30 - Police and revolutionaries

Summary

Soon after officers of leading noble families rebelled in December 1825, Nicholas I created the Third Section of His Imperial Majesty’s Own Chancellery and a uniformed gendarmerie to conduct censorship, oversee the bureaucracy, keep track of the public mood and preserve state security. During the first two decades of its existence, Nicholas’s security police were not unpopular. At the end of Nikolai Gogol’s Inspector General (Revizor, 1836), for example, the gendarme who announces the arrival of the true inspector appears as a symbol of justice. At any given moment during the second quarter of the century, one or two dozen people – mostly officials, society women, writers, journalists and well-connected nobles – provided sporadic, often gossipy information to the Third Section, sometimes quite openly.

Aside from the Polish rebellion of 1830–1, the period from 1826 to 1840 witnessed almost no incidents of political opposition. The intelligentsia was largely preoccupied with literary and philosophical issues. The execution of five Decembrists and the exile to Siberia of over one hundred more in 1826 had surely diverted many from the path of active opposition. As the close association between government and educated public began to break down, in the 1840s, thanks to the expansion of education, increased European influences and the wave of European revolutions in 1848, the police sought to maintain the status quo, driving into internal or external exile prominent intellectuals like Alexander Herzen and Fedor Dostoevsky. The Third Section was beginning to inspire dread but still was not an efficient security police institution.