Political Crime in Late Imperial Russia (2002)

Political Crime in Late Imperial RussiaAuthor(s): Jonathan DalySource: The Journal of Modern History, Vol. 74, No. 1 (March 2002), pp. 62-100Published by: The University of Chicago PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/343368 .

Accessed: 26/11/2014 17:50

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

.

The University of Chicago Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to TheJournal of Modern History.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 128.248.155.225 on Wed, 26 Nov 2014 17:50:25 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=ucpress

http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/343368?origin=JSTOR-pdf

http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp


[The Journal of Modern History 74 (March 2002): 62–100]� 2002 by The University of Chicago. 0022-2801/2002/7401-0003$10.00All rights reserved.

Political Crime in Late Imperial Russia*

Jonathan DalyUniversity of Illinois at Chicago

The repression of state crime is the touchstone of the lawfulnessof any system of repression.

(Pierre Papadatos, Le delit politique)

A glorious path, great renown as a defender of the people, tuber-culosis, and Siberia.

(N. A. Nekrasov, Komu na Rusi zhit’ khorosho?)

In a recent study, I argued that the late Imperial Russian government closelyfollowed the Western trend, which began in the late eighteenth and earlynineteenth centuries under the impact of Enlightenment ideas, toward less-ening the cruelty of criminal punishment regimes. Until 1906, for example,Russia had one of the lowest execution rates among major European coun-tries; it also abolished corporal punishment and undertook to develop modernprison facilities—two important hallmarks of up-to-date penal reformism—at roughly the same time, though not as extensively, as those countries.1 Theanarchist P. A. Kropotkin went so far as to argue that Russia’s penal system,in principle, was the most humane. He hastened to add that in practice thesystem often failed to live up to its principles.2 Even so, one cannot helpbeing struck by Kropotkin’s positive assessment of the intentions of a gov-ernment so staunchly vilified by broad segments of the educated public in

* I am grateful to Jorg Baberowski, Jane Burbank, Maria Moore, Leonid Trofimov,and the participants at the Midwest Russian History Workshop in Toronto on April 10,1999, for commenting on earlier versions of this study. Research for it was supportedin part by grants from the Institute for the Humanities Grants-in-Aid Program, withfunding from the Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research at the University of Illinoisat Chicago, from the Kennan Institute for Advanced Russian Studies, Washington, D.C.,and from the International Research and Exchanges Board, with funds provided by theNational Endowment for the Humanities and the United States Information Agency.None of these organizations is responsible for the views expressed.

1 Jonathan W. Daly, “Criminal Punishment and Europeanization in Late ImperialRussia,” Jahrbucher fur Geschichte Osteuropas 47 (2000): 341–62.

2 P. A. Kropotkin, V russkikh i frantsuzskikh tiur’makh, trans. Batunskii, revised bythe author (St. Petersburg, 1906), pp. 24–25.



Political Crime in Late Imperial Russia 63

Russia before the revolution of 1917 and so bleakly depicted by many his-torians thereafter.

This article attempts to account for the late Imperial Russian government’sreputation for repressiveness by exploring the one realm of criminal punish-ment in which it appears to have been most out of step with its Western Eu-ropean role models and counterparts—namely, the repression of so-called po-litical crime. Although the question of political repression in Imperial Russiafigures, at least tangentially, in a massive quantity of historical literature (nearlyevery Soviet political or social study emphasized it), scholars have neglectedto analyze systematically how political repression evolved over the last de-cades of the Imperial government, how it related to the nature of governmentin Russia, or how it compared to political theory and practice in western Eu-rope.3 Addressing these issues is the aim of the present study. In order to clarifythe meaning of political crime and punishment in late Imperial Russia, let usbegin with an inquiry into the concept of political crime and its historicalevolution in Europe.

THE NATURE AND HISTORY OF POLITICAL CRIME IN EUROPE

As the criminologists C. Lombroso and R. Laschi noted in 1892, politicalcrimes “have always been prosecuted,” even though many penologists in thenineteenth century denied their very existence.4 The definition of such crimesand the vigor with which they have been punished, however, have changeddramatically over time. According to Pierre A. Papadatos, the political offensewent from being the most grave crime, as an attack on the most sacred elementsof the community, to being a privileged crime, one whose perpetrators de-served especially solicitous treatment.5 This striking transformation, whichtook place largely between the mid-eighteenth and the mid-nineteenth centu-ries, stemmed from the gradual agreement among most educated people inEurope and its diaspora that political, social, and religious ideas and institu-tions do not possess absolute value, and that therefore opposing this or thatidea or institution should not be construed as gravely threatening to society orthe body politic.6

3 One recent, remarkable exception is Laura Engelstein, “Revolution and the Theaterof Public Life in Imperial Russia,” in Revolution and the Meanings of Freedom in theNineteenth Century, ed. Isser Woloch (Stanford, Calif., 1996), pp. 315–57.

4 C. Lombroso and R. Laschi, Le crime politique et les revolutions par rapport audroit, a l’anthropologie criminelle et a la science du gouvernement, trans. A. Bouchard,2 vols. (Paris, 1892), 1:v–vi.

5 Pierre A. Papadatos, Le delit politique: Contribution a l’etude des crimes contrel’etat, preface by Jean Graven (Geneva, 1954), p. vi.

6 Lombroso and Laschi, 1:32–35, 2:213, 259; Barton L. Ingraham, Political Crime



64 Daly

During the early modern period in Europe, the prohibition on contesting theauthority of rulers and political institutions was all but absolute, and politicalcrime in general was seen as a breach of faith or trust toward the monarch.7

In England, under Henry VIII, Elizabeth I, and James I, attempting to imitatethe signature of the monarch or failing to acknowledge his or her supremacywere capital offenses. In France, any attempt on the king’s life entailed exe-cution, quartering, torture, the confiscation of the assailant’s property, and thebanishment of his or her relations.8 In addition, offenses against religion andthe church, which not only constituted a pillar of the established order but alsoinformed people’s entire worldview, retained a political cast into the eighteenthcentury and were punished harshly. In France and Italy, for example, it was agrave political crime to offend a cardinal or his family.9

Even so, European jurisprudence since the Middle Ages had allowed forcontesting the authority of rulers under certain circumstances. The authorityof feudal lords was, legally speaking, contractual. Were a lord to overstep thelimits of the contract, his vassals could legitimately resist him. In the earlymodern period, advocates of natural law, such as Francisco Suarez, SamuelPufendorf, and Hugo Grotius, defined the power of the sovereign as delimitedby specific functions. The sovereign’s failure to realize the common good wasconceived by those thinkers as grounds for political rebellion. The Reforma-tion, which increased the obligation of secular rulers to tend to the spiritualand material needs of their subjects, had engendered or at least reinforced thisidea. It was not a huge step from there to argue, as John Locke did, that thepurpose of the sovereign authority was no longer to realize the common goodbut to protect the liberty of the individual.10

At the same time, however, the concept of political crime continued todevelop. Already in the early seventeenth century, Cardinal Richelieu declared,in regard to crime against the state, that it was “necessary to close the door onpity” and that “even the thought of a crime against the state should be pun-

in Europe: A Comparative Study of France, Germany, and England (Berkeley, 1979),p. 24; Joseph Viaud, La peine de mort en matiere politique: Etude historique et critique(doctoral diss., University of Paris, 1902), p. 50.

7 Ingraham, p. 57; Lombroso and Laschi, 2:242; Viaud, p. 109.8 Lombroso and Laschi, 2:231–32; Ingraham, pp. 45, 56–57; Papadatos, pp. 27–32,

55; Viaud, p. 109.9 Marie-Sylvie Dupont-Bouchat, “Strategies du maintien de l’ordre en Belgique et

en France au XIXe siecle: La doctrine de la defense sociale,” in Historische Soziologieder Rechtswissenschaft, ed. Erk Volkmar Heyen (Frankfurt, 1986), p. 80. Lombrosoand Laschi, 2:231, 254–55, 276. In early modern Europe, “heresy was perceived to bea cancer in the body politic; if society was to be saved, the cancer had to be cut outand destroyed . . . heresy was the capital crime par excellence” (Carter Lindberg, TheEuropean Reformations [Oxford, 1996], p. 280).

10 Papadatos, pp. 17, 26, 29; Ingraham, pp. 40–42.




ished.”11 Even so, before the development of the conception of popular sov-ereignty in the second half of the eighteenth century, monarchs remained theprimary objects of state crime in both political theory and judicial practice,despite the existence of sophisticated theories of state sovereignty at least sinceMachiavelli. In the late eighteenth century, political thinkers began to conceiveof threats to the state as either external or internal. The former concerned thevery existence of the state; the latter, its relatively ephemeral elements, suchas governments and political institutions. Vigorous opposition to these entitiescame to be considered potentially legitimate. Moreover, this narrower concep-tion of the gravest political crimes for the first time in the history of Christen-dom excluded attacks on religious institutions, for the Christian religion wasno longer viewed as part of the foundation of political life.12

This new conception of political crime was grounded in the Enlightenmentnotions of individual liberty and sovereignty of the people. Of course, theFrench Revolution, in large part a product of the Enlightenment, engenderedsome of the most repressive, broadly defined laws against political crime. Andin reaction to the excesses of the revolution several monarchical governmentsstiffened their own prohibitions against political crimes.13 By the mid-nine-teenth century, however, a rapid succession of short-lived governments, inFrance in particular, had reinforced the idea of political institutions as relativeand of political offenders as “more disquieted of mind than corrupt.” Guizothelped articulate the new understanding of political crime when he argued thatany political act could be seen as potentially legitimate by the fact that eachperson has a right to express his political will. For many educated people, thefighter against tyranny acquired the aura of a saint.14 In consequence, on theContinent at the very least, political lawbreakers generally enjoyed indulgenttreatment by prosecutors, juries, judges, and prison wardens. Even Bentham,while not sharing this exalted vision of political offenders, opposed laws ban-ning political activity—not because individuals possess absolute rights butbecause, he argued, such laws are ineffective.15

The European countries’ laws on political crime developed in fairly closerelation to the ideas of the Continent’s most prominent legal thinkers. Theinfluential Napoleonic penal code of 1810, which defined political offenses asthe gravest crimes, nevertheless improved on the previous penal legislation by

11 Papadatos, pp. 25, 27.12 Otto Kirchheimer, Political Justice: The Use of Legal Procedure for Political Ends

(Princeton, N.J., 1961), pp. 32–33; Papadatos, pp. 35–37; Ingraham, pp. 39–40.13 Lombroso and Laschi (n. 4 above), 2:233; Ingraham, pp. 100–103; Viaud, pp.

126–30.14 Viaud, p. 12; Papadatos (n. 5 above), pp. vi, 43–45; Fabreguettes, pp. 130–31;

Ingraham, p. 25.15 Ingraham (n. 6 above), pp. 112–16.



66 Daly

establishing clearly defined penalties for crimes and abolishing such cruel pun-ishments as quartering, burning alive, torture, and the like, though a personcould still be executed and despoiled of his property merely for plotting toharm the emperor.16 Over the next couple of decades, a movement for penalreform took hold of the Continent, resulting in the adoption of still more en-lightened penal codes, most of which diminished the punishments applicableto political crimes.17 Moreover, a series of individual laws, most notablyadopted under the July Monarchy and the Second Republic in France, pushedthe reformist spirit further, by, inter alia, abolishing capital punishment forpolitical crimes. Similarly, in 1837 the English government, for example, re-duced the penalty for failing to disperse during a riot from capital punishmentto lengthy sentences of transportation or imprisonment.18 Even so, England’sTreason Act, as amended in 1842, prescribed the death penalty for attempts toinjure the queen in any way, and seven years’ transportation merely for trying,by means of some offensive weapon, to frighten the queen. As Barton Ingra-ham has argued, in an age of popular sovereignty even a constitutional mon-arch has to be “placed on a pedestal” in order to be taken seriously.19

There arose among jurists, after the middle of the century, the question ofdefining what precisely constituted a political crime. The immediate cause ofthe controversy was the proliferation of politically oppositional activity acrossEurope and the attendant demands, made by various governments, for theextradition of political offenders. Since the Middle Ages, Europe had knowna tradition of political and religious asylum, which achieved prominence dur-ing the wars of religion and the international political struggles surroundingthe revolutions in England and France.20 Then in 1815 England proclaimedthe principle of the nonextradition of political criminals; ten years later itrefused Russia’s demand to hand over N. I. Turgenev, one of the Decembrists.In 1830 and 1831 there arose in France and Belgium the concept of political

16 Viaud (n. 7 above), pp. 155–58; Papadatos, pp. 38–41; Napoleonic penal code,arts. 86, 89, in L. Rondonneau, ed., Corps de droit francais: Civil, commercial etcriminel (Paris, 1810), p. 447.

17 Such codes were adopted in Prussia (1830), Bavaria (1831), Sweden (1832),Greece (1833), Rome (1836), and Baden (1839): O. I. Chistiakov, ed., Zakonodatel’stvopervoi poloviny XIX veka, vol. 6 of Rossiiskoe zakonodatel’stvo X–XX vekov (Moscow,1988), p. 163.

18 Papadatos, p. 50; Michelle Perrot, “L’impossible prison,” in her L’impossibleprison: Recherches sur le systeme penitentiaire au XIXe siecle (Paris, 1980), p. 59;Ingraham, p. 153.

