The higher police: Vladimir Putin and his predecessors.

• Author: Murawiec, Laurent

SO MUCH HAS changed in Russia since the fall of the Soviet Union that it is easy to overlook some things that have not changed. One of the most significant of these constants is the continued importance of an intelligence elite that has existed within the Russian state for nearly 200 years, both as a corporate body and, more importantly, as a current of thought endowed with a distinctive identity and self-assured sense of national mission. This elite calls itself "the Higher Police" and, as things have turned out, it is largely in charge in today's Russia.

As it happens, the historical continuity of this elite can be traced, its self-conception can be charted, and its impact on the actions of the Russian state, yesterday as well as today, can be assessed. Such tasks are critical to understanding contemporary Russia and Russian foreign policy. It is to such labors, at least in their preliminary stage, that this essay is directed.

Grafting the Roots

IN 1997, the FSB (Federal'naya Sluzbba Bezopasnosti, or Federal Security Service), the contemporary incarnation of the Russian intelligence service--most popularly known as the KGB(1)--convened the first in a series of annual seminars on the history of the intelligence craft and intelligence organizations in Russia. Dubbed the "Historical Lectures at the Lubyanka"-- since they were held at the old headquarters of the KGB--the seminars took place under the auspices of the Andropov Institute. In-house KGB historians and invited outside academics gave presentations on such subjects as "The Founding of the Cheka: A New View", "On the Intelligence Activity of the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs at the Beginning of the 20th Century", and "The Department of Police and Secret Agents (1902-1917)." Remarkably, KGB historians have been focusing on pre-1917 intelligence work and organizations. While they do not ignore entirely 80 years of Soviet intelligence history--that of the Cheka, the GPU, the NKVD, and the KGB (2)-their focus points to a continuous corporate identity harking back to pre-revolutionary predecessor organizations that defined themselves as a "Higher Police" transcending ideology itself.

The history of the Higher Police dates back to the early 19th century. After the Decembrist putsch of 1825 failed to overthrow the newly enthroned Nicholas I, the Czar established a new organization that soon "became the most powerful force in the country", the Third Section of His Majesty's Own Chancellery. (3) Designed not merely as a command center for repression of subversive machinations, it was also tasked with "the study of Russia's condition." Gathering the best and the brightest of the nobility, its brief was virtually unlimited. It was subordinate to the monarch alone. Such was the vysshaya politsiya, or, in the French preferred by the aristocracy of the time, la haute police. Its chief was General Count Alexander Khristoforovich Benckendorff (1783-1844), a soldier who rose from the ranks of the Baltic-German nobility that had provided so many of the Czars' servants.

Under Benckendorff's stewardship, which stretched from 1825 through 1844, the Third Section devoted itself to social engineering on a grand scale. Far from being merely a political police, it conceived of its role as "eradicating abuse" wherever it might be found in Russian society. Its 1839 report to the Czar boldly stated: "All Russia impatiently awaits changes....The machine requires to be reworked afresh. The keys to this necessity are to be found injustice and Industry. ...[The Section is] convinced of the necessity, even of the inevitability, of the liberation of the serfs." (4) One could barely cite so explosive and sensitive an issue in the Russia of the time. Had such words been published in a journal, uttered in public, or even whispered in private--by anyone other than a member of the Third Section--it would have been cause for instant imprisonment or exile. Yet the Third Section regularly issued such reformist policy recommendations without fear. The 1838 report advocated the development of railwa ys in Russia; the 1841 report called for special attention to public health; the 1842 report advocated lowering tariffs to foster economic development. The Section's Annual Reports on the State of Public Opinion were the Czar's eyes and ears. (While these extraordinary reports have in general been available to historians, their import has not been properly understood; as "police" reports, they are only of passing interest, but as traces of the Higher Police's social engineering ambitions, they are of primordial importance.)

The Third Section represented the emergence of a technocratic elite that pursued its mission of serving the Russian state from within and with the use of "enlightened" methods of social control and engineering. They were not a gaggle of thugs, or the jackbooted shock troops of autocratic repression. They conceived of themselves as the best, purest and most loyal servants of "a certain idea of Russia", and it is a concept that set deep roots. Indeed, it recurred several decades later in the 1870s, when the reformist course followed by the "czar-liberator" Alexander II faltered and terrorists besieged the regime. In a desperate bid to regroup, reorganize and streamline the forces of counter-revolution to defend the tottering regime, the Czar chose General Prince Mikhail T. Loris-Melikov as head of the Third Section.

The prince, an Armenian warlord who had met signal success as commander of the Army of the Caucasus, applied liberal "techniques" to a difficult situation. He enlarged public liberties in the hope of rallying the enlightened segments of public opinion to the regime's side. The slogan that inspired and symbolized Loris-Melikov's policy was a call for a "dictatorship of the heart." (It seems that even in matters of the heart...