On the day of the five Decembrists’ executions, Nicholas issued a manifesto in which he announced the necessity of cleansing society of ‘the consequences of the disease that had been incubating in its midst’. He went on to explain that this disease was an alien element in Russia, whose ‘heart’ was pure. He stressed the necessity of parents safeguarding their children from evil (foreign) influences and educating them to understand that ‘love of the Monarch and devotion to the throne are rooted in the national character’ of Russia.1
Nicholas meant to break with the past and adopt an entirely new approach to protecting the state. He did not want the kind of secret police that spied and repressed; he wanted an organ that would enable him to exercise his fatherly role of keeping his subjects out of harm’s way and guiding them, with loving severity – and he meant to keep direct control of it. He transferred all police work concerned with law enforcement and criminal investigation to the ministry of the interior. Matters of a political nature were to be dealt with by his own chancellery, within which he created, by imperial ukaz on 3 July 1826, a dedicated section, the third. To head the Third Section of His Imperial Majesty’s Chancellery and implement his concept he appointed the forty-four-year-old General Aleksandr Kristoforovich von Benckendorff.
Benckendorff was an unlikely candidate to run the secret police of an empire faced with revolutionary perils. A charming ladies’ man, not particularly intelligent or energetic, vague, forgetful and absent-minded by the time he had reached middle age, he was seen by many as a bumbling nonentity, even as something of a joke. The scion of Baltic German barons and the son of an infantry general who had been close to Tsar Paul I, he had been sent to a school in Bavaria, followed by one in St Petersburg run by French Jesuits. In 1798 he became an officer in the Semeonovsky Guards, in whose ranks he fought at Eylau nine years later. In the same year he accompanied Petr Alexeevich Tolstoy on his embassy to Paris, which he enjoyed greatly. He met many interesting people, including Metternich, then Austrian ambassador in the French capital, whom he seems to have emulated in his numerous amorous conquests, to the extent of sharing some. In 1812 he was given command of a ‘flying detachment’ with orders to harry Napoleon’s retreating army, which he did with success and with greater humanity than most of his colleagues, treating both French prisoners and the serfs who fought under his orders with consideration. The following year he commanded a brigade at the Battle of Leipzig, and went on to liberate Holland and Belgium and to take part in the French campaign of 1814.
In 1819 he became chief of staff of the Guard Corps, and quickly realised that all was not well. He was particularly alarmed by the young officers, who combined low morale and lax discipline with unorthodox political views, but his attempts to remedy this were thwarted by unit commanders. His conviction that the Semeonovsky mutiny of 1820 had nothing to do with any international conspiracy did not endear him to Alexander, and he was transferred to the command of a cavalry division.2
Benckendorff grew close to Grand Duke Nicholas, who liked and trusted him, and from the moment news of Alexander’s death reached St Petersburg he was present at most of the confabulations concerning the succession. He was with Nicholas on the morning of 14 December, and was the first to call out his unit in support of the new tsar. Nicholas appointed him to the Investigating Committee, to which he contributed a voice of sanity and a note of humanity. During interrogations he was always polite and even solicitous towards the prisoners, many of whom noted his kindness.3
On his return from Paris in 1810, Benckendorff had submitted a memorandum to Alexander on the desirability of establishing a political police force along the lines of Fouché’s, with the proviso that it should have a moral base and constitute a ‘cohort of right-thinking people’. Alexander had never shown much interest in police. In the decade 1810–20, while the budget of the foreign ministry quadrupled, that of the ministry of police remained roughly the same, at under 3 per cent of state revenue. In 1819 he abolished the ministry, and the police continued to function as a law unto themselves, using bribery and intimidation to acquire evidence, which they used for various purposes unconnected with the enforcement of the law or state security. Staffed mostly by people of low calibre, uneducated and venal, this body epitomised the worst stereotypes of the snooping, sinister, corrupt secret police of legend, spying on harmless individuals while ignoring more serious matters. In February 1820 the Moscow police reported how many people gathered at the English Club, how many went to a masquerade and how many to the theatre on a given day (120, 136 and 769 respectively). But they did not report, as the French ambassador did in the very same month, and for months before and after, that people were bored, fed up with Alexander’s obsession with religion and his growing taciturnity, and overwhelmingly wished he would try to enjoy life and let them do so too. They also failed to note what many ordinary people were commenting on, namely that the guards stationed in St Petersburg were on the verge of mutiny. The street police were also inefficient and corrupt, and brutal in the extreme, administering rough justice and beating people up in full view of passers-by.4