19 Ingraham, pp. 153–54, 191.20 Papadatos, pp. 59–62; Ia. Fegin, “Vydacha politicheskikh prestupnikov,” Zhurnal

grazhdanskogo i ugolovnogo prava, no. 4 (1884), pt. 2:52–58. It bears noting that theEmperor Paul gave shelter to French monarchists. See Ia. D. Baum, “Bor’ba tsarskogopravitel’stva s pravom ubezhishcha,” Katorga i ssylka 32 (1927): 75.




crime (infraction politique) as a category of crime whose perpetrators deservedspecial, more lenient treatment. In consequence, France and Belgium in 1833declared their intention not to extradite political offenders. Although in thatsame year Prussia, Russia, and Austria pledged joint action against revolu-tionary activists, and Austria and Russia agreed to extradite political offenders,by the 1860s even these countries were signing bilateral conventions on ex-tradition that in nearly every case excluded political criminals. The so-calledBelgian amendment, deriving from a Franco-Belgian convention of 1856 thatdefined as a regular crime any attempt to kill a head of state or members ofhis family, was gradually adopted throughout Europe, yet it did not avail theRussian government. Russia’s only success in winning the extradition of apolitical offender occurred with Sergei Nechaev, whom the Swiss governmentreturned to Russia in 1871 on the condition that he be tried as a regular crim-inal. Despite assiduous diplomatic efforts by Russia, Switzerland refused toreturn the political terrorists S. M. Kravchinskii and V. I. Zasulich (the formerkilled a government official; the latter wounded one).21

As Russia faced a rash of terrorist attacks in the late 1870s and early 1880s,European jurists continued to argue about the definition of political crime. Oneschool defined it subjectively, according to the intention or goal being pursuedby the perpetrator. Another school emphasized the objective results of the act.22

The Russian jurist Ia. Fegin argued that regicide is the “most political ofcrimes” and therefore should benefit from the exemption from extradition that“everyone in Europe agrees” should attend political crimes. In fact, a congressof jurists meeting in Oxford in 1880 resolved that each state from which anextradition was requested had the right to make its own determination, whichimplied that many jurists were having second thoughts about the blanket prin-ciple of nonextradition of political offenders.23

Several factors combined by the 1890s to undermine the general agreementabout the special treatment supposedly deserved by political offenders. Mostspectacular was the rise of anarchism and the consequent intensification ofterrorist violence in nearly all the countries of Europe (and beyond). Thisviolence prompted the French government, for example, to adopt a series ofharsh legislative acts, called the lois scelerates (1893–94), aimed specificallyat anarchists.24 Also important were the acute labor conflicts, aggressive na-tionalism, and tense international competition witnessed at the end of the cen-

21 Papadatos, pp. 63–69; Fabreguettes, pp. 127, 136; Fegin, pp. 58–59; Baum, pp.83–93; N. A. Troitskii, Tsarskie sudy protiv revoliutsionnoi Rossii: Politicheskie prot-sessy, 1871–1880 gg. (Saratov, 1976), pp. 66–68.

22 Viaud, pp. 248–56; Fegin, p. 35; Ingraham, p. 93; Papadatos, pp. 71–74.23 Fegin, pp. 34, 43, 63.24 Papadatos (n. 5 above), pp. vii, 52; Ingraham, p. 168.



68 Daly

tury. The leaders and populations of the European countries felt less securethan they had earlier in the century and therefore less generous toward per-ceived threats to the state—be they internal or external. For the state by thelast part of the century had acquired a new significance in all the Europeancountries that had broadened the right to political participation. Wherever pop-ular sovereignty was conceived as the foundation of the political system, anyattack on the institutions of the state or on the government elected by themajority could be conceived as an affront to the people itself. Already in 1890Lombroso and Laschi were defining political crime as “any violent harmcaused to laws established by the majority to preserve the political, economic,or social system that it desires.” Although they too agreed that political crim-inals should be punished less severely than regular criminals, in France, bythe year 1902, the opposite sometimes was true: political offenders foundguilty of committing grave regular crimes were often punished more harshlythan regular criminals committing the same crimes.25

During this period in Western Europe there developed an integrated conceptof the established order that encompassed political, social, and economic in-stitutions and relations for the defense of which highly trained criminologistsand various legal and medical experts elaborated sophisticated arguments.26

This broad coalition of educated elites enormously strengthened the establishedorder in those countries where it arose. Even so, the principle of privilegedtreatment for political offenders remained more or less undisputed until theWorld War in the Western European countries. The war marked a watershed.The subsequent mass democratic and totalitarian governments were far lessdisposed to act indulgently toward political criminals. Ingraham was prompted,in regard to this shift, to suppose that “Future historians may assess the pe-culiarly ambivalent and lenient view of political crime and criminals held bythe ruling circles of Western European nations in the nineteenth century asbeing a unique phenomenon in the broad context of man’s history.”27

RUSSIA’S LAWS ON POLITICAL CRIME

How did late Imperial Russia’s treatment of political criminals relate to nine-teenth-century criminological trends? To answer this question it is first nec-essary to analyze Russia’s laws on political crime. They may be divided intotwo categories: those applied by judicial authorities, primarily courts, and those

25 Ingraham (n. 6 above), p. 191; Lombroso and Laschi (n. 4 above), 2:247–50, 260;Viaud (n. 6 above), pp. 303–4; P. Fabreguettes, Societe, etat, patrie: Etudes historiques,politiques, philosophiques, sociales, et juridiques, 2 vols. (Paris, 1897–98) 2:143–44.

26 Dupont-Bouchat (n. 9 above), pp. 79–105.27 Kirchheimer (n. 12 above), pp. 36, 40–41; Ingraham, pp. 181, 216–20.




applied by administrative authorities, such as governors, police officials, andsenior ministers of government, even the emperor himself. Judicial authoritieswere governed by the penal codes of 1845 and the criminal code of 1903;government officials, by a body of special legislation; the emperor, by bothspecial legislation and custom.

The penal code of 1845 drew on the Muscovite law code of 1649, the penalprovisions of Peter I’s military statute (Artikul voinskii) of 1716, and the re-formed penal codes of Western Europe.28 The Russian code of 1845 prescribedharsh punishments, including prison and even penal servitude, for crimesagainst the Russian Orthodox church and faith (arts. 182–262).29 The muchbriefer section on state crimes (O prestupleniiakh gosudarstvennykh; arts. 263–82) included the code’s only capital offenses.30 (Since the reign of Catherine II,only political crimes entailed the death penalty.)31 The first such offense wasdefined as committing or intending to commit lese-majeste (arts. 263–64), aswell as aiding and abetting, including failing to denounce, perpetrators of thesame (art. 265). Lese-majeste included attacks against the person, honor, orpower of the emperor, as well as of members of his family (art. 266).32 Thecode also interpreted as capital crimes conspiring to overthrow the existinggovernmental and state order and the failure to denounce the same (arts. 271–72), as well as high treason (arts. 275–76).33 This brief, but exhaustive, list of

28 Chistiakov, ed. (n. 17 above), pp. 17–19, 163; N. S. Tagantsev, Russkoe ugolovnoepravo: Lektsii: Chast’ obshchaia, 2 vols. (1887; reprint, Moscow, 1994), 1:98–107.

29 Central to crimes against the faith was the concern that they could provoke apos-tasy from Russian Orthodoxy. Thus, if three Jews should blaspheme against Christ inthe presence of two Muslims, this act did not constitute a crime. The law code of 1649had accorded crimes against the church and the faith a similar primacy of position.

30 The only other capital crime was willful breach of quarantine (Donald C. Rawson,“The Death Penalty in Late Tsarist Russia: An Investigation of Judicial Procedures,”Russian History 11 [Spring 1984]: 32), but apparently no one was executed on thisbasis (see the list of death sentences issued from 1826 to 1906 in M. N. Gernet, O. B.Gol’dovskii, and I. N. Sakharov, eds., Protiv smertnoi kazni, 2d ed. [Moscow, 1907],pp. 385–423).

31 Efforts thereafter to expand the number of capital crimes had failed. See PeterLiessem, “Die Todesstrafe im spaten Zarenreich: Rechtslage, Realitat und offentlicheDiskussion,” Jahrbucher fur Geschichte Osteuropas 37 (1989): 493.

32 The laws of several western and central European countries (including Austria,Germany, England, and Denmark) retained the death penalty, at least until WorldWar I, for attacks on the life of the ruler or head of state.

33 Attacks against the sovereign and his state were called “the first two points” inearlier criminal legislation. On previous penal legislation, see Chistiakov, ed., pp. 349–52. On earlier state-crime legislation, see S. V. Kodan, “Gosudarstvennye prestuplen-iia,” in Otechestvennaia istoriia: Istoriia Rossii s drevneishikh vremen do 1917 goda:Entsiklopediia, 5 vols., ed. V. L. Ianin et al. (Moscow, 1994) (hereafter OI), 1:615–16.



70 Daly

capital offenses was a clear departure from Peter I’s military statute, whichhad prescribed the death penalty for 122 offenses, many of them not definableas state crimes.34 Section 3 also included some harsh punishments for verballyinsulting the honor of the sovereign or members of his family (up to eightyears of hard labor).

To the crimes against sovereign and state, the penal code added crimesagainst the governmental order (arts. 283–357), whose central theme was theresistance to or the failure to obey constituted governmental authorities butwithout the intention to overthrow the absolutist order as such. These crimesranged from open rebellion to disregarding minor administrative orders. Thegravest of these crimes—for example, participation in a violent rebellionaimed at preventing government officials from enforcing an Imperial decree—carried harsh penalties, including long periods of penal servitude (art. 284)—but not capital punishment. In many of these crimes, attenuating circum-stances—for example, whether the culprit had been drinking—could meanthe difference between a lengthy sentence of hard labor and a six-months’ termof prison (art. 309).35

The judicial reform of 1864 separated the judicial branch of governmentfrom the executive and thereby undermined the power of administrative au-thorities. This was a definite step toward constitutionalism and the rule of law.At the same time, however, the judicial statutes declared crimes against thestate “much more important and dangerous than other crimes” and thereforeremoved them from the competency of jury trials and even of the district courts(okruzhnye sudy).36 The statutes also did not alter in any respect the definitionsof crimes and punishments of the penal code.

Other laws, adopted over time, supplemented those in the code of 1845. Forexample, the code prescribed harsh punishments for taking part in secret so-cieties aiming to overthrow the Imperial order or even pursuing “harmful”ends (arts. 347–48), yet it was often difficult to prosecute such crimes, espe-cially after the promulgation in 1864 of the judicial statutes—when, coinci-

34 Cyril Bryner, “The Issue of Capital Punishment in the Reign of Elizabeth Pe-trovna,” Russian Review 49 (October 1990): 394.

35 Since these provisions were a good deal less sweeping and draconian than theEuropean Old Regimes’ penal law and only marginally harsher than those in the Na-poleonic penal code of 1810 (see Ingraham [n. 6 above], p. 73), it is incorrect to suggestthat they “are to totalitarianism what the Magna Carta is to liberty” (Richard Pipes,Russia under the Old Regime [New York, 1974], p. 295). Moreover, since a totalitarian,or indeed any form of absolutist, government is defined by the absence of formal rulesor laws limiting its exercise of power, a law code, which formally enacts such limits,cannot properly be conceived as a precondition of its establishment.

36 Official commentary on art. 1032, cited in N. A. Troitskii, Tsarizm pod sudomprogressivnoi obshchestvennosti, 1866–1895 gg. (Moscow, 1979), p. 105.




dentally, secret organizations began to grow more abundant, active, even vi-olent. Therefore, a law of March 27, 1867, interpreted membership in anysecret society as a criminal act, though the harshness of one’s punishment stilldepended on the nature of the society and whether one played an active rolein it. Thus, persons aware of secret associations aimed at changing the existingstate order, but who failed to denounce them to the government, could beimprisoned for no longer than eight months or charged fines of no more than500 rubles.37 Most of the members of the Going to the People movement, whowere brought to trial, were convicted on this basis.38 As the only recent studentof the history of political crime in Europe, Barton Ingraham, has noted, West-ern European laws forbidding conspiracies, from which the Russian law onsecret societies derived, were often the only way to get at potential perpetratorsof political crimes.39

In 1903 the government adopted a new criminal code (Ugolovnoe ulozh-enie), whose sections on political and religious crimes were significantly ex-panded in comparison with the penal code.40 The new code criminalized thepreparation, distribution, or public reading of written material inciting to trea-son, draft evasion, or any such insubordination, as well as the sowing of dis-cord between factory owners and workers or between social classes. Suchmanifestations of collective violence as pogroms, major strikes, and violentdemonstrations were also defined as criminal. Severe punishments were spec-ified for group participation in incidents of collective violence whenever singleperpetrators were not discovered. This legal provision theoretically lessenedthe need for the security law of 1881. Similarly, membership in a variety ofunregistered political parties was made a criminal offense, in a manner remi-niscent of Germany’s antisocialist laws of 1878 to 1890.41 The code also re-

37 Polnoe sobranie zakonov Rossiiskoi imperii (St. Petersburg, 1855–1917) (hereafterPSZ), ser. 2, vol. 42, pt. 1, no. 44402.

38 Troitskii, Tsarskie sudy (n. 21 above), p. 109.39 Ingraham, pp. 30, 187–89.40 Only the sections on political and religious crime came into effect. Regarding

political crime, articles 99–134 (but not articles 120, 122, and 133) came into force bya law of June 7, 1904 (PSZ, ser. 3, vol. 26, no. 27560). See A. P. Engel’ke and N. E.Ignatovich, eds., Deistvuiushchaia chast’ Ugolovnogo ulozheniia, Vysochaishe utver-zhdennogo 22 marta 1903 g. (St. Petersburg, 1908); Jorg Baberowski, Autokratie undJustiz: Zum Verhaltnis von Rechsstaatlichkeit und Ruckstandigkeit im ausgehendenZarenreich, 1864–1914 (Frankfurt am Main, 1996), p. 734. The government’s failurefully to enact the 1903 Criminal Code created a dualism in criminal law and provokedconfusion in the investigation and adjudication of crime (P. Sh. Ganelin et al., eds.,Sovet ministrov Rossiiskoi imperii, 1905–1906 gg.: Dokumenty i materialy [Leningrad,1990], p. 52, n. 10).

41 See Kodan, “Gosudarstvennye prestupleniia,” p. 616; Baberowski, pp. 208, 734.See also Chistiakov, ed. (n. 17 above), p. 172; S. S. Titkova, “Razrabotka Ugolov-



72 Daly

stricted the use of the death penalty for political criminals. Thus, capital pun-ishment was abolished for attacks against members of the imperial family otherthan the emperor, the empress, and the heir, or against the guardsmen pro-tecting them, as well as for nonessential participation in, or failure to denounce,plots against the state or the emperor. In addition, the new code empoweredthe courts to substitute hard labor for capital punishment on their own author-ity.42 Overall, the criminal code of 1903 promised to make it easier for thegovernment to fight sedition within the bounds of the criminal justice system.

