THE PARTIAL DISMANTLING OF THE PATRIMONIAL STATE
between private and common good. Such, for example, was the purpose behind his practice of attaching explanations to imperial decrees from the most trivial (e.g. an ukaz prohibiting the grazing of cattle on the boulevards of St Petersburg) to the most weighty (such as the decree of 1722 changing the law of imperial succession). No monarch before Peter had thought such explanations necessary; he was the first to take the people into his confidence. In 1702 he launched Russia's first newspaper, Vedomosti. This publication not only made a major contribution to Russia's cultural life; it also marked a dramatic constitutional innovation, for with this act Peter abandoned the Muscovite tradition of treating national and international news as a state secret.
These and related measures posited a society functioning in partnership with the state. But this assumption was not thought out, and herein lies the central tragedy of modern Russian politics. It was not necessary for Peter and his successors to take their people into confidence, to treat them as partners rather than as mere subjects, to inculcate in them a sense of common destiny. Numerous regimes of the patrimonial or despotic type had managed to carry on for centuries without taking this drastic step. But once it had been decided that the interests of the country required the existence of a citizenry conscious of its collective identity and of its role in the country's development, then certain consequences inevitably followed. It was clearly contradictory to appeal to the public sentiments of the Russian people and at the same time to deny them any legal or political safeguards against the omnipotence of the state. A partnership in which one party held all the power and played by its own rules was obviously unworkable. And yet this is exactly how Russia has been governed from Peter the Great to this day. The refusal of those in authority to grasp the obvious consequences of inviting public participation generated in Russia a condition of permanent political tension which successive governments sought to attenuate sometimes by loosening their reins on the realm, sometimes by tightening them, but never by inviting society to share the coachman's seat. With the idea of the state came the notion of political crime, and this, in turn, led to the establishment of the political police. The Code of 1649 which had first defined crimes against the tsar and his realm under the category of 'Word and Deed' offences had not as yet created special organs to ferret out political dissenters. At that time the tsarist government relied on denunciation by private citizens for information concerning seditious activities. The disposal of such cases was entrusted to individual prikazy; only the most serious ones came before the tsar and his Duma. Peter continued to rely heavily on denunciation; for example, in 1711
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he ordered that anyone (serfs included) denouncing dvoriane evading service should receive their villages as a reward. But he no longer could afford to treat political crimes as an occasional nuisance because his enemies were legion and scattered among all the strata of society. He created, therefore, a separate police bureau, the Preobrazhenskii Prikaz, which he charged with over-all responsibility for dealing with political offences in the empire. This institution was introduced so surreptitiously that historians to this day have not been able to locate the decree authorizing its establishment or even to determine the approximate date when it might have been issued.11 The first solid information concerning this organ dates from 1702 when a decree came out detailing its functions and authority. According to its provisions, the head of the Preobrazhenskii Prikaz had the right to investigate at his discretion any institution and any individual, regardless of rank, and to take whatever steps he thought necessary to uncover pertinent information and forestall seditious acts. In contrast to the other branches of administration created under Peter, its functions were defined very vaguely - a fact which served to enhance its powers. No one - not even the Senate which Peter had set up to supervise the country's administration - had the right to inquire into its affairs. In its chambers thousands were tortured and put to death, among them peasants who resisted the soul tax or recruitment orders, religious dissenters and drunks overheard to make disparaging remarks about the sovereign. The uses of the police, however, were not confined to political offences, broadly defined as these were. Whenever the government ran into any kind of difficulty, it tended to call upon its organs for help. Thus, the complex task of managing the construction of St Petersburg, after various unsuccessful attempts was in the end entrusted to that city's police chief.
The Preobrazhenskii Prikaz seems to have been the first institution in history created to deal specifically and exclusively with political crimes. The scope of its operations and its complete administrative independence mark it as the prototype of a basic organ of all modern police states. It is one of the few dependable rules of history that, given enough time, private interests will always triumph over public ones simply because their advocates, as they stand both to lose and to gain more than do the guardians of public property, are infinitely more resourceful.
The dvoriane listed with the Office of the Heroldmeister in St Petersburg as serving under the Table of Ranks were even under Peter's semi-meritocratic regime recipients of exclusive privileges, holding as they did the bulk of the country's arable land and of its working population. Their hold on this property, however, was tenuous, being conditional
THE PARTIAL DISMANTLING OF THE PATRIMONIAL STATE
on the satisfactory performance of state service and also subject to many legal restrictions. Nor did the dvoriane enjoy any safeguards to protect them from the arbitrariness of the state and its officials. As one might expect, their foremost desires were to transform their conditional possession of land and serfs into outright ownership and to acquire guarantees of personal inviolability. They also wished for greater business opportunities than they had under a system of rigid state monopolies. Finally, to the extent that they became educated and curious about the outside world, they wanted the right of free travel and access to information. Most of these wishes were granted to them during the four decades which followed Peter's death (1725); the remainder, before the century was over. The climacteric was the reign of Catherine the Great; for although Catherine is mainly remembered for her love affairs it was she, rather than Peter, who revolutionized the Russian system and set it on its western course.
The dismantling of the patrimonial structure occurred with astonishing rapidity. Unfortunately, historians have paid much less attention to its decline than to its origins with the result that much of that history is covered by obscurity. We must confine our explanation to several hypotheses, the validity of which only further study can determine:
1. In the imperial period, the dvorianstvo grew very impressively in numbers; between the middle of the seventeenth and the end of the eighteenth centuries its male contingent increased nearly threefold, and from the end of the eighteenth to the middle of the nineteenth, once again more than fourfold; from approximately 39,000 in 1651, to 108,000 in 1782, to 464,000 in 1858.12
2. A number of Peter's measures bearing on the dvorianstvo had had the effect of consolidating its position: a. By regularizing procedures for service promotion, the Table of Ranks helped to free the dvorianstvo from total dependence on the per sonal favour of the tsar and his advisers; it made the service establish ment more autonomous, a development which the crown was unable subsequently to reverse; b. Compulsory education required of young dvoriane brought them together and tended to heighten their sense of class solidarity; the Guard Regiments where the elite of dvoriane was schooled and given military training acquired extraordinary power; c. The increase in the authority of the landlord resulting from the introduction of the soul tax and conscription transformed dvoriane into virtual satraps on their estates;