Following the Decembrist revolt, Benckendorff produced a new memorandum which painted a dismal picture of the existing state of affairs: ‘our secret police is almost brainless’, he wrote, and, what was worse, ‘honourable people are afraid of it, while rascals manipulate it’. An efficient secret police ought to be centralised, he argued, with agents everywhere and a semi-military arm covering the whole country. Vigilant postmasters in St Petersburg, Moscow and all the provincial capitals ought to keep close watch on all private correspondence. But the most important element in ensuring the body’s effectiveness was to make it honourable, beginning with its chief, so that decent people ‘who might wish to warn the government about some conspiracy or to appraise him of interesting news’ should feel inclined and confident enough to come forward. ‘Evil-doers, intriguers and other such people who have repented of their faults or wish to redeem themselves by some denunciation will at least know where to turn.’ There were contradictions in his argument: while denouncing the evils of ‘a police which relies on denunciation and intrigue’, he advocated extensive use of spies.5
The Third Section consisted of sixteen people, based in an office on Fontanka Street. They were marshalled by Benckendorff’s director of chancellery, Maksim Yakovlevich von Vock, a likeable, educated man of progressive views, and rapidly built up a pool of some 5,000 informers, most of them strategically embedded in society. A letter from Vock to Benckendorff written in July 1826 provides a window on to the process of recruiting such agents. Vock had identified a minor noble by the name of Nefedev who, he believed, could render excellent service ‘as a consequence of his connections in the middle and higher social circles of Moscow’. He would be ‘a walking encyclopedia, to which I can always refer’, and would be perfectly positioned to produce information on anyone in Moscow, which he had plausible reasons to visit frequently, and where he had a house in which he often entertained, which meant that he could invite the objects of the Third Section’s interest rather than having to approach them at social gatherings. Nefedev was ‘a state councillor with the Order of St Vladimir 3rd Class, vain and eager for honours’, so there should be no trouble in recruiting him, and ‘his usefulness is obvious’. Vock was surprised and offended whenever he met with a refusal. ‘People who enjoy all the privileges of birth, wealth and intellect, and do not use these gifts for the general good, are guiltier than the plotters,’ he wrote, mirroring Nicholas’s view that every member of society should do his duty. Benckendorff was less censorious, and was prepared to pay spies and to use criminals who wished to ‘redeem their crimes’.6
On 25 June, ten days before the creation of the Third Section, Benckendorff had been put in command of the Gendarmerie, originally founded in 1815 when a dragoon regiment had been renamed and given the task of providing a military police for the Russian units in France. It was now to be the executive arm of the Third Section. The military background of this force suited Benckendorff perfectly, as he wished to have at his disposal a body untainted by the corruption associated with the police. He reorganised it, giving it the name of the New Corps of Imperial Gendarmes, with sky-blue uniforms, to symbolise the clarity of the heavens, and white cross-belts and gloves to stand for purity; it was to be a moral force for good. The empire was divided into five, and subsequently eight, districts, each under the command of a general of gendarmes. As he was a direct representative of the Third Section of the emperor’s chancellery, the chief of gendarmes in any given district, whatever his rank, could overrule even the governor of a province.
Legend has it that when Benckendorff asked the tsar for a directive defining the role of the Third Section, Nicholas, who was holding a handkerchief at the time, handed it to him with the words: ‘Here is your directive. The more tears you wipe away with this handkerchief, the more faithfully you will serve my aims.’ The gendarmes were supposed to mingle with society and make themselves liked and trusted. ‘If they like you, you will easily achieve everything,’ Benckendorff said to one newly-appointed gendarme. ‘If a gendarme is not popular,’ he said to another, ‘he is of no use.’ Operating on a higher moral plane than the notoriously corrupt administration, the gendarmes could exert a beneficial influence; they were to lead by example, shame corruption, protect the weak and offer help and advice wherever they were needed, even in family disputes.7
‘In you, everyone will see an official who can, through my agency, bring the voice of suffering humanity to the Imperial Throne and immediately place the defenceless and voiceless Citizen under the protection of the Tsar,’ Benckendorff told one new recruit. Being in a position to right wrongs and help the helpless, the gendarme would have the support and assistance of all who loved their country, the truth, virtue, and so on. He also warned that, being a champion of virtue, he would be confronted by evil, and must stand firm against it.8
Public opinion was sceptical at best. As spies in the drawing rooms of St Petersburg and Moscow reported, people believed the new police might just improve things if they were controlled by competent and upright people, otherwise ‘the medicine will be worse than the disease, and instead of having one bad police force we will have two’.9