Senior officials sought to pass a few more laws against political offensesbefore the constitutional era commenced with the opening of the State Dumain April 1906. On January 21, the State Council approved a bill requiring thetrial by military courts of all persons accused of violently attacking governmentofficials, which would have meant demanding the death penalty for them. Thebill failed to become law when a minority of state counselors, supported bythe emperor, demurred on the grounds that it would have marked a clear de-parture from Russian and European criminological theory and practice. TheState Council, at the same sitting, proposed a bill specifying that persons pre-paring or possessing explosive devices with the intention of harming the statesecurity or public order should be tried in military courts and be liable tosentences of up to fifteen years of hard labor. In this case, Nicholas ratifiedthe proposal only after demanding that such cases be decided in the civilianjudicial tribunals (sudebnye palaty).43 Since the procedural rules governingthese courts were far more favorable to defendants than were those in themilitary courts, this change represented a distinctly liberal amendment to theproposed bill. On March 23, a law came into force making it a crime to dis-tribute false information about activities of government officials and institu-tions. On April 15, the emperor signed a bill making instigators of rural strikesliable to be sentenced to up to four years’ confinement in a fortress. Finally,in December, the Council of Ministers recommended the implementation ofarticle 133 of the Criminal Code of 1903, which threatened with arrest anypublished acclamation of grave crimes. The ministers were especially con-

nogo ulozheniia i primenenie ego v bor’be s revoliutsionnym dvizheniem,” in Pravovyeproblemy istorii gosudarstvennykh uchrezhdenii: Mezhvuzovskii sbornik nauchnykhtrudov, ed. B. A. Starodubskii (Sverdlovsk, 1983), pp. 81–86; Volker Rabe, Der Wi-derspruch von Rechtsstaatlichkeit und strafender Verwaltung in Russland, 1881–1917:Motive, Handhabung und Auswirkungen der administrativen Verbannung von Revo-lutionaren, Wissenschaftliche Beitrage Karlsruhe, no. 14 (Karlsruhe, 1985), p. 42.

42 A. A. Piontkovskii, Smertnaia kazn’ v Evrope (Kazan’, 1908), pp. 82–83, 91–92.43 A. Shebalov, ed., “Vopros o smertnoi kazni za politicheskie prestupleniia nakanune

pervoi Dumy: Arkhivnye materialy po istorii 1905–1906 g.g.,” Katorga i ssylka 17(1925):187–97.




cerned about recent praise in print for the terrorist M. A. Spiridonova. InDecember, after lengthy debate and extensive research indicating similar leg-islation in the major Western European countries, the government adopted alaw under article 87 making it a crime to praise any illegal action in print orin speech.44 The Duma let this bill fall into abeyance.45 Legislative gridlockafter the creation of the Duma thwarted all further efforts to adopt new lawsrestricting political activity.46

Russia’s laws against sedition were in general harsher, more abundant, andmore vaguely formulated than those of the major Western European powers,a fact that was documented by high-level government commissions under thechairmanship of I. V. Frisch (in 1872) and D. N. Nabokov (in 1879). Thus,for example, violent attempts to alter the state order, form of government, ororder of succession, while a capital offense in Russia, were to be punishedwith life imprisonment in Germany, with twenty-one to twenty-three years’incarceration in a fortress in Italy, with penal servitude for life in England, andwith exile in a fortified place (usually one of the islands off the coast of Guy-ana) for an unspecified period in France.47 Moreover, it was easier in Russiato impose the harshest punishments for political crimes because the wordingof the laws was often extremely loose, as in the law banning membership insecret societies of any kind. Accusing people of seditious capital crimes wasalso far easier in Russia, thanks to the clauses criminalizing the mere intentionto attempt to commit a seditious act or the failure to denounce such an inten-

44 PSZ, ser. 3, vol. 26, pt. 1, no. 27395 (false information); A. F. Berezhnoi, Tsarskaiatsenzura i bor’ba bol’shevikov za svobodu pechati (1885–1914) (Leningrad, 1967), pp.199–200 (false information); I. Kovalev, ed., “Tsarizm v bor’be s revoliutsionnoi pe-chat’iu v 1905 g.,” Krasnyi arkhiv (hereafter: KA) 105 (1941): 141 (false information),151–54 (acclamation); B. V. Anan’ich, et al., Krizis samoderzhaviia v Rossii, 1895–1917 (Leningrad, 1984), p. 283 (instigators).

45 N. I. Lazarevskii, ed., Zakonodatel’nye akty perekhodnogo vremeni, 1904–1908gg.: Sbornik zakonov, manifestov, ukazov, 3d rev. ed. (St. Petersburg, 1909), p. 526.

46 On a few occasions the Senate narrowed or expanded the scope of important lawson political crime. For example, in 1906 it ruled that the courts no longer had toestablish the intention to incite violence on the part of persons accused, under article129 of the criminal code, of distributing incendiary publications, as long as the accusedunderstood they were incendiary. See Sergei Ordynskii, “Pechat’ i sud,” in Svobodapechati pri obnovlennom stroe (St. Petersburg, 1912), p. 140.

47 Troitskii, Tsarskie sudy, p. 108; Piontkovskii, p. 22; Viaud (n. 6 above), p. 379;James Fitzjames Stephen, A Digest of the Criminal Law (Crimes and Punishments),6th ed., ed. Herbert Stephen and Harry Lushington Stephen (London, 1904), art. 63.Another commission headed by Frisch urged in May 1881 that capital punishmentshould not be used at all against religious and political criminals, since it tended, theyargued, to “stoke the fires of opposition”: S. N. Viktorskii, Istoriia smertnoi kazni vRossii i sovremennoe ee sostoianie (Moscow, 1912), p. 323.



74 Daly

tion, although in practice such laws were enforced rarely, if at all.48 It is alsosignificant that none of these countries but Russia retained criminal sanctionsfor a wide variety of “religious” crimes.

It is certainly true that the laws against sedition remained harsher in Russiathan in the other major European countries, but, as Lombroso and Laschiargued in the 1890s, the harshness of punishments against political crime mustdepend on the local conditions. Where revolts and rebelliousness are frequentbut not generally destructive, as they were in, say, France (but not in Russia),such punishments should be less severe. In more primitive polities, wherepeople venerate the sovereign ruler, lese-majeste must be considered differ-ently than in more modern, civilized countries.49 There is little doubt that boththe revolutionaries and the defenders of the late Imperial Russian governmentbelieved strongly that the emperor’s personal security was inseparably linkedto the foundation of the existing order; otherwise People’s Will, the late eigh-teenth-century Russian terrorist organization, would not have put so much storein assassinating him,50 and the laws protecting him would not have remainedso severe for so long. Russia’s rulers and senior officials also justifiably fearedfor their own lives, as was graphically expressed by revolutionaries in Odessain 1878 who mocked the reliance of K. G. Knop, the gendarme chief of Odessa,on four bodyguards. “Perhaps,” they wrote to him, “it would be safer for youto join the revolution; at least we can walk the streets.” In August 1906 Nich-olas lamented in a letter to his mother that, because of the terrorist danger, hewas a virtual prisoner in his palace outside the capital at Peterhof. As late as1911, the governor of Penza, I. F. Koshko, feared continuously for his verylife. His friends, he later recalled, were afraid to talk to him in the street.51 Ofcourse, the political opposition was so strong and violent in Russia at least inpart because of government arbitrariness and the exclusion from the politicalprocess until 1906 of anyone who was not a senior government official.

POLITICAL TRIALS

Political trials were important public events in nineteenth-century Europe, bothin Russia and in the West. The public was outraged when five Decembristswere hanged in 1826, after a closed and procedurally unreformed but not

48 Viaud, p. 381; Troitskii, Tsarskie sudy (n. 21 above), pp. 108–10.49 Lombroso and Laschi (n. 4 above), 2:262–64.50 M. G. Sedov, Geroicheskii period revoliutsionnogo narodnichestva: Iz istorii pol-

iticheskoi bor’by (Moscow, 1966), pp. 194, 228.51 Troitskii, Tsarskie sudy, pp. 84–85; M. Pokrovskii, ed., “Perepiska Nikolaia II i

Marii Fedorovny, 1905–1906 gg.,” KA 22 (1927): 198; I. F. Koshko, Vospominaniiagubernatora (1905–1914 g.): Novgorod, Samara, Penza (Petrograd, 1916), p. 147.




wholly arbitrary trial, for attempting to overthrow the Russian emperor andsystem of government. Laura Engelstein has viewed these executions as evi-dence of Nicholas I breaking “with the posture of the Enlightenment.” Yet fouryears earlier a similarly failed coup attempt in France resulted in the sentencingto death—and beheading—of an equal number of conspirators. Similarly, inEngland forty-six people were hanged for committing forgery and five werehanged for plotting to murder the cabinet in 1820 alone. Political trials wereespecially frequent in France in the 1820s and 1830s. The government, onaccount of these trials, in which defense attorneys implored jurors to contrastheartfelt enthusiasm to the unprincipled purposes of their accusers, was harshlycriticized by much of the educated public, a pattern repeated in Russia in the1870s.52

A variety of courts in Russia tried political cases in late Imperial Russia.The higher criminal court (Verkhovnyi ugolovnyi sud) was constituted, begin-ning in 1764, on an ad hoc basis at the request of the emperor. In the nineteenthcentury, such courts tried only the Decembrists D. V. Karakozov (1866) andA. K. Solov’ev (1879).53 The judicial statutes of 1864 authorized the newlycreated judicial tribunals to try the least important political crime cases (thosethat could not lead to punishment with deprivation or limitation of rights) but,following widespread continental European practice, to do so with govern-ment-appointed representatives of the estates (gentry, towns, and village ad-ministration) in the place of juries.54 A government report on the judicial stat-utes explained why standard juries could not be permitted to take part in suchcases: “State crimes,” it asserted, “are much more important and dangerousthan other crimes, but because of their nature they do not always provokerevulsion in every member of society, as other crimes do. Moreover, manypeople view these cases with sympathy, instead of with condemnation. There-fore, permitting a jury to decide the criminality or non-criminality of certainteachings and actions of the revolutionaries would mean leaving the state,society, and the authorities without any protection.”55

52 Engelstein (n. 3 above), pp. 321–22; Gernet, Gol’dovskii, and Sakharov, eds. (n.30 above), p. 386 (Russia); John Lawrence, A History of Capital Punishment (NewYork, 1960), p. 14 (England); Ingraham (n. 6 above), pp. 76–78 (France), 78 n. 54(beheadings).

53 O. F. Kozlov et al., eds., Gosudarstvennost’ Rossii: Slovar’ Spravochnik, 2 vols.(Moscow, 1996–99), 1:63–64; Piontkovskii (n. 42 above), pp. 76–77; “Istoricheskaiaspravka,” Pravo, no. 28 (1906): 2367. Karakozov and Solov’ev had attempted to as-sassinate Alexander II.

54 B. V. Vilenskii, ed., Sudebnaia reforma, vol. 8 of Rossiiskoe zakonodatel’stvo X–XX vekov (Moscow, 1991), pp. 20–21; Baberowski (n. 40 above), pp. 191–92. Baber-owski notes that this mode of “estate justice [Standgerichtsbarkeit] was used againstnot just terrorists but also hooligans, looters, and other regular criminals” (p. 766).

55 Troitskii, Tsarskie sudy, p. 105.



76 Daly

Yet from the outset even the specially constituted judicial tribunals disap-pointed officialdom. In summer 1872, for example, the St. Petersburg JudicialTribunal exonerated most of the associates of the notorious terrorist SergeiNechaev. Consequently, the government created a special office (Osoboe pri-sutstvie) of the Senate to try all but the least important political cases. Thisoffice heard thirty-seven of the fifty-two political cases from 1873 to 1878,56

yet it proved unsatisfactory. Since transporting large numbers of political de-fendants to St. Petersburg was financially burdensome, slowed down the ju-dicial process, and could be seen to endanger both public order and publicrelations, a law of May 9, 1878, stipulated that most political cases shouldonce again be tried regionally in the judicial tribunals.57

In general, however, political trials presented inherent problems from thegovernment’s point of view. Political defendants often found that they coulduse the courts as a forum from which to broadcast their views and to criticizethe government, and many judges appeared willing to treat political criminalsas worthy of special respect and privileges, following the typical practice inWestern Europe.58 The eloquence and skill of the attorneys who defendedantigovernment activists, and the latters’ ability often to dominate their trialsmorally and even procedurally and to win the sympathy of both the educatedpublic and the judges, angered conservative public figures and governmentofficials and caused political crime cases to be handled both administrativelyand in the military courts with greater and greater frequency.59 What the gov-ernment wanted to avoid above all was, as Laura Engelstein put it, ennoblingthe revolutionary enterprise “by the dignity of justice, which championed therule of law even on behalf of the lawless.”60 Beyond using the courts to advancetheir own moral position in society, the most sophisticated revolutionaries inthe 1870s took great pains to avoid divulging any information to the police orto prosecutors (from whom they feared no violence), as a result of which itbecame harder to win convictions against them in court.61

Beginning in 1878, the majority of political trials were handled by militarycourts. Those courts tried forty-eight of sixty-three political trials from August

56 P. A. Zaionchkovskii, Rossiiskoe samoderzhavie v kontse XIX stoletiia (Politi-cheskaia reaktsiia 80–x–nachala 90–x godov) (Moscow, 1970), p. 104; Slukhotskii,pp. 257–58; Troitskii, Tsarskie sudy, pp. 98, 103.

57 Slukhotskii, p. 263.58 Baberowski, pp. 663–90.59 There is evidence that some jurors in trials of political activists voted to acquit for

fear of reprisals. See M. N. Gernet, Istoriia tsarskoi tiur’my, 3d ed., 5 vols. (Moscow,1961–63), 3:97.

60 Feliks Kon, Za piat’desiat let, 2d ed. (Moscow, 1936), p. 148; P. A. Valuev, Dnev-nik (1877–1884), ed. V. Ia. Iakovlev-Bogucharskii and P. E. Shchegolev (Petrograd,1919), p. 159 (diary entry for March 29, 1881); Troitskii, Tsarskie sudy (n. 21 above),p. 282; Engelstein, pp. 332–38, 340.

