What should be the relationship between the authorities and society so that the state, presumably an all-purpose governing mechanism, is as effective as it can be? Historical practice has seen at least three typical patterns. One is when governmental institutions rule a society without the latter’s participation. This is usually the case of an absolutist or a unitary state. Society is allowed to perform some administrative functions, but this participation remains negligible and carefully-measured – it is, by all accounts, a police state.
What guarantees the greatest success is the introduction of self-government, when communities can really do some of the governmental duties according to the law, on their own responsibility, and in the interests of the local populace.
If you apply these patterns to the Russian Empire and Ukraine as a part of it, you will see that the former attributes will be typical of it. What amply reveals the degree of the state’s trust in society and vice versa are institutions that performed the functions of political police. In the late 19th century, these were the local branches of the Police Department of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, popularly known as guard departments (Okhrana), established for political investigation and persecution throughout the Russian Empire.
The first of them began to be established in the capitals: in St. Petersburg in 1866 after an abortive attempt on the life of Alexander II by the revolutionary terrorist Dmitry Karakozov, in Moscow in 1880, and in Warsaw in 1900. They functioned on the legal basis of a provision on the empire’s secret police, approved by Alexander III in 1882, and from 1907 onwards on the basis of the legislative Regulations on Guard Departments. Political detection was carried out by way of secret indoor and outdoor surveillance by agents as well as by perusal of mail. Both methods were aimed at collecting operative and evidential information in the public environment.
The tasks assigned to the guard departments determined their structure. Each of them had two units: of human intelligence and outdoor surveillance. Clerks would process mail and reports to set up “data banks,” i.e. alphabetic cards with names and nicknames and photo dossiers on radical movement activists who were in the guard departments’ field of vision. Also of use was information from secret agents and outdoor surveillants.
It is General Strelnikov who proposed the method for the guard departments’ activities. A prosecutor in the Kyiv Military District, he solved a number of cases, the most resounding of which involved Vovk, a civic movement militant. Thanks to his ingenious ways of interrogation, his contemporaries, particularly the Kyiv-based Professor of Law Kistiakivsky, characterized him as a “prosecutor with the instinct of a hangman.” Mass-scale searches and arrests, which Strelnikov resorted to, later gave way to provocations and disorganization by way of creating conflict situations in the revolutionary movement, spreading false information about its participants, and discrediting and compromising activists as well as the very idea of liberation.
One who considerably improved Strelnikov’s methods was Colonel Sergei Zubatov of the Special Corps of Gendarmes, a former People’s Will member whom the Moscow Guard Department had won over to its side. He carved out a brilliant career in this new walk of life – from a petty clerk to the chief of the Moscow Guard Department. He applied Western European techniques, such as fact recording, photographing, and the secret status of intelligence agents. Germany, France, and Austria-Hungary also had this kind of internal security laws which were in force, however, just for a few years, in contrast to several decades in Russia. When criticized for applying administrative exile, rather than a judicial inquiry, to political offenders, he said this could not be dropped because it had become a tradition in Russia.
The year 1902 saw the formation of a wide-scale network of about 27 detective units, which came to be known in 1903 and onwards as “departments for guarding public security and order.” Some of them functioned in the Ukrainian gubernias, where resistance movement was strong, such as those of Katerynoslav, Kyiv, Odesa, Kharkiv, and Simferopol.
In 1906 Minister of Internal Affairs Pyotr Stolypin established eight district-level guard departments whose number soon rose to 15. To counter revolutionary movements, terrorist acts, agrarian unrest, propaganda in the army and the navy on a territory under the jurisdiction of a district guard department, several gubernias would make a joint effort, using, among other things, their urban and rural police and gendarme forces. From then on, they were guided by instructions of the chief of the district guard department, while the gubernia’s gendarme departments were supposed to supply the latter with information required for detection. Searches and arrests could only be carried out with the consent of the guard department chief.
The sphere of their jurisdiction coincided with action areas of the most active revolutionary parties and organizations. Several district guard departments worked in Ukrainian gubernias: the South-Eastern Department was responsible for the Kharkiv, Katerynoslav, Voronezh, and Tambov gubernias as well as the Don Cossack Area; the South-Western Department (1907-14) for the Chernihiv, Poltava, Podillia, and Volhynia gubernias, and the Kyiv Department (1902-17) existed in parallel with the South-Western one. The Odesa-based Southern Guard Department exercised jurisdiction over the Odesa, Kherson, Tauric, and Bessarabian gubernias in 1902-17. The Mykolaiv Detection Unit, founded in 1904, became a guard department subordinated to the Kherson Gubernia Gendarme Directorate. It controlled the political situation in Mykolaiv and was part of the Southern Guard Department in 1907-14. There had also been a detection unit at the Poltava Gubernia Gendarme Directorate since 1903. The 1905-07 revolution saw the establishment of recording bureaus responsible for protecting the personal safety of imperial family members: they hunted for security risks among the populace.