An unexpected problem was that the establishment of the Third Section was viewed as a threat by the other police forces in operation – the city police, the governor general’s police and the military police. These now sprang into feverish activity in order to demonstrate their zeal and their superiority to the newly-founded organ. They began to gather information on everyone and anyone, and Moscow and St Petersburg swarmed with spies. People lived in fear of their own servants, and became guarded even in the best society, which was riddled with aristocratic informers. On 23 August, less than two months after the foundation of the Third Section, an indignant Vock complained to his chief that he was himself under surveillance by the city police, who were watching his house, noting the names of visitors, and following him wherever he went. He was outraged that ‘surveillance itself is being made the object of surveillance, in defiance of all sense and propriety’. In the field, the agents of the rival organisations disrupted each other’s operations, laying false trails and provoking disturbances which they then accused the others of having started by their clumsiness. The Third Section and its gendarmes soon adopted some of their tactics, and, rightly or wrongly, people believed they too took bribes.10
Nicholas was aware that his punishment of the Decembrists had turned him into a figure of hate in many quarters, in Russia and abroad, and was therefore keen to demonstrate that there really was a conspiracy threatening his throne. ‘We arrest people not in search of victims,’ he once said, ‘but in order to let the truth be known to our accusers.’ This dictated the true mission of the Third Section: to find plots against the tsar and his government. Whatever Benckendorff might have hoped, its priority was not assisting the downtrodden but the discovery of subversion. Ineluctably, it became an instrument of political manipulation and propaganda.11
The mood of the country, according to Benckendorff’s overview for the year 1827, was not in the least revolutionary. The document assesses the attitudes of every social group, beginning with the court, which was entirely loyal and without influence outside its own circle. The aristocracy, top officials and others of note inhabiting the capital are described as ‘contented’, with the exception of those who are ‘discontented’ because they no longer enjoy the positions and influence they held under the previous tsar or because they would like to see a more liberal form of government. They did not, in his view, represent the slightest danger. The ‘middle class’, consisting of landowners living in the capital or larger towns, nobles not in government service, merchants, educated people and writers, was described as being ‘contented’ and supportive of the state. The civil servants and the whole administration were ‘morally the most corrupt’, but did not present a political threat. The army was passive. The serfs were unhappy and the clergy despondent on account of their poverty and low status, but these classes were of no consequence.
There was only one class which did provide cause for concern. ‘Our youth, that is to say the young gentry between the ages of 17 and 25 constitute as a group the most gangrened element in the empire,’ the report maintains. ‘Among these madcaps we can see the germs of Jacobinism, a revolutionary reformist spirit,’ it goes on, concluding that, unchecked, this would ‘turn these young people into real Carbonari’. It all stemmed from their upbringing. This would have come as no surprise to Nicholas. During the investigation into the Decembrist revolt he too had become convinced that the educational system was spreading ‘gangrene’ through the nobility’s youth. An inspection of the University of Kharkov in February 1826 yielded a report that ‘the present generation is entirely infected with gangrene and there should be not a moment’s delay in remedying a disease whose effects are already making themselves strongly felt’. Private education at home was no better. It was ‘a plague which one must seek to extirpate’. ‘In a word,’ the inspectors concluded, ‘we need an essentially monarchical and not a subversive education, without which the tranquillity of the empire is in jeopardy.’12
‘Our infected youth needs vigilant and persistent surveillance,’ Vock advised Benckendorff, and the Third Section concentrated on this area, pursuing every lead it could pick up. In 1826 one of its informers, actually an agent provocateur, came up with intelligence of a conspiracy among students led by three brothers by the name of Kritsky who supposedly intended to start a revolution and murder the tsar. The investigation did not uncover any real evidence, but the brothers were locked up for good measure in the Schlusselburg fortress, a favoured place of detention for political prisoners. Two years later, Ivan Ivanovich Sukhinov, who had taken part in the revolt of the Southern Society and been sentenced to death, commuted to life with hard labour in a mine in Nerchinsk, apparently tried to organise a rebellion in the mine with his fellow convicts, but was betrayed, condemned to be shot, and hanged himself. There were other reports of officers and young nobles associating and making subversive noises in various parts of the country. The scarcity of any actual subversion is demonstrated by the alacrity with which in the summer of 1826 Vock’s agents, who had been alerted that a number of youths met frequently at the lodgings of a certain Mordvinov, set about infiltrating the group, only to report that ‘Mordvinov and his associates are nothing more than rakes who gather together with the sole aim of holding orgies.’ Matters were not allowed to rest there, and much further investigation went into observing which brothels Mordvinov scoured in order to find the right girls.13