61 Troitskii, Tsarskie sudy, pp. 120–21.




9, 1878, to March 1, 1881, and forty-five out of eighty-five such trials fromMarch 1, 1881, to January 1, 1890.62 An Imperial order of May 18, 1885,directed the military courts to take into account mitigating circumstances inpolitical trials only after first petitioning the emperor himself. Since most mili-tary judges were loath to trouble him, they tended to issue harsher sentencesthan they would otherwise have done.63 A law of February 12, 1887, gave thejustice minister the power to close to the public any trial in the regular courtsif he deemed this necessary to “protect the dignity of the state power, to pre-serve public order, or to ensure the proper prosecution of court action.”64 More-over, from 1887 to the end of the century the government as a rule did notissue official notices about political trials.65 The Imperial government in thelate 1880s also sought to strengthen its control over the courts in a variety ofother ways, but to little avail. The “counterreformed” courts could not alwaysbe counted on to punish people whom the government deemed guilty of po-litical crimes, and revolutionary activists continued to use the courts as a forumfor launching ideological attacks on the social and political order. Officialdom,in this connection, was far from blameless. Painstaking attention to the re-quirements of effective prosecution might have yielded a greater measure ofsuccess than senior policymakers imagined possible. In any event, the govern-ment gradually abandoned the courts in its struggle against the opposition.66

The civilian courts heard not a single political case from 1894 to 1901, andthe military courts tried only seventeen such cases between 1885 and 1903.67

Increasingly the government relied instead on executive authority.

62 N. A. Troitskii, “Narodnaia volia” pered tsarskim sudom, 1880–1891 gg. (Sara-tov, 1971), p. 73.

63 Ibid., p. 198.64 PSZ (n. 37 above), ser. 3, vol. 7, no. 4227.65 Troitskii (n. 36 above), p. 52.66 Troitskii, “Narodnaia volia” pered tsarskim sudom, p. 255.67 Marc Szeftel, “Personal Inviolability in the Legislation of the Russian Absolute

Monarchy,” American Slavic and East European Review 17 (1958): 19, n. 30; WilliamC. Fuller, Jr., “Civilians in Russian Military Courts, 1881–1904,” Russian Review 41(July 1982): 293, and on the tensions between civilian and military authorities, seeCivil-Military Conflict in Imperial Russia: 1881–1914 (Princeton, N.J., 1985). Theregular courts tried twenty-one alleged political criminals in 1903 and eighty-four in1904. See L. I. Gol’dman, ed., Politicheskie protsessy v Rossii: 1901–1917 (Moscow,1932), 1:52, 61. The law of June 7, 1904, made it harder to persuade potential witnessesto testify against revolutionaries by stipulating that state-crime cases should be triedopenly: Who could say what activists ready to shed the blood of officials might do toa witness who spoke openly in court? See N. N. Ansimov, “Okhrannye otdeleniia imestnaia vlast’ tsarskoi Rossii v nachale XX v.,” Sovetskoe gosudarstvo i pravo, no. 5(1991): 123. The military courts played an even more modest role in the government’santisedition campaign in these two years. They tried only forty-three political defen-dants in 1903 and eighteen in 1904. See N. N. Polianskii, Tsarskie voennye sudy vbor’be s revoliutsiei: 1905–1907 gg. (Moscow, 1958), p. 33.



78 Daly

ADMINISTRATIVE PUNISHMENTS

Even the modest guarantees enshrined in the judicial statutes soon appearedto favor opponents of the government far more than administrative officialswere willing to countenance. Beginning with the early 1870s, a series of speciallegislative acts authorized the administrative prosecution of state crimes. Extra-judicial forms of punishing alleged criminals had previously been resorted to,but the judicial reform of 1864 had put an end to them. Seven years later,however, the justice minister won the right, in consultation with the directorof the Third Section, to drop any state crime case and to propose to the em-peror, again in consultation with the director of the Third Section, to imposeexile, probation, and fines by administrative fiat on state-crime suspects, theinvestigation of whose cases was thus halted.68

With the rise of terrorist attacks against government officials, and againstthe tsar himself beginning in 1878, further laws were adopted to permit theadministrative punishment of alleged political offenders.69 The most draconianof these laws, promulgated on April 2, 1879, allowed governors general totake any measures they deemed necessary for preserving public tranquillity.The security law of August 14, 1881, which rescinded all these previous specialmeasures, retained several of their main provisions, limiting their scope some-what, and thenceforth constituted the second method of handling political casesadministratively. The law permitted administrative authorities, including gov-ernors and police, to detain suspects for up to one week (one month underspecial circumstances), to propose the administrative exile of alleged politicaloffenders for up to five years, and to request the transfer of certain cases tomilitary courts. This legislative act remained in force until 1917. Althoughseveral of its provisions resembled those of contemporaneous legislation inWestern European countries (until 1885 the French police could on their ownauthority detain anyone without a warrant, and the German antisocialist lawsof 1878–90 permitted administrative authorities to banish people from themajor cities for lengthy periods, to close publications, and to seize property),this was the harshest and most sweeping legislation of its kind in Europe.70

68 PSZ (n. 37 above), ser. 2, vol. 46, pt. 1, no. 49615 (May 19, 1871); L. Slukhotskii,“Ocherk deiatel’nosti Ministerstva iustitsii v bor’be s politicheskimi prestupleniiami,”Istoriko-revoliutsionnyi sbornik 3 (1926): 255–56, 260.

69 See Jonathan W. Daly, Autocracy under Siege: Security Police and Opposition inRussia, 1866–1905 (DeKalb, Ill., 1998), pp. 18–27, 33–41.

70 Louis Andrieux, Souvenirs d’un prefet de police, 16th ed., 2 vols. (Paris, 1885),1:112; Vernon L. Lidtke, The Outlawed Party: Social Democracy in Germany, 1878–1890 (Princeton, N.J., 1966), pp. 79–83. Elsewhere I have argued that the security lawof August 14, 1881, “was not a turning point on the path toward a modern ‘policestate’ but a sign of that country’s uneasy transition from an absolutist to a constitutional




Government officials were divided in their assessments of Russia’s laws onadministrative punishments. Between 1878 and 1882, two high-level commis-sions proposed the abolition of the administrative resolution of state-crimecases, though none of the proposals became law.71 At the same time, manyadministrative officials viewed the powers bestowed on them by the securitylaw of 1881 as essential to ordinary governance in Russia. A police departmentreport submitted to the emperor on May 12, 1887, even suggested that admin-istrative punishments were often merciful. Many antigovernment activists werevery young, it argued. In time they would likely come to see the error of theirways—that is, as long as they avoided falling into the judicial maelstrom withthe attendant loss of civil rights. Senior police officials apparently took thisargument quite seriously. In 1892, for example, police department DirectorP. N. Durnovo asserted to one revolutionary that “administrative exile savedso many talented people. Look at your friend [D. A.] Klements. He would nothave become a prominent scholar if he had been deprived of his rights andexiled judicially.”72 Of course, it seems highly unlikely that the available evi-dence against most administrative political exiles would have sufficed to con-vince a Russian court of law that they were guilty of seditious activity. Indeed,the report of May 12, 1887, quite honestly admitted that in purely practicalterms administrative exile was preferable to trying malefactors in the courts,which process was unpredictable, complicated, and time-consuming.73

order.” See my “On the Significance of Emergency Legislation in Late Imperial Rus-sia,” Slavic Review 54 (Fall 1995): 602.

71 Slukhotskii, pp. 275–76; S. M. Kazantsev, “Prokurorskii nadzor i sledstviia popoliticheskim delam v Rossii vo vtoroi polovine XIX veka,” in Gosudarstvennyi stroii politiko-pravovye idei Rossii vtoroi poloviny XIX stoletiia, ed. Mikhail DmitrievichKarpachev and Mikhail Grigor’evich Korotkikh (Voronezh, 1987), p. 121.

72 V. M. Andreev, “Chislennost’ i sostav politicheskikh ssyl’nykh v vostochnoi Sibiriv 70–90-x godakh XIX veka,” in Ssyl’nye revoliutsionery v Sibiri (XIX v.-fevral’ 1917g.) (Irkutsk, 1980), 5:54–55; Rabe (n. 41 above), p. 75; A. I. Ivanchin-Pisarev, “Vos-pominaniia o P. N. Durnovo,” Katorga i Ssylka 7 (1930): 57. An active member ofLand and Liberty, Klements was exiled administratively to Siberia in 1879. There hegave up political activity, though he always remained a radical sympathizer, and enteredgovernment service. In 1910, he retired as director of the ethnographic section of theRussian Museum in St. Petersburg. Had he been exiled judicially, and therefore strippedof his civil rights, he could never have occupied that position in government service(S. I. Gol’dfarb, “Klements, D. S.,” in Russkie pisateli, 1800–1917: Biograficheskiislovar’, ed. P. N. Nikolaev et al., 5 vols. [Moscow, 1989–99], 2:550–51).

73 Andreev, 5:54–55. The use of extrajudicial means for punishing political offend-ers, it should be noted, was common to all the continental European countries, in partbecause the precise formulations of laws prohibiting treasonable and seditious activitiesoften made it difficult to prove guilt in regular courts of law. See Joachim Wagner,Politischer Terrorismus und Strafrecht im Deutschen Kaiserreich von 1871 (Heidelberg,1981), pp. 345, 358, 398.



80 Daly

The use of administrative punishments against political criminals was alsorestricted after the turn of the century. A law of June 7, 1904, designed tobring the various laws on political crime into harmony with the judicial statutesof 1864, revoked the justice minister’s authority to recommend the adminis-trative resolution of state-crime cases, thus ending his—and the emperor’s—direct involvement with administrative punishments. It seemed to many ob-servers that henceforth court sentencing would become the normal method ofdealing with state crime.74 In practice, however, the Revolution of 1905 wouldprovoke a massive use of the provisions of the security law of 1881 againstalleged political offenders.

THE INCIDENCE OF POLITICAL PUNISHMENT IN RUSSIA

Although George Kennan decried what he considered the inhuman harshnessof Russia’s laws against political crimes, he nevertheless admitted that thegovernment did “not construe these laws strictly nor enforce them with rig-orous and indiscriminate severity against all political offenders.”75 To whatextent was this true? Only detailed archival research will permit answeringthis question fully.

The number of people investigated, tried, and punished for political crimesin Russia and in the major western European countries varied over time. Ingeneral, there was more such activity in times of social unrest, which mani-fested itself more strongly in England in the early decades of the nineteenthcentury, in France during its political upheavals of 1830, 1848, 1851, and 1871,and in Germany, and especially Russia, later in the century. The key differencebetween Russia and those countries on the eve of World War I, it seems, wasRussia’s lateness—in confronting mass opposition movements, in establishinga constitutional order, and in its persisting repression of a broad range ofpolitical activity.

During the Chartist disturbances in Great Britain between January 1839 andJune 1840, for example, 544 people were imprisoned for political crimes (in-cluding “19 for seditious words, 69 for seditious conspiracies, 93 for unlawfulassembly, and 125 for riot”); in 1842 another 375 people were sentenced toprison or transportation for similar offenses. By contrast, during all the yearsbetween 1827 and 1846 only 443 people were brought to trial for political

74 Rabe, pp. 87, 352; G. G. Evangulov, “Novoe ugolovnoe ulozhenie,” Pravo, no.21 (May 18, 1903):1479–82; Ganelin et al., eds. (n. 40 above), p. 52, n. 10; Baberowski(n. 40 above), p. 208; PSZ, ser. 3, vol. 24, pt. 1, no. 24732 (June 7); Slukhotskii, pp.279–80; V. A. Maklakov, Iz vospominanii (New York, 1954), p. 265.

75 George Kennan, “The Russian Penal Code,” Century Magazine 35 (April 1888):885. See also Pipes, Russia under the Old Regime (n. 35 above), pp. 309–10.




crimes in the Russian Empire, and it is likely that even fewer were actuallypunished.76 Of course, there was not much autonomous public activity in Ni-cholaevan Russia, and only as portions of society became politically active—or, rather, desirous of playing a political role—did the level of oppositionalactivity and consequently of political persecution and prosecution rise to levelssimilar to and even exceeding those in the major Western European countries.

In France, a law of June 27, 1848, led to the transportation to penal colonieswithout a proper trial of 3,433 people. Then 26,884 people were arrested inthe wake of Louis Napoleon’s coup d’etat in December 1851; of these, 9,530were transported to Algeria and 239 to Cayenne, 2,804 were interned in France,and 1,545 were banished from France. Most brutal of all, suppression of theParis Commune took 20,000 lives, to say nothing of over 38,000 arrests andmore than 50,000 political cases leading to 23 executions, some 4,500 depor-tations to France’s penal islands, and 4,500 imprisonments in France. Muchof the political repression in France in 1848–52 and 1871–75 was meted outby special commissions and military councils (conseils de guerre), not bycourts.77

Immediately after Carl Nobiling’s attempt to kill the kaiser on June 2, 1878,some 600 people were sentenced by German courts to an average of nearlyone year’s imprisonment for verbally insulting his majesty. One woman wasgiven one year and six months in prison for commenting that “the Kaiser atleast is not poor, so he can afford medical treatment.”78 In the two monthsfollowing the adoption by the Reichstag of the Antisocialist Law of October21, 1878, 521 people were sentenced to prison for social democratic activities.During the twelve years of its existence, 127 Social Democratic periodicalpublications were suppressed, 332 worker’s organizations were closed down,900 Social Democrats were banished from the major cities, and 1,500 peoplewere imprisoned.79

Throughout the 1870s in Russia, 534 opposition activists, or roughly 10percent of all such activists, according to calculations by a Soviet scholar, werepunished harshly for political activity (18 were executed; 134 were sent tohard labor; and 382 were sent to Siberian exile).80 Although the Russian Em-pire’s most intense period of political unrest in the nineteenth century occurred

76 Ingraham (n. 6 above), pp. 150–51; Kodan, “Gosudarstvennye prestupleniia” (n.33 above), 1:616.

77 Viaud (n. 6 above), pp. 393 (1848), 397–99 (1851), 409–11 (Commune); J. M.Thompson, Louis Napoleon and the Second Empire (Oxford, 1954), p. 123 (1951);Jacques Rougerie, ed., Proces des communards (Paris, 1964), pp. 17–21.

78 Wagner, pp. 79–80.79 Ingraham, Political Crime in Europe, pp. 197–98; Wagner, p. 367; Lidtke, p. 80.80 As cited in V. R. Leikina-Svirskaia, Intelligentsiia v Rossii vo vtoroi polovine XIX

veka (Moscow, 1971), pp. 311–12.



