials of the Corps of Gendarmes had the right to detain suspects for two weeks, and for two weeks longer with a governor’s authorization. After one month, a detainee was either released or turned over to the Ministry of the Interior for further investigation. Once that was completed, if the evidence warranted, the suspect was brought to trial either before a court (sometimes the Senate) or before administrative boards of the Ministry of the Interior composed of two representatives each of that ministry and the Ministry of Justice: a bureaucratic body functioning in a judiciary capacity.58 Under such procedures, Russians could be sentenced for up to five years of administrative exile. The population had no recourse against the security organs, least of all in areas placed under Safeguard, where the police could act with complete impunity.
The authority of the Minister of the Interior was enhanced by virtue of the fact that his police and gendarmerie were the only vehicles for enforcing directives of the other ministries. If Finance ran into a taxpayers’ revolt, or War had trouble recruiting, they had to go to Interior for help. In the words of a contemporary source,
the outstanding position of the Ministry of the Interior is determined not only by the number, variety, and importance of its functions but also and above all by the fact that it administers the police force, and that the enforcement of all government decrees, regardless of which ministry’s competence they happen to fall under, is, as a rule, carried out by the police.
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In the closing decades of the century, Interior Ministers supported and implemented various “counterreforms” designed to emasculate the liberal reforms of the 1860s. Among them were restrictions on zemstva, the introduction of land commandants, expulsion of Jews from areas where law forbade them to reside, and repression of student unrest. Had they had their wish, Russia would have been frozen not only politically but also economically and socially.
The inability of the Interior Ministers to carry out their programs provides a telling commentary on the limitations that life imposed on the practices of patrimonial autocracy. From considerations of state security, its proponents opposed nearly every measure designed to modernize the Russian economy. They fought currency reform and the adoption of the gold standard. They disliked railroads. They opposed foreign borrowing. Above all, they resisted industrialization on the grounds that it hurt cottage industries, without which peasants could not make ends meet, led to dangerous concentrations of industrial labor, and enabled foreigners, especially Jews, to penetrate and corrupt Russia.
There were weighty reasons of state why this resistance was ignored. Russia had no choice but to industrialize. Witte, the Minister of Finance and chief advocate of industrialization, made his case largely in political and military terms, because he knew that they would appeal to Nicholas II. In February 1900, in a memorandum to the Tsar, he argued, consciously or unconsciously echoing the nineteenth-century German political economist Friedrich List, that
without her own industry [Russia] cannot achieve genuine economic independence. And the experience of all nations indicates palpably that only countries which enjoy economic independence have also the capacity fully to unfold their political might.
*
To prove his point, Witte pointed to China, India, Turkey, and Latin America.
Persuasive as this argument was, fiscal exigencies were even more so: Russia urgently needed capital to balance the budget, to broaden the revenue base of the Treasury, and to ease the tax burden of the peasant. The alternative was state bankruptcy and possibly widespread agrarian unrest. Thus fiscal considerations overrode the interests of internal security, pushing the Imperial Government to take the “capitalist” road with all its social and political consequences.
Russia has suffered chronic budgetary deficits ever since the middle of the nineteenth century. There were the immense costs of serf emancipation, the provisions of which committed the government to advance the landlords 80 percent of the value of the land given to their ex-serfs: this money the peasants were supposed to repay over forty-nine years, but they soon fell into arrears. Then there was the costly Balkan War of 1877–78, which caused the Russian ruble to lose 60 percent of its value on foreign exchanges. The government also incurred heavy expenses in connection with its involvement in railroad construction.*
Russia lacked the capital to meet such expenditures. Her revenues rested on a very narrow basis. Direct taxes in 1900 accounted for only 7.9 percent of state income, a fraction of what advanced industrial countries drew from this source. The bulk of the revenues derived from taxes on consumption: sales taxes and customs duties (27.2 percent), proceeds of the liquor monopoly (26 percent), and operations of railways (24 percent). This covered the ordinary expenses but not the military outlays and the costs of railroad construction. Russia partly made good the deficit with sales of grain abroad: in 1891–95 she exported on the average 7 million tons of cereals a year, and in 1902, as much as 9.3 million.60 Most of the revenue, directly and indirectly, came from the peasant, who paid a land tax as well as taxes on articles of necessity (salt, matches, kerosene) and vodka. In the 1870s and 1880s, Russian Finance Ministers obtained the money with which to try to balance the budget mainly by increasing taxes on articles of consumption, which had the effect of forcing the peasant to sell grain that the government then exported. The famine of 1891–92 made clear the limits to such practices: the peasants’ ability to pay, it was now acknowledged, had been exhausted. Fears arose that the continuation of the policy of squeezing the peasant could lead to chronic famines.
On taking over the Ministry of Finance in 1892, Witte adopted a different policy: rather than squeeze the countryside, he borrowed abroad and worked to increase the country’s wealth through industrialization. The development of productive capacities would, he was convinced, improve living standards and, at the same time, enhance government revenues.61 He had initially believed that Russia could raise the capital for her industrialization at home, but he soon realized that domestic financial resources were insufficient62—not only because capital was in short supply but because affluent Russians preferred to invest in mortgages and government bonds. The need for foreign loans became especially pronounced after the crop failures of 1891 and 1892, which forced a temporary curtai
lment of grain exports and resulted in a fiscal crisis.† Russia’s foreign borrowing, which until 1891 had been on a modest scale, now began in earnest.
To create the impression of fiscal solvency, the Imperial Government occasionally falsified budgetary figures, but its main device to this end was a unique practice of dividing the state budget. The expenses comprised under the “ordinary” budget were more than covered by domestic revenues. Those incurred in maintaining the armed forces and waging war, as well as building railroads, were treated as “non-recurrent” and classified as “extraordinary.” This part of the budget was met from foreign borrowing.
To attract foreign credit, Russia required a convertible currency.
By maintaining in the 1880s a foreign trade surplus, largely with the help of grain exports, and by intensive gold mining, Russia managed to accumulate enough bullion to adopt in 1897 the gold standard. This measure, carried out by Witte in the teeth of strong opposition, made the paper ruble convertible on demand into gold. It attracted massive foreign investments in state obligations as well as securities. Stringent rules on bank-note emissions and an excellent record of debt servicing earned Russia a high credit rating, which enabled her to borrow at interest rates only slightly above those paid by Germany (usually 4 or 4.5 percent). The bulk of the foreign money—four-fifths of that invested in state bonds—came from France; the remainder was supplied by British, German, and Belgian investors. In 1914, the total debt of the Russian Government amounted to 8.8 billion rubles, of which 48 percent or 4.2 billion ($2.1 billion or the equivalent of 3,360 tons of gold) was owed to foreigners: at the time, it was the largest foreign indebtedness of any country in the world.63 In addition, in 1914 foreigners held 870 million rubles of state-guaranteed securities and 422 million rubles of municipal bonds.
The Russian Revolution Page 13