The approved staff of each guard department consisted of two or three officers and the chief appointed by the Police Department director. They were responsible for the organization of a network of secret agents to be planted into political organizations. The agents were recruited from among underground members who were unstable, weak-natured, and unsure of or disappointed with the cause they served. Among them were those hurt by the party leadership, people without firm convictions, and those who needed financial aid, especially after escaping from exile, as well as those who conscientiously worked for guard departments for a reward.
The recruitment ended with the signing of a cooperation agreement, after which the secret agent was given a nickname, received knowledge in the history of revolutionary movements and the clandestine party literature, and learned the professional skills of detection. His task was to gather information on the situation in the local anti-monarchic movement, which was to be aimed, after consultations with the Police Department, at fighting the underground. In this connection, Popov, chief of the Kharkiv District Guard Department, wrote in 1908: “to recruit worthy collaborators, we have to constantly deal with people in order to find their weak points.” The number of secret agents was small in 1907: 15 in Katerynoslav, 25 in Kyiv, 15 in Odesa and Kharkiv each — for this reason, this category of collaborators also included gendarmes and all policemen of all ranks, who, in fact, played the role of official suppliers of information.
There was also a special group of filery (police spies), the Russian name deriving from the French “fileur” meaning “one who shadows.” Most of them were recruited from among non-professional, little-educated, but physically endurable persons other than ethnic Poles or Jews. These people kept diaries of outdoor surveillance over radical, civic, and official figures. They were, in fact, totally unaware of the real names of their “heroes,” because the latter appeared, as they themselves did, in their records under a nickname.
Their number was not constant and varied depending on the scope of the missions being performed. According to Yarmysh, a noted expert on the history of Russia’s punitive apparatus, there were 33 spies in the Kyiv department and 25 in Kharkiv and Odesa each. There was another morbid, if not ugly, characteristic feature that corrupted their service. They not only contributed to the busting of an organization but also created the conditions when some of the members could escape arrest and continue their clandestine activities. And whenever they failed to do so, they would establish bogus underground societies that recruited factory workers or peasants. This allowed them to remain always in action and receive a handsome salary of 75 to 150 rubles from the state. They were popularly known as “people in a pea-colored coat and a top hat” after an apt expression by the satirist Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin.
Postal censorship – gathering information by way of opening private mail and copying without the addressee’s knowledge – was carried out by employees at post-offices’ secret departments also known as “black office rooms.” In small towns, this was done by the most trusted and reliable post officials. In the long run, practically all mail was perused, including that of ministers and excepting the emperor and the minister of internal affairs. This was, naturally, in contravention of the law that guaranteed privacy of correspondence. Incidentally, the official who invented a machine that could quickly open envelopes and make fake seals was awarded an Order of St. Vladimir, 4th class.
There were about 50 guard departments in the Russian Empire in 1914. Most of them ceased to exist in pursuance of a 1913 instruction except for St. Petersburg, Moscow, and Warsaw, where they functioned until 1917. Guard departments managed to eliminate a number of terrorist groups and disorganize underground revolutionary parties. But, on the whole, they failed to protect the state from revolutionary and anti-governmental propaganda and keep it under control, which was one of the factors that caused the imperial government to fall.
State officials themselves, including the highest-ranking ones, had mixed feelings about political police methods. Sergei Witte, Russia’s most efficient minister of finance, who had begun his career in Odesa and Kyiv, thought that the civic movement had become so strong that it could not be stopped with repressions and political police actions and that the central government had to meet it halfway. Mikhail Dragomirov, a high-placed general born in the Chernihiv region, always remembered about his ethnic origin and condemned the way gendarmes conducted detection and investigation. As a soldier who preferred a fair encounter, he was outraged by the fact that guard departments encouraged provocations. When Dragomirov commanded the Kyiv Military District, he tried to put off as much as he could the planting of informers into the army. They began to operate here in 1909 – much later than elsewhere.
The establishment of guard departments amply exposed a crisis in the political culture of the tsarist system which tried to resist the ever-growing radical and opposition movements by applying demoralizing methods rather than by way of socioeconomic reforms, improving the political system, and promoting national and cultural development. Having banned political activities and forcing the opposition to go underground as a result of police persecution, from where it would respond with violence and terror, the monarchy resorted to provocations and discrediting tactics, thus more and more abandoning the idea of a rule-of-law state which would protect the rights and interests of its citizens. It turned out that the methods applied by guard departments were diminishing the already low prestige of the authorities, and the state was losing trust among the widest social circles. Valentyna Shandra holds a Doctor of Sciences degree in history