82 Daly

between 1878 and 1881, as of March 1, 1881 (the day Alexander II was as-sassinated), there were only 1,087 cases of state crime under investigation inthe whole empire. (About half of them had to do with insulting the emperoror his family, and many of these “crimes” were not taken seriously by seniorgovernment officials.)81 In the seven months following the regicide, over 4,000cases of verbal insult of the emperor were investigated.82 One presumes thatonly a tiny fraction of the people involved in these cases received punishmentsof one kind or another. Indeed, from March 1, 1881, through 1894, the courtspunished 369 political offenders (or 26 per year), while a further 3,082 wereexiled administratively (220 per year).83 For comparison’s sake, on averageeach year in Germany 185 people were either imprisoned or banished frommajor cities for political activity during the thirteen years of the AntisocialistLaw (1878–90). Since Germany’s population was about one-third that of Rus-sia (33 million against 93 million in 1875), that figure represented a signifi-cantly higher proportion of the German population than did the combinednumber of administrative and judicial punishments for political offenses inRussia during the reign of Alexander III.

It was soon after Nicholas II ascended to the throne that the number ofpolitical crimes investigated and punished began to increase very significantly,in comparison with both previous Russian experience and contemporaneousWestern and central European practice. During the period 1894–1903, 10,931people were punished by imperial order, including 2,691 exiled, 4,761 placedunder police surveillance, 1,734 imprisoned, and 1,745 given brief jail terms.The frequency of these punishments increased exponentially, testifying to therise in social and political tension in the country: the number of cases decidedby imperial order rose from 56 in 1894 to 1,522 in 1903 (that is, they increasedby a factor of 27).84 Moreover, as noted above, from 1894 to 1901 not a single

81 P. A. Zaionchkovskii, Krizis samoderzhaviia na rubezhe 1870–1880-x godov(Moscow, 1964), p. 181. Louis Andrieux, prefect of Paris from 1881 to 1885, urgedRussian government officials to act forcefully. “There is a social revolution taking placein Russia,” he wrote. “If the government does not take strong measures, it will fall.”Cited in A. V. Ia. Bogucharskii, Iz istorii politicheskoi bor’by v 70-x i 80-x gg. XIXveka: Partiia “Narodnaia volia”, ee proiskhozhdenie, sud’by i gibel’ (Moscow, 1912),pp. 284–85.

82 Troitskii, “Narodnaia volia” pered tsarskim sudom (n. 62 above), p. 36.83 Rabe (n. 41 above), p. 143. During the period 1878–84 the number of people

investigated for political activity was 6,858, or roughly 978 per year (Slukhotskii [n.68 above], p. 262).

84 By January 1901, there were 4,113 Russian subjects subsisting in exile (both courtmandated and administrative) for politically motivated activities (Zaionchkovskii, Ros-siiskoe samoderzhavie [n. 56 above], p. 168). Only 1,760 of these resided in Siberia;the others lived in the smaller towns of European Russia (A. D. Margolis, Tiur’ma issylka v imperatorskoi Rossii: Issledovaniia i arkhivnye nakhodki [Moscow, 1995], pp.21, 38–40).




investigation ended up in court; courts tried a total of fifteen political cases in1902 and 1903.85 Since administrative punishments were almost invariably lesssevere than those imposed by the courts, the couple of decades following theregicide of 1881 witnessed more lenient, though also more frequent, punish-ment of political offenders than the decade before.86

Yet even in this period comparative data can shed light on Russia’s place inthe European scene. One critic of the Russian government noted that, begin-ning in 1823, the English courts did not try a single case concerning the verbalinsult of members of the royal family.87 Oddly, that critic, a learned jurist,omitted to mention that such actions were still being prosecuted in Germanyat the turn of the century (the penalty for insulting the kaiser or his principalministers ran to five years’ imprisonment), although the yearly number of thesecases declined from 622 in 1894 to 275 in 1904.88 The number of peopleinvestigated for insulting the emperor in Russia in the period 1901–3 was 881,or roughly 300 each year (the number of people brought to trial on this chargeis not known). The population of Russia was still more than three times thatof Germany in 1900 (133 million compared to 43 million inhabitants); thus,the proportion of such cases in each country seems to have been relativelysimilar, although the number of actual convictions and the scope of the atten-dant punishments is not known. In any event, the courts in Russia graduallyceased to try such cases after the turn of the century.89 And even when triedand convicted, one’s chances of ending up in prison were apparently ratherslight. Thus, the caricaturist Iu. K. Artsybushev was condemned in December

85 Slukhotskii, pp. 277–78.86 In all, roughly five hundred people were executed in fulfillment of court-issued

sentences from 1875 through 1905, about one-fourth of them for “political” crimesinvolving murder, armed resistance to government authorities, or attempted murder.(From 1890 through 1904 only two people were executed, one for murder, the secondfor attempted murder.) See Gernet, Gol’dovskii, and Sakharov, eds. (n. 30 above), pp.396–400. In 1901 only 180—that is, about 1.6 percent—of the 11,066 convicts servingterms of katorga were political criminals. The rest had committed heinous regularcrimes, such as murder (39 percent), armed robbery and other grave forms of theft(26.5 percent), the infliction of bodily injury (13.7 percent), and rape (2.9 percent). SeeOtchet po Glavnomu tiuremnomu upravleniiu za 1901 god (St. Petersburg, 1903), p.33; S. V. Kodan, “Katorga,” in OI, 2:529–32; G. S., “Katorga, katorzhnye raboty,” inEntsiklopedicheskii slovar’, 82 vols. (St. Petersburg, 1890–1904) (hereafter: ES),14A:759; Zaionchkovskii, Rossiiskoe samoderzhavie, p. 168; Bruce F. Adams, ThePolitics of Punishment: Prison Reform in Russia, 1863–1917 (DeKalb, Ill., 1996), pp.50, 100.

87 I. S. Urysohn, “Politicheskie prestupleniia v deistvuiushchem russkom ugolovnomprave,” Pravo, no. 33 (1909): 1784.

88 Ingraham (n. 6 above), p. 190; Kirchheimer (n. 12 above), pp. 35–36.89 E. N. Tarnovskii, “Statisticheskie svedeniia o litsakh, obviniaemykh v prestuplen-

iiakh gosudarstvennykh,” Zhurnal Ministerstva Iustitsii 12, no. 4 (April 1906): 50–99;Baberowski (n. 40 above), pp. 777–78.



84 Daly

TABLE 1TRIALS AND PUNISHMENTS FOR POLITICAL ACTIVITY

TRIALS

JUDICIAL

EXILE

ADMINISTRATIVE

EXILE

YEAR Regular Military

InSiberian

Exile

Sentencedto HardLabor

TotalExiled In Exile

DEATH

PENALTY

EXECUTIONS

1904 18 01905 308 111906 3,395 4,698 1,530 7,677 6,068 141907 6,886 4,335 1,521 8,130 9,748 521908 8,476 7,016 715 1,723 10,160 16,572 1181909 6,088 5,400 1,103 2,203 18,563 111910 4,359 2,045 2,591 579 650 12,806 01911 3,345 733 4,011 736 6,946 81912 2,814 960 5,072 452 67 3,024 01913 554 1,753

Total 35,363 26,067 6,069 29,623 214

1905—as the government was just beginning to crush the armed rebellion inMoscow—to two and one-half years of prison for his searing caricatures ofNicholas II, yet the Senate annulled the conviction, because the senatorsgrasped that they could not admit officially that the images represented theemperor.90 Those who would mock the emperor in word or pictural represen-tation were much more likely, in fact, to be punished administratively, as wasthe satirist A. V. Amfiteatrov in 1902.91

The number of punishments for political activity skyrocketed during thesocial upheaval of 1905–7.92 The average annual number of people tried forstate crimes in the special office of the Senate and the judicial tribunals rosefrom 538 in 1884–90, to 2,599 in 1901–3, then up to, on average, 5,052 from1908 to 1912 (see table 1). The total for the years 1906 to 1912 was roughly35,000. The vast majority of the defendants stood accused of rebellion (bunt)and agitation (smuta), but also of belonging to illegal organizations and dis-

90 Liki semnadtsatogo (1917 god v politicheskikh portretakh Iu. K. Artsybusheva)(Moscow, 1991), p. 9.

91 Daly, Autocracy under Siege (n. 69 above), pp. 122–23.92 The rates of all forms of crime rose dramatically in the first eight years of the

twentieth century in Russia and continued to climb during the years of industrial growthbefore the World War. See S. S. Ostroumov, Prestupnost’ i ee prichiny v dorevoliut-sionnoi Rossii (Moscow, 1960), p. 167.




tributing seditious printed material.93 The rate of conviction was roughly 70percent (or 25,277 of the defendants). Of those convicted, 82 percent (or20,838) were sentenced to terms of jail (up to three months), prison (up tosixteen months), or fortress (up to sixteen months).94 Put another way, only13.8 percent (or 3,485) of those tried for political offenses in 1906 to 1912received the harshest sentences: judicial exile or hard labor with loss of rightsof social status. It has been impossible to determine either the yearly numberof political offenders sentenced to exile by the courts or the total numberactually in exile in a given year. It is known, however, that 715 people sen-tenced to exile by the courts resided in Siberia in 1908 and that this numberreached 5,072 in 1912.95 A large percentage of these political exiles wereundoubtedly former political hard-labor convicts (katorzhniki), since by lawhard-labor convicts automatically became exiles for a specified time once theirterm of hard labor (katorga) expired.96 A total of 6,069 political offenders weresentenced to katorga in 1906 to 1912, the yearly number ranging from 1,530in 1906 to 452 in 1912.97 Most of the harshest punishments, including manysentences of long-term exile and most sentences of katorga, as well as all deathsentences, were issued by the district military courts, which tried from 18defendants in 1904 to 7,016 in 1908 and 554 in 1913, for a total of 26,067defendants during those years.98 The total number of suspected political of-

93 In 1901–3, 7,796 people were investigated for state crimes, including insultingthe emperor and his family (909 people, or 11.5 percent), belonging to revolutionaryorganizations (2,247, or 28.8 percent), distributing revolutionary propaganda (2,093,or 26.8 percent), possession of antigovernment imprints (842, or 10.8 percent), andbelonging to illegal societies (1,515, or 19.4 percent). See P. Liublinskii, “Prestupnost’i ugolovnaia statistika,” in Entsiklopedicheskii slovar’ russkogo bibliograficheskogoinstituta Granat, ed. Iu. S. Gambarov et al., 58 vols. (Moscow, n.d.), 36:652.

94 E. N. Tarnovskii, “Statisticheskie svedeniia ob osuzhdennykh za gosudarstvennyeprestupleniia v 1905–1912 gg.,” Zhurnal Ministerstva Iustitsii, no. 10 (1915): 42–45;Ordynskii (n. 46 above), p. 129 (printed matter); N. S. Tagantsev, ed., Ulozhenie onakazaniiakh ugolovnykh i ispravitel’nykh 1885 goda, 11th rev. ed. (St. Petersburg,1901), arts. 35, 38–39 (sentence lengths).

95 N. N. Shcherbakov, “Chislennost’ i sostav politicheskikh ssyl’nykh v Sibiri, 1907–1917 gg.,” Ssyl’nye revoliutsionery v Sibiri (XIX v.-fevral’ 1917 g.) (Irkutsk, 1973),1:210, 219.

96 Daly, “Criminal Punishment” (n. 1 above), p. 351.97 Rabe (n. 41 above), p. 151 (yearly numbers); Shcherbakov, “Chislennost’i sostav,”

p. 219 (total). In many cases, hard-labor convicts, especially those convicted of politicalcrimes, performed no forced labor and did not even live under the strict prison or exileregimen required by law (see Justice Ministry report, January 1909, Rossiisskii gosu-darstvennyi istoricheskii arkhiv, f. 1276, op. 4, d. 106, ll. 79–80 ob.). The term kator-zhnik applied mostly to regular criminals; katorzhanin usually designated a politicalcriminal (S. I. Ozhegov and N. Iu. Shvedova, Tolkovyi slovar’ russkogo iazyka [Mos-cow, 1992], p. 275).

98 S. S. Ostroumov, “Repressii tsarskogo pravitel’stva protiv revoliutsionnogo dvi-



86 Daly

fenders tried in both regular and military courts in the period 1906–12, then,was at the very least something over 60,000. Between 1905 and 1912, 214people were executed for crimes against the state; this was a tiny proportionof the 3,293 people sentenced to death and executed for a variety of graveregular crimes, some of them doubtless involving political motives.99 To thesenumbers one needs to add the 2,274 people killed without trial, mostly forrebellion, by punitive expeditions (1,172) and on sentence of military fieldcourts (1,102) from December 1905 through early 1907.100 Finally, in the pe-riod from 1906 to 1912 administrative officials exiled nearly 30,000 peoplefor political reasons, though, because of frequent escapes, the authorities couldnever account for more than 16,572 at any one time.101 Overall, the regularand military courts sentenced some 30,000 people for political activity. If oneadds the equal number of administrative exiles, the total number of peoplepunished in some manner for political activity in the period 1906–12 rises tosomething like 60,000—a figure nevertheless proportionately lower than thenumber punished in France in 1848–52 or in 1871.102

A large proportion of the punishments discussed in the preceding paragraphstruck inhabitants of the Russian Empire’s borderlands.103 Over 50 percent of

zheniia v Rossii v period imperializma: Ugolovno-statisticheskoe issledovanie,” Vestnikmoskovskogo universiteta, ser. 8, Pravo, no. 3 (1976): 36–38.

99 Saul [S.] Usherovich, Smertnye kazni v tsarskoi Rossii: K istorii kaznei po poli-ticheskim protsessam s 1824 po 1917 god, 2d ed., intro. M. N. Gernet (Khar’kov, 1933),pp. 10–11; Ezhegodnik gazety “Rech’” na 1914 god (St. Petersburg, 1914), p. 41;Polianskii (n. 67 above), p. 35.

100 V. S. Diakin, Samoderzhavie, burzhuaziia i dvorianstvo v 1907–1911 gg., ed. R.Sh. Ganelin (Leningrad, 1978), p. 27. According to Usherovich, six thousand peoplewere executed legally or killed without trial by the Imperial Russian government from1905 to 1917 (pp. 493–94).

101 Rabe, pp. 147 (number sent), 149 (number on hand). For slightly different annualfigures on administrative exile, see N. N. Shcherbakov, “Iz istorii karatel’noi politikitsarizma v nachale XX stoletiia,” Ssyl’nye revoliutsionery v Sibiri (XIX v.-fevral’ 1917g.), (Irkutsk, 1979), 3:85.

102 A harsh critic of the government, V. P. Obninskii, admitted that “no Europeangovernment would tolerate” the level of popular disorder in Russia in 1905–6, whichraised “the specter of Pugachevshchina.” In 1906, he continued, “There were days whenseveral major incidents of terrorism were accompanied by virtually dozens of lesserattacks and assassinations against the lower ranks of the administration, not countingthreats received in the mail by almost every police official.” See Viktor Obninskii,Novyi stroi, 2 pts. (Moscow, 1911), 1:96, 131.

103 It also seems likely that a large proportion of revolutionary activists were denizensof the empire’s borderlands. For example, data available on 453 revolutionaries activein the period 1878–87 indicate that roughly three hundred, or 65 percent, came fromborder areas, principally Ukraine, Poland, and the Baltic provinces. See Ivan Avaku-movic, “A Statistical Approach to the Revolutionary Movement in Russia, 1878–1887,” American Slavic and East European Review 18 (April 1959): 182–83.




the political activists sentenced to exile by the courts were from the empire’sborderlands: 20 percent from Ukraine, 13 percent from Poland, 8 percent fromthe Baltic region, 6 percent from the Caucasus, and 4 percent from Belorussiaand Lithuania; in addition, 10 percent were exiled from major military bases.104

Furthermore, of the roughly 6,000 executions, both with and without trial, onlyabout 14 percent (842) took place in European Russia and 6 percent (367)took place in Siberia and the Far East; the rest occurred in the borderlands.105

These numbers suggest that an inordinately large proportion of the politicalrepression meted out in the wake of the 1905–7 revolution stemmed from theexigencies of ruling over the vast Russian Empire.106

In the two years before the World War, political repression and the recourseto administrative punishments in particular abated markedly, reaching theirnadir with the political amnesty of February 1913. For example, by summerthere were only 1,051 political exiles in the entire Russian Empire. Some juristson the eve of World War I foresaw the imminent abolition of administrativeexile. During the war, however, its incidence increased drastically.107

TREATMENT OF POLITICAL CRIMINALS

The treatment of opposition activists in Russia was extremely unpredictable.Vehement opponents of the government often managed to operate right underthe noses of the police, while relatively harmless and even essentially loyalsubjects of the emperor were not infrequently harassed by heavy-handed ad-ministrative officials, even by the emperor himself. At the time of Alexan-der III’s coronation in May 1883, B. N. Chicherin, the elected mayor of Mos-cow, called on other public activists to prepare themselves for the day whenthe government would request their cooperation. To Alexander III, this modeststatement apparently signified a demand for a constitution, and in late July,

104 Shcherbakov, “Chislennost’ i sostav,” p. 227. See also Tarnovskii, “Statisticheskiesvedeniia ob osuzhdennykh za gosudarstvennye prestupleniia” (n. 94 above), p. 49.

105 Usherovich, p. 493.106 Capital punishment was an unusual spectacle even in the borderlands. In February

1908 the governor general of the Baltic region decreed that the more traditional methodof hanging should henceforth replace the firing squad. Unable to find a single hangmanin the entire Baltic region, he was forced to borrow one of the two available in St.Petersburg. See T. Shatilova, “Kazni na Lis’em Nosu v gody reaktsii,” KA 16 (1926):233–34.

107 Rabe (n. 41 above), pp. 101, 134–35, 154–55; Shcherbakov, “Chislennost’ isostav” (n. 95 above), p. 214. The war provoked the massive exile, almost entirely bymilitary authorities, of large segments of population. See Peter Gatrell, A Whole EmpireWalking: Refugees in Russia during World War I (Bloomington, Ind., 1999); Eric Lohr,“Enemy Alien Politics within the Russian Empire during World War I” (Ph.D. diss.,Harvard University, 1999).



88 Daly

V. A. Dolgorukii, the governor general of Moscow, sent Chicherin a confiden-tial letter expressing the emperor’s wish that he retire.108 Another case was thatof A. A. Kornilov. In March 1901, having served for twelve years as a middle-rank civil servant, he along with six hundred intellectuals signed an appeal,drafted by P. N. Miliukov, that protested the treatment of student demonstra-tors. Because he signed the appeal, Kornilov was arrested, his apartment wassearched, and he was banned for two years from residing in the universitytowns of the Russian Empire. In a letter to Nicholas II, the distraught Kornilovproclaimed that he had “served your majesty for the twelve best years of mylife” and noted bitterly that “Even a murderer would be punished only after acareful study of his case. Many are now persecuted simply because they be-lieve in justice and legality.”109 In a nutshell, this was the major criticismlodged against the late Imperial Russian government by liberal public activists.

The nature of the punishments for political crimes was also relatively un-predictable. The conditions of life in prison and exile were determined largelyby four factors: one’s social status, the economic and social conditions of theplace of confinement, the character of local officials, and the political climatein St. Petersburg.110 The first of these factors generally remained constant: thewell born and the well educated could expect better treatment than peasantsor industrial workers, just as political detainees were usually better treated thanregular criminals. The worker-revolutionary A. S. Shapovalov complained that“before well-dressed gentlemen, police officials walked on hind legs, offeredthem a chair, and used the formal form of address [said ‘vy’]. To workers theysaid ‘ty,’ yelled at them, beat them in their cells.” Yet he also noted that worker-revolutionaries “belonged to people whom they [the police] hated but feared,”so the police treated them with more respect than ordinary workers.111 Also,

108 B. N. Chicherin, Vospominaniia Borisa Nikolaevicha Chicherina, 5 pts. (Moscow,1929–34), 4:234–42.

109 A. A. Kornilov, “Vospominaniia,” Voprosy istorii, no. 3 (1994):144–51.110 A. Argunov, “Bez svobody,” Golos minuvshee na chuzhoi storone, 13 (1925): 88;

Kon (n. 60 above), pp. 245–47, and on the variety of prison and exile regimens, see,e.g., pp. 176, 227–28, 237, 259, 264–70; and [I.] Genkin, Po tiur’mam i etapam (St.Petersburg, 1922), pp. 24, 41–43, 113, 120–23, 137, 264, 369.

111 A. [S.] Shapovalov, Po doroge k marksizmu: Vospominaniia rabochego-revoliut-sionera, 4 pts. (Moscow, 1924), 1:31, 2:104 (fear). Alexander Herzen wrote in hismemoirs, “In order to know what is Russian prison, Russian court and police, one hasto be a muzhik [peasant], dvorovyi [house serf], artisan, or meshchanin [petty urbandweller]. Political prisoners, who are mostly nobles, are treated harshly, punished se-verely; however, their fate cannot be compared with the fate of poor bearded men. Withthose, the police does not stand on ceremony.” A. I. Gertsen, Byloe i dumy, 4 vols.(Moscow, 1934), 1:157, as quoted in Gernet (n. 59 above), 2:477. Occasionally, as inthe case of the participants in the Kazan’ Cathedral demonstration in 1876, intellectualswere punished more harshly than workers. See Troitskii, Tsarskie sudy (n. 21 above),p. 167.




the size of the monthly allowance disbursed to administrative exiles hingedon social status. The allowance was not large, but the cost of living was usuallyquite low in the places of exile. Moreover, most exiles and prisoners wereallowed to spend their own money to supplement their upkeep, which meantthat people of means generally lived better.112 Also stable was the character ofthe place itself. On a basic level, V. I. Lenin was naturally more comfortablein the climatically hospitable Shushenskoe than Iu. O. Martov was in his placeof exile—he was sent in the same year for the same crime to the forbiddingTurukhansk (Lenin’s mother had good connections). From the point of viewof employment and cultural opportunities, one was far better off in Irkutsk, acultural and commercial center in eastern Siberia, than, say, further north andeast in Iakutsk or even to the west in Krasnoiarsk.113 Less predictable were thenature and attitudes of the prison officials and other local administrative per-sonnel bearing responsibility for political detainees. A few officials were cruel;some were very lenient; many accepted bribes in exchange for favors; most,it seems, enforced the rules governing prisons and the exile system feck-lessly.114 In fact, whether those rules were enforced with anything like precisionoften depended on the firmness and sense of security of senior administrativeofficials. Thus, the appointment of P. G. Kurlov as director of the Main PrisonAdministration in October 1907 ushered in a period of tightened control overpolitical prisoners.115 Perhaps just as important was the state of relations be-tween the government and the opposition and the government’s concern forpublic opinion. For example, after George Kennan’s harsh depictions of theRussian exile system began to be translated into Russian in the late 1880s andearly 1890s, provoking immense public indignation, the Interior Ministryurged its officials in the field to display greater leniency toward political ex-iles.116 In consequence, during much of the 1890s, the exiles enjoyed consid-erable freedom of movement.117

112 S. L. Chudkovskii, Iz davnikh let: Vospominaniia (Moscow, 1934), p. 171; Rabe,pp. 192, 214.

113 Chudkovskii, p. 277; V. K. Ikov, “Listopad,” Voprosy istorii, no. 8 (1995): 98;Kon, pp. 368–69.

114 For several examples of police officials, especially in provincial towns, aidingand abetting known political criminals against the obvious wishes of the security police,see Gr. Nestroev, Iz dnevnika maksimalista (Paris, 1910), pp. 158–60; Vl. Korolenko,Istoriia moego sovremennika, 4 vols. (Moscow, 1922), 3:15–18; Peter A. Garvi, Zapiskisotsial-demokrata, 1906–1921 (Newtonville, Mass., 1982), pp. 142–44; S. L. Chud-kovskii, pp. 115–16, 207–8; Ivanchin-Pisarev, “Iz moikh vospominanii: Po doroge vSibir’, Krasnoiarske i minusinske,” Katorga i ssylka 57–58 (1929): 304; I. K. Mik-hailov, Chetvert’ veka podpol’shchika (Moscow, 1957), p. 162.

115 Kon, p. 176 (bribes); Genkin, p. 53 (Kurlov).116 O. V. Budnitskii, “Kennan, Dzhordzh,” in OI, 2:548; Rabe, p. 108.117 Revolutionary activists often found it easy to meet to discuss political issues, even

to hold conferences. See Rabe (n. 41 above), p. 292.



90 Daly

The worst times to be a political detainee were during the assiduous terroristcampaign of People’s Will in the late 1870s and early 1880s, when V. K. Plehvewas interior minister (1902–4), and in the period from 1907 to 1910.118 Themost fortunate political detainees spent time in prison and exile in the early1860s, in late 1905 and most of 1906, and during most of the years from 1912to 1917. In the early 1860s, according to V. F. Retunskii, political prisoners inTobol’sk “did not feel bored or deprived of anything.” M. A. Spiridonova wrotefrom experience that in 1906 “prisons were clubs” for political prisoners. E. M.Iaroslavskii, exiled to Iakutsk during the years 1913–17, described a regimeof “relative freedom,” especially in Iakutsk.119

One certainly reads in the memoir literature, and in other sources, horrorstories about ill treatment in prison and exile.120 Many of the worst descriptionsof abuse relate to hard-labor prisons and to the Shlissel’burg Fortress, the mostnotorious place of political confinement. Although they rarely made use oftheir right to do so, the emperors had the power to imprison any person therewithout judicial sentence. From 1884 to 1905 only 68 inmates entered its gates,yet those confined within them never benefited from the periodic amnesties ofpolitical prisoners and exiles, which caused Gershuni to dub it “our holy Je-rusalem, [our] place of triumph and suffering.” There, one of the worst atroc-ities in the annals of late Imperial Russian political criminal repression tookplace in 1884. Two prisoners, I. N. Myshkin and a certain Minakov, wereexecuted for insulting a prison guard.121 After the turn of the century, however,

118 Rabe, pp. 83, 98, 193, 197–99, 338. Yet V. K. Ikov, a Social Democrat who spenttime in exile and under arrest off and on in 1902 and 1903, claimed that before 1906,government “officials had no personal or class hatred toward revolutionaries. Theywere just doing a job, and did not think about the political or ethical meaning of theirjob at all. Prison guards had not more animosity toward us than tax collectors.” Herecalled the story of a political prisoner in Tambov in 1903 for whom the guardsorganized a party, interpreting a request to write (pisat’) as to dance (plisat’). See V. K.Ikov, pp. 92, 95.

119 V. F. Retunskii, Gosudarstvennye prestupleniia: Stranitsy istorii politicheskoissylke v Zaural’e (Surgut, 1992), pp. 86–87; M. Spiridonova, “Iz zhizni na Nerchinskoikatorge,” KS 14 (1925): 192–93; Emelian Iaroslavskii, “Nakanune Fevral’skoi revo-liutsii v Iakutske,” in V iakutskoi nevole: Iz istorii politicheskoi ssylki v iakutskoi ob-lasti: Sbornik materialov i vospominanii, ed. M. A. Braginskii et al. (1927), pp. 26–28. See also Rabe, pp. 195 (early period), 337 (war years).

120 See, e.g., George Kennan, Siberia and the Exile System, 2 vols. (New York, 1891);Genkin (n. 110 above); Parvus, Po tiur’mam vo vremia revoliutsii: Pobeg iz Sibiri (St.Petersburg, 1908); Ek. Nikitina, “Tornaia doroga: Tiur’ma i katorga 1905–1913 godov:Materialy k istorii,” in Deviatyi val: K desiatiletiiu osvobozhdeniia iz tsarskoi katorgii ssylki, ed. V. Vilenskii et al. (Moscow, 1927), pp. 15–43; T. Asin, “K statistiki ares-tovanykh i ssylnykh,” Russkoe bogatstvo 10 (1906): 1–37.

121 Gernet (n. 59 above), 2:380 (emperor’s power); Kropotkin (n. 2 above), p. 35(mystery); Grigorii Gershuni, Iz nedavnego proshlogo (Paris, 1908), pp. 108 (amnes-




the regime of Shlissel’burg grew milder. When the director, V. I. Zimberg,warned a group of political prisoners that he had the authority to have themwhipped, they “all smiled and considered it absurd.”122 They knew full wellthat corporal punishment was almost never used against political prisoners.123

Shlissel’burg closed its doors for good in 1906.Many political dissidents, especially nonrevolutionary members of the edu-

cated elite, faced their punishments without great fear. In the words of A. V.Tyrkova-Williams, “We looked upon our arrest with mockery. We enteredprison without fear. There was no tragedy in what had happened to us.”124 Or,as F. Ia. Kon put it, most Russian opposition activists (unlike their Polishcounterparts) widely believed that the government would never dare to treatthem harshly.125 In fact, the positive descriptions of prison and exile, especiallyin view of the Russian government’s reputation for harshness, seem moreabundant and striking than the negative ones. I. V. Gessen described the prisonof preliminary confinement in Saint Petersburg in 1896 as “comfortable, dry,warm, light, with a good library; the treatment of prisoners,” he noted, “wasimpeccable.” The food was bad, he admitted, but he added that one could haveit brought in. Perhaps most telling, such a dedicated opponent of the imperialpolitical system as S. P. Melgunov wrote that political detainees in early Sovietprisons recalled prerevolutionary prisons “with an almost joyful feeling.” A. A.Argunov, a leader of the Socialist-Revolutionaries, admitted that the “Bol-shevik prisons leave the previous ones far behind in terms of cruelty. . . . Onecannot imagine a chekist being anything but rude and cruel. [Whereas] oneoften encountered rather good-natured [gendarmes].” One of the key advan-tages of the prerevolutionary Russian prisons was the ability of prisoners toread and write, or “to further their political education,” as they often put it.Indeed, prisoners were allowed to have any publications except those prohib-ited in public libraries or journals appearing in the previous twelve months.Iulii Martov recalled being filled with inspiration as he read encoded messagesfrom other prisoners in some of the books in a prison library.126

ties), 115 (atrocity), 119 (68), 123 (Jerusalem); Gernet, Gol’dovskii, and Sakharov, eds.(n. 30 above), p. 397.

122 Genkin, pp. 48–49.123 Kropotkin, p. 126; Kon (n. 60 above), p. 259.124 A. Tyrkova-Williams, Na putiakh k svobode (New York, 1952), p. 81.125 Kon, p. 26.126 I. V. Gessen, “V dvukh vekakh: Zhiznennyi otchet,” in Arkhiv russkoi revoliutsii,

ed. I. V. Gessen, 22 vols. (Berlin, 1937) (hereafter ARR) 22:61; S. P. Mel’gunov, Vos-pominaniia i dnevniki (Paris, 1964), 1:139; Argunov (n. 110 above), pp. 88–89; PitirimA. Sorokin, A Long Journey: The Autobiography of Pitirim A. Sorokin (New Haven,Conn., 1963), pp. 37–38 (political education); Justice Ministry directive, November16, 1904, Rossiisskii gosudarstvennyi istoricheskii arkhiv goroda Moskvy, f. 475, op.



92 Daly

Escape from exile—and sometimes even from prison—was a relativelyeasy matter after the completion of the Trans-Siberian Railway, and especiallyduring the period following the 1905 Revolution. F. Ia. Kon recalled that inMinusinsk (in south-central Siberia) at the turn of the century, those whowanted to escape could do so, thanks to an underground organization thatprovided fake passports, shelters, and designated contacts. Ia. M. Sverdlovreported that beginning in 1905 so many people fled from exile that the guardswere not even punished for escapes. As noted by O. O. Gruzenberg, a promi-nent legal defender of political criminals, “anyone who wanted to could escapefrom exile.”127 According to government statistics (typically deflated to avoidthe appearance of negligence), the number of people escaping from Siberianexile increased from 23 in 1891–1900 to 118 in 1902–3, 1,261 in 1904, 1,951in 1905, and 2,730 in 1907. This trend continued at least to the World War:according to police department data, as of January 1, 1914, in twelve remoteprovinces, 2,028 out of 3,222 administrative exiles, or 63 percent, were miss-ing. Escapes from prison were relatively frequent in 1906 (217 reported cases)and in 1907 (287 reported cases).128

A large proportion of political prisoners and exiles were also freed by pe-riodic amnesties and through personal appeals for clemency. Traditionally,political criminals benefited frequently, regular criminals seldom, from pardonsand amnesties. For Montesquieu, clemency was “the ‘most beautiful attribute’of the prince’s sovereignty,” while Kant, later in the eighteenth century, termedit the “most slippery of all rights of sovereignty.”129 Be that as it may, a ten-dency developed throughout nineteenth-century Europe to expect the amnestyof political prisoners at the start of each new reign.130 Russia, for example,enjoyed massive amnesties of administrative exiles in 1880, 1883, 1891, 1894,1896, 1904, 1905, and 1913 for political or dynastic reasons. According toVolker Rabe, “Long-term political exiles rarely completed their terms.”131 It

19, d. 22, l. 41 (publications); Iulii Martov, Zapiski sotsial-demokrata (1922; reprint,Cambridge, 1975), p. 116. On the courtesy of gendarmes, see Daly, Autocracy underSiege (n. 69 above), pp. 49–51.

127 Kon, p. 481; Ia. M. Sverdlov, Izbrannye proizvedeniia: Stat’i, rechi, pis’ma (Mos-cow, 1976), p. 34; O. O. Gruzenberg, Ocherki i rechi (New York, 1944), p. 99.

128 V. N. Dvorianov, V sibirskoi dal’nei storone . . . (Ocherki istorii politicheskoikatorgi i ssylki, 60-e gody XVIII v.—1917 g.), ed. A. F. Khatskevich, 2d rev. ed. (Minsk,1985), pp. 165, 205–6.

129 Ingraham (n. 6 above), p. 33; Viaud (n. 6 above), pp. 261–62; Lombroso andLaschi (n. 4 above), 2:274–75; Kirchheimer (n. 12 above), p. 397 (Montesquieu andKant).

130 Ingraham, p. 72.131 Szeftel, “Personal Inviolability” (n. 67 above), p. 22n; Ostroumov, Prestupnost’

i ee prichiny (n. 92 above), p. 128; Gruzenberg, p. 113; Rabe (n. 41 above), pp. 85–86, 101.




was also well known that political prisoners or exiles who renounced theirformer opposition to the political system could expect to be pardoned person-ally by the emperor. The case of L. A. Tikhomirov, a leader of People’s Willat the time of the regicide and whom Alexander III pardoned, was only themost celebrated, but many lesser opposition activists trod the same path as he.Kon recalled his own astonishment at the lengths to which government officialssometimes went in order to persuade revolutionaries to repent. They traveledthousands of miles, he wrote, “They showed great concern and sighed.” Konasserted that, according to official data, twenty-five out of 217 political exilesin Kara (north of the Arctic Circle) in the late 1880s received clemency in thisway.132

Strange to say, many revolutionary activists actually welcomed the quasi-unavoidable terms of prison and exile. Arrested on January 9, 1905, the So-cialist-Revolutionary V. M. Zenzinov recalled that neither he nor his parentswere worried. “At that time,” he wrote, “everybody saw prison as an inevitableduty.” Zenzinov added that he never cooperated in any way with gendarmesor prosecutors, which made them “fume with anger,” yet the “authorities actedentirely decently toward me, never took any special measures toward me.”133

Indeed, for most political activists, prison and exile were “a must.” A. L.Parvus, exiled in September 1906, reportedly felt embarrassed by the relativelyshort term of his sentence (three years). An analysis of one hundred biogra-phies in Deiateli soiuza SSR i Oktiabr’skaia revoliutsiia (1927) indicates that33 activists had been exiled once, 14 twice, 8 thrice, 5 four times, 2 five times,and 1 six times. (Only 37 never suffered exile.) Collectively, they had madeseventy-one escapes.134

EDUCATED ELITES AND POLITICAL REPRESSION

Prerevolutionary Russia’s laws against political activities may not have beengreatly harsher than in some western and central European countries (and wererelatively mild compared to those of the harsh regimes that took power inRussia and Western Europe beginning in October 1917). The incidence ofpolitical punishment also may not have been much greater in late ImperialRussia, at least until 1906–8, and large numbers of “professional revolution-aries” may have kept up their revolutionary activity despite the system ofpolitical repression in Russia. Yet many of Russia’s educated elites had lived

132 Kon, pp. 238–39, 244. Moreover, detention in Kara was not onerous. Kon wrotethat “it was good in Kara” (pp. 227–28).

133 V. Zenzinov, Perezhitoe (New York, 1953), pp. 144, 166.134 Rabe, pp. 342–43 (statistics), 345 (Parvus).



94 Daly

in Western Europe and knew that they were far more likely to meet withrepression in Russia than in the West.

For left liberals, according to N. A. Troitskii, the foremost Soviet historianof political crimes and punishments, “the lethal secretiveness of the politicaltrial, as opposed to the openness of regular trials, is an ulcer [iazva], which atthe very root destroys the sense of legality in society.”135 Engelstein concurs.“A crucial attribute of ‘justice,’ in the minds of both the accused and of thepublic,” she writes, “was access—glasnost’. What was morally and politicallyreprehensible was what occurred behind closed doors.”136

The administrative system’s arbitrariness, its unpredictability, also angeredpublic figures. P. B. Struve probably spoke for many educated Russians whenhe wrote in 1903 that “the Russian people do not know and cannot know howsecurity police and gendarme institutions operate, because their ‘work’ is con-ducted on the basis of secret rules and directives, which are scrupulously hid-den from public view.”137 As a student delegate to France in the late 1880s,the future Constitutional Democrat (Kadet) V. A. Maklakov met with theFrench president and education minister but back in Russia was dismissedfrom the university and denied the right to enter any other university. Mak-lakov’s father went to the director of the police department, P. N. Durnovo,who, while refusing to reveal the reason for the order, told him that it had infact been revoked. Durnovo later personally told Maklakov, by then a Dumadeputy, that “at that time we often used such measures for little transgressions,to show certain people that the government was firm.” He added that thosethreats were not always carried out.138 In other words, Maklakov was scarcelypunished at all, and others like him presumably suffered some kind of frightor indignity but little more for their political beliefs or actions.

Of course, many political activists did suffer more concretely for their po-litical beliefs and actions. Yet even then it was often the arbitrary nature of thepunishments, not their harshness, that angered opposition activists most. F. I.Rodichev considered administrative exile “worse than katorga, even perhaps[worse] than execution, because the threat was vague and hopeless.”139 It islikely that Rodichev in practice would have found administrative exile far

135 Troitskii, Tsarskie sudy (n. 21 above), p. 272.136 Engelstein (n. 3 above), p. 340. Engelstein noted the irony in the Populists de-

nouncing political trials as “a hollow comedy,” since they “scoffed at the law and seizedevery occasion to stage political theater of their own” (p. 338).

137 P. B. Struve, “Rossiia pod nadzorom politsii,” Osvobozhdenie, no. 20/21 (April18/May 1, 1903): 357.

138 Maklakov (n. 74 above), pp. 131–38.139 Fedor I. Rodichev, Vospominaniia i ocherki o russkom liberalizme, ed. Kermit E.

McKenzie (Newtonville, Mass., 1983), pp. 10, 23. See also Kniazhna Ol’ga Trubet-skaia, Kniaz’ S. N. Trubetskoi: Vospominaniia sestry (New York, 1953), p. 206.




preferable to katorga, but it is understandable that he abhorred the unpredict-able nature of the former.140 Indeed, even the conservative constitutionalistN. S. Tagantsev considered the recourse to administrative punishments “themajor impediment” to cooperation between government and society.141

As I. I. Petrunkevich lamented, “At the end of the nineteenth century notone European state, save Russia, endowed administrative officials with sucharbitrary power that they could legally arrest a person, then, without a formalinvestigation or a trial, and without even explaining the reasons for and essenceof the accusation, exile that person anywhere in the empire, even to such placesas the farthest reaches of Siberia, which because of their location representeda form of torture.” Petrunkevich asked rhetorically, “Is this not a sufficientjustification for terrorist acts that are responding to government terror?”142

P. N. Miliukov spoke in a similar vein in early 1900 at a memorial meeting inhonor of the socialist philosopher P. L. Lavrov, recently deceased. “The dy-namics of revolutionary movements are such,” he argued, “that those that donot achieve their ends inevitably are driven to terrorism.” The Socialist-Rev-olutionary terrorist B. V. Savinkov, who was present, later told Miliukov, halfjokingly, “I am your student.”143

It is true that the German police for thirteen years (1878–90) enjoyed thearbitrary power to close down publications and voluntary associations, to arrestany person suspected of involvement with Social Democrats, and even to ban-ish such people from some of the major cities in Germany. The police underLouis Napoleon enjoyed powers even broader than these, especially from 1851to 1860. In 1851 many thousands of people were imprisoned, exiled, evenexecuted for political activity. As late as 1871 the French Republican govern-

140 The philosopher S. N. Trubetskoi argued, more plausibly, that “exile to Siberiacannot intimidate students; they will see in it not strength of government but its weak-ness and fear of students; it can only inflate their sense of importance.” See Trubetskaia,p. 206.

141 N. S. Tagantsev, Perezhitoe: Uchrezhdenie Gosudarstvennoi Dumy v 1905–1906gg. (Petrograd, 1919), p. 49. See also Rabe (n. 41 above), p. 142.

142 Ivan Il’ich Petrunkevich, “Iz zapisok obshchestvennogo deiatelia: Vospominan-iia,” ed. A. A. Kizevetter, in ARR 21:244–45. Even S. Iu Witte, as prime minister,declared in a conference chaired by the emperor in 1906 that “a legal order is unthink-able if on the basis of a gendarme’s denunciation one can be exiled, flogged, and thelike.” See V. Vodovozov, ed., “Tsarskosel’skoe soveshchanie,” Byloe 26 (October1917): 227. Officials disagreed about the effectiveness of administrative exile. In 1903,P. I. Kutaisov, the governor general of eastern Siberia, complained to Interior MinisterV. K. Plehve that it merely “spreads revolutionary ideas all over Russia” (Dvorianov[n. 128 above], p. 154). I. F. Koshko, as governor of Penza in 1911, found that exileto remote rural areas acted like a “cold shower” on revolutionary activists who hadgreat trouble getting peasants to listen to them (Koshko [n. 51 above], pp. 155–57).

143 P. N. Miliukov, Vospominaniia (Moscow, 1991), pp. 138–39.



96 Daly

ment massacred twenty thousand people and exiled to France’s penal coloniesmany thousands more—all by extrajudicial means. Before the period 1906–8,the Russian government, by contrast, had never applied such massive politicalrepression, and even in that period the number of people repressed was asmaller proportion of the total population than in France.

One nevertheless discerns four key differences between Russia and thesecountries. First, emergency or special administrative laws remained in forcein Russia far longer than anywhere in central or western Europe. Second, thesocial pressure for reform came relatively late in Russia. In France, for ex-ample, social and political upheavals in 1789–94, 1814–15, 1830, 1848–51,and 1870–71 facilitated or provoked the transition from an Old Regime insome ways similar to that of Russia. This transition was socially and politicallydisruptive, just as it had to be in Russia. Third, whereas in France the under-lying administrative structures were deeply rooted and firm, only the politicalregimes being transitory, in Russia the political regime was rooted in the ad-ministrative system, so any rebellion was far more threatening to the socialand political order. Fourth, Russian society was far less integrated into thepolitical process than in western or central Europe. By the 1890s, even mostlower-class males in the West enjoyed voting rights. The French laws againstanarchism (lois scelerates) apparently enjoyed broad popular support, and be-ginning in 1894 some anarchists were exiled by judicial process to the Iles duSalut off the coast of French Guyana.144 English juries were quite willing tocondemn to hard labor any person inciting others to violence in print, some-thing the Russian judicial authorities instinctively believed they could notcount on from jurors in Russia.145 In fact, societies where the majority of peopleenjoy full political rights may be more willing to approve of the harsh pun-ishment of those who break political rules and strictures, no matter how ar-bitrary they might appear to contemporary Western sensibilities.146 The vastmajority of Americans during the same years paid little attention to the exclu-sion of blacks or American Indians from the political process and even fromminimal judicial protections.147

144 Mikhail Gubskii, “Ssylka,” in ES 31:374.145 Daly, Autocracy under Siege (n. 69 above), p. 123; Fabreguettes (n. 25 above), p.

134. In 1907 the Justice Ministry proposed to subject political crimes to trial by specialjuries selected according to higher education and property qualifications than ordinaryjuries (“Kratkaia ob”iasnitel’naia zapiska,” 1907, RGIA, f. 1276, op. 3, d. 121, ll.12–13).

146 Peasant jurors in Russia regularly demanded the harshest punishments for blas-phemers, heretics, sectarians, and horse thieves (Baberowski [n. 40 above], p. 166).More often Russian peasants themselves meted out terrifying punishments to suchoffenders. See Stephen P. Frank, Crime, Cultural Conflict, and Justice in Rural Russia,1856–1914 (Berkeley, 1999), chap. 8.

147 In 1885, while George Kennan was gathering information in Siberia for his scath-




The Russian social order would have been more stable had the elites—bothgovernmental and public—joined together to defend shared interests (property,values, beliefs). It is surely difficult to modernize a country, especially a vast,ethnically and regionally multifarious one like Russia, without a vigorous con-sensus between state and society, or at the very least between officialdom andeducated elites.148 E. P. Thompson has argued that England avoided majorsocial crises in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in part thanksto broad public acceptance of the “bloody” English penal code, in which thenumber of capital crimes increased from about fifty in 1700 to between 220and 230 in 1800. At the very least, England’s social elites condoned imposingthe death penalty for a wide variety of petty property crimes, right down tostealing turnips, so long as the laws were meticulously administered and lib-erally interpreted. For Thompson, the key point was the agreement amongEngland’s social elites that property was of greater value, under a variety ofcircumstances, than human life itself.149 Although it has been argued that thesanctity of property was Russia’s most European attribute,150 most of Russia’s

ing critique of Russia’s penal exile system, one of the key steps toward rendering theAmerican Indians powerless subjects of the state was undertaken by Congress andupheld by the Supreme Court in its U.S. v. Kagama decision (Walter L. Williams,“American Imperialism and the Indians, in Indians in American History: An Introduc-tion, ed. Frederick E. Hoxie [Arlington Heights, Ill., 1988], pp. 235–36). Also, 9,699(mostly black) prison inmates were leased in 1886 to private entrepreneurs, largely inthe former slave states, under terrible work conditions (Alex Lichtenstein, Twice theWork of Free Labor: The Political Economy of Convict Labor in the New South [Lon-don, 1996], pp. 19, 52–53, 130, 135). Finally, in the United States between 1880 and1910 some 3,638 people (84 percent of them blacks) were lynched (Margaret WernerCahalan and Lee Anne Parsons, Historical Corrections Statistics in the United States,1850–1984 [Rockville, Md., 1986], pp. 10–11). Of course, only beginning in the 1860sdid the authority to impose capital punishment begin to pass from local communitiesto the states in the United States. In Russia, by contrast, Paul I had made the issuingof death sentences the prerogative of the central authorities, as it was in most of WesternEurope (Tagantsev, Russkoe ugolovnoe pravo [n. 28 above], 2:107).

148 The contemporaneous Irish terrorist campaign seems to have enjoyed somethinglike genuine popular support, unlike the Russian campaign, which was led by Euro-peanized, educated elites who were every bit as alienated from the mass of populationas was that officialdom against which the terrorists vied. On the Irish case, see CharlesTownshend, Political Violence in Ireland: Government and Resistance since 1848 (Ox-ford, 1983), esp. chap. 4.

149 E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (London, 1963), p.80 (I am grateful to John Bushnell for bringing this passage to my attention); JamesB. Christophe, Capital Punishment and British Politics: The British Movement to Abol-ish the Death Penalty, 1945–57 (Chicago, 1962), p. 14; Phillip Thurmond Smith, Po-licing Victorian London: Political Policing, Public Order and the London MetropolitanPolice (Westport, Conn., 1985), pp. 17–18.

150 Marc Szeftel, “The Form of Government of the Russian Empire prior to the Con-



98 Daly

educated elites at the start of the twentieth century did not join with officialdomin defending it. On the contrary, during its last decades the Russian government“had to fight a[n oppositional] mood that was everywhere,” in the words ofV. G. Korolenko.151 Even the creation of a constitutional order in 1906 failedto win the government solid support from the broader educated elites.

The Imperial regime, by failing to guarantee full civil rights, to draw edu-cated elites into the government, and to curtail recourse to harsh repressivemeasures, drove them toward the radical opposition, thus helping to polarizethe Russian state and society, which was the key prerequisite for a seizure ofpower by extremists.152 Yet the refusal of the liberal and moderate oppositionto countenance any but liberal methods of governance only made it moredifficult for the government to share power with them. A. I. Guchkov, theOctobrists’ leader, considered his colleagues’ refusal to join with him in sup-porting Stolypin’s policy of repression proof of their “softness [driablost’] andlack of will [bezvol’nost’]” and their unsuitability to assume state responsi-bilities. He recalled how he had sparred over the issue with P. A. Geiden, aconservative Octobrist who in the past had held minor government positionsin the provinces. He had said to him, “suppose you are the interior minister.You receive a cable that violence will soon erupt between Armenians andTatary [Azerbaijanis].” When Guchkov told him it would be necessary to im-pose martial law, Geiden retorted that he would rather resign.153

Yet one should not forget that the government faced utterly fanatical op-ponents, at least at the political fringes. A terrorist, Presniakov, who killed analleged police informant in 1877, denied feeling any pity. “It was like killingan animal,” he said.154 The terrorist movement declined after the regicide of

stitutional Reforms of 1905–06,” in Essays in Russian and Soviet History in Honor ofGeroid Tanquary Robinson, ed. John Shelton Curtiss (New York, 1963), p. 114, andThe Russian Constitution (n. 45 above), p. 417, n. 121.

151 Korolenko (n. 114 above), 3:99. Korolenko quoted from an open letter to Alex-ander II from Petr Lavrov, published in Vpered and quoted from memory, “If you meetan educated young man with a clever face and an open look, that is your enemy” (3:99).

152 On social and political polarization in Russia, see Leopold H. Haimson, “TheProblem of Social Stability in Urban Russia, 1905–1917,” in The Structure of RussianHistory: Interpretative Essays, ed. M. Cherniavsky (New York, 1970), pp. 341–80,and “‘The Problem of Political and Social Stability in Urban Russia on the Eve of Warand Revolution’ Revisited,” Slavic Review 59 (Winter 2000): 848–75; Daniel R.Brower, The Russian City between Tradition and Modernity, 1850–1900 (Berkeley,1990), p. 221. For the most convincing “optimistic” assessment of Russia’s chancesfor peaceful development, see Marc Szeftel, The Russian Constitution, pp. 420–69.

153 V. I. Startsev, S. Liandres, and A. V. Smolin, eds., Aleksandr Ivanovich Guchkovrasskazyvaet: Vospominaniia predsedatelia Gosudarstvennoi dumy i voennogo ministraVremennogo pravitel’stva (Moscow, 1993), pp. 44–45.

154 N. S. Tiutchev, Revoliutsionnoe dvizhenie 1870–80 g.g.: Stat’i po arkhivnym ma-terialam, ed. A. V. Pribyleva (Leningrad, 1925), p. 29.




1881, but then it returned with a vengeance after the turn of the century. In1905–8 police authorities registered over five thousand violent attacks againstgovernment officials, roughly half resulting in their deaths.155

* * *

The February Revolution brought a euphoric sense of liberation from politicalrepression. The celebrated criminologist and antitsarist crusader M. N. Gernet,writing immediately after the fall of the monarchy, hailed the “political revo-lution unparalleled in human history” that had “raised us to an immeasurablemoral height. Throwing open the doors of the fortified cells where our fightershad been buried alive, discovering them rotting away in distant exile, seeingtheir bodies still trembling on the gallows, the victorious people abolishedcapital punishment. And abolished it without any limitations and forever.”156

During the first half of March 1917, the Provisional Government abolishedthe entire police apparatus, dismissing the governors and vice-governors, andamnestied all political and religious criminals, except people suspected of trea-son.157 For a brief period, nearly all of Russia’s educated elites, both insideand outside the government, felt a unity of purpose. Alas, this unity was to beshort-lived. The research of Ingraham indicates that “often it has been thefailure to employ limited measures of repression during a period of weaknessand division which has led to the polarization of factions within society, thedefeat of democracy, and the introduction of a dictatorial regime.”158 The fail-ure in this regard of the Provisional Government surely opened the way to aBolshevik seizure of power.

Under the Imperial regime, political activists were persecuted for their be-liefs far longer than their counterparts in Western European countries, yet asin those countries, they generally received more lenient treatment than regularcriminals.159 In Soviet Russia, the situation was reversed. Not only were po-litical offenders treated often much worse than regular criminals; in addition,far more people were punished for political than for regular crimes. The em-phasis on political reeducation, the holding of families responsible for the

155 A. M. Zaionchkovskii, “V gody reaktsii” KA 8 (1925): 242–43.156 Gernet cited in A. Karelin, Smertnaia kazn’ (Detroit, 1923), p. 3.157 Jonathan W. Daly, “The Security Police in Late Imperial Russia,” in Russia under

the Last Tsar: Opposition and Subversion, 1894–1917, ed. Anna Geifman (London,1999), p. 234; Svod uzakonenii i rasporiazhenii pravitel’stva (March 7, 1917), no. 55,art. 346.

158 Ingraham (n. 6 above), p. xiii.159 For some evidence that political offenders throughout Russia, even in the midst

of the 1905–1907 revolution, received more lenient treatment than regular criminals,see Asin (n. 120 above), pp. 16–18, 29–35.



100 Daly

deeds of their members, and the punishment of whole social categories alsomade the Soviet penal system harsher than its predecessor.160

The opposition of many educated elites to the imperial regime, though nearlyabsolute until 1917, lost its meaning after the Bolshevik seizure of power.Sorokin must have spoken for the majority of erstwhile opponents of the im-perial regime when he wrote that “compared to the hell of the Communistcamps and prisons, those of the tsar could be called a purgatory.”161 And Al-exander Kerenskii argued in emigration that “after having suffered through theexperience of the totalitarian regimes in Europe and Russia, to call Stolypin a‘terrorist ruler’ is just as ludicrous as to compare amateur singing to the perfectartistry of Shaliapin. In support of this thesis one need cite only this one fact:that the number of innocent hostages shot in Russia in one day after [theSocialist-Revolutionary terrorist Fannie] Kaplan’s attempt on Lenin’s life [onAugust 30, 1918] significantly exceeded the number of those sentenced to hangby Stolypin’s ‘rapid-firing’ military field courts during the entire eight monthsof their existence.”162 Kerenskii was probably not exaggerating, since the of-ficial Soviet government daily, Izvestiia, reported that on August 31, 1918, theCheka had executed 553 hostages in Nizhnyi Novgorod and Petrograd alone.163

Yet perhaps what distinguished late Imperial Russia from Soviet Russia wasless the comparative levels of brute repression, which may have been only amatter of degree, than the new regime’s positive agenda. The Bolsheviks in-tended to mobilize the people for visionary projects. Reflecting years later onthe nature of the Imperial regime, Tyrkova-Williams wrote, “we assured our-selves and others that we were being strangled in the hands of the autocracy.In reality we were free in body and soul. We were not allowed to talk aboutmany things, but nobody forced us to say things we did not believe.”164 In thissense late Imperial Russia was fully within the ambit of European govern-mental practice, whereas its socialist successor had set out on a new path.

160 Papadatos (n. 5 above), pp. x, 105–6, 110; Elise Kimerling, “Civil Rights andSocial Policy in Soviet Russia, 1918–1936,” Russian Review 41 (January 1982): 24–46.

161 Sorokin (n. 126 above), pp. 84–85.162 A. F. Kerenskii, Rossiia na istoricheskom povorote: Memuary (Moscow, 1993),

p. 70.163 Richard Pipes, The Russian Revolution (New York, 1991), p. 819.164 Tyrkova-Williams (n. 124 above), pp. 114–15.



Political Crime in Late Imperial Russia (2002)

Documents

Transcript of Political Crime in Late Imperial Russia (2002)