In 1831 the Third Section received a report of a conspiracy being hatched in Irkutsk in Siberia by the exiled Decembrist A.N. Muravev. The source of the report was Roman Maddox, a cursory look at whose background might have given the Third Section pause for thought. The son of a theatre manager of English origin, he had revealed remarkable histrionic talent in 1812 when, aged seventeen, he had decided to raise a partisan unit of Circassian tribesmen. He forged documents which represented him as a lieutenant of horseguards and aide-de-camp to the minister of war, as well as powers of attorney from both him and the minister of finance. Armed with these he set off for the Caucasus, where he strutted about military bases and inspected installations, and unwisely wrote a critical report to the minister of police. He was locked up in the Peter and Paul fortress and then the Schlusselburg for thirteen years. Barely out of gaol, he enlisted as a gendarme. In 1829 he was posted to Irkutsk, where he busied himself with spying on Muravev by paying court to his wife’s sister. He reported that Muravev was corresponding in code with other Decembrists, and that there were two secret societies operating, one in St Petersburg, the other in Moscow, under the name ‘Union of the Great Cause’, dedicated to overthrowing the state. The Third Section sent a senior gendarme out to assist Maddox, who had penetrated deeper into the conspiracy and acquired a ‘coupon’ which would gain him admission to the inner circles of the St Petersburg and Moscow societies. He was recalled to St Petersburg, where he showed Benckendorff a clutch of fantastic forgeries. The latter despatched him to Moscow, where he was to use his ‘coupon’ and penetrate the local Union of the Great Cause. A general of gendarmes was attached to him to provide liaison and duly passed back various scraps of information, accounts of secret meetings and random denunciations. In the course of his ‘penetration’ Maddox contrived to marry the daughter of a wealthy family and promptly vanished, taking her dowry but not her person with him. He succeeded in evading the police for some time, but eventually, having run out of money, returned to Moscow, where he was caught and thrown into the Schlusselburg once more.14
Another who played fast and loose with the gullibility of the Third Section was Captain Sherwood. He had proved his worth by his warnings about the conspiracy of the Southern Society, and been richly rewarded for it: he was promoted, ennobled and given the surname Vernii – ‘Loyal’. He was also given a post in the Third Section. In 1827 he was sent south to check if there was any conspiratorial activity there. He travelled about, taking the waters in the Caucasus, lingering in Odessa and coming to rest in Kiev, where he set up a network of informers. Wherever he went, he adopted an enigmatic manner, hinting, winking and bluffing, playing on people’s fears and encouraging them to denounce before they were themselves denounced – in a manner later parodied by Gogol in The Government Inspector. He found that the families of exiled or imprisoned Decembrists, if a hint or two was dropped that their beloved husband, brother or son might be released in return for services rendered, were prepared to denounce anyone they could think of.
Unfortunately for Sherwood, the local chief of gendarmes became anxious that his own authority was being undermined and that any intelligence, real or fabricated, that Sherwood might send to Benckendorff might reflect badly on him. He therefore had Sherwood watched, put together a file listing all his misdemeanours – professional, ethical and sexual – to which he added a number of well-documented insulting things he had said about Benckendorff, and sent it off to St Petersburg. Sherwood was duly recalled and cashiered. He resorted to criminal activities of one sort or another, and attempted to recover the confidence of the Third Section with fresh revelations. To no avail: he was exiled from St Petersburg for his pains. Not content to let matters rest there, Sherwood wrote to Grand Duke Michael, enclosing a report which castigated the Third Section for being ineffectual, affirming that it was failing to address the very real threat posed by exiled Decembrists and Polish revolutionaries, and accusing Vock’s successor and Benckendorff’s deputy Leontii Dubelt of inefficiency and corruption. He assured the grand duke that the whole of St Petersburg knew that in order to affect a judgement, send someone to prison or exile, or obtain a person’s release, all that was necessary was a call on Dubelt’s mistress, and accused him of having taken more than 100,000 roubles in bribes. The grand duke passed the report to Dubelt, who had Sherwood thrown into the Schlusselburg.15
Legislation dating back to the seventeenth century had made a virtue of denunciation, and failure to denounce someone who might be guilty of a crime against the state (which could include ‘evil intent’) was itself a crime, punishable by death. By the beginning of the eighteenth century the concept of passivity as a criminal act was well established, and suspicion had become an admissible element in judging a case. The reforms of Peter the Great effectively made anyone who fell under suspicion guilty by implication, and reinforced the obligation to denounce. Denunciation could earn rewards such as promotion, noble status, decorations, estates and pensions. It was therefore well worth a try. Given the prevalence of corruption among the civil service, a random denunciation might yield unexpected fruit when the official in question came to be investigated.16
An experienced provincial chief of gendarmes, Colonel Lomachevsky, claimed that he could tell at a glance which denunciations to disregard and which to investigate. But failing to look into an evidently spurious one might lay him open to denunciation himself, for either lack of zeal or corruption, on the assumption that he had taken a bribe not to pursue the matter. At the level of the Third Section in St Petersburg, under the eagle eye of Nicholas, nobody was willing to take such responsibility. Nicholas never entirely ceded control to Benckendorff, and kept looking over his shoulder. And his suspicions were as easy to arouse as they were difficult to allay.
A certain Lukovsky, probably a Pole, turned up from England in 1835 with the information that there was a Russo-Polish secret society in that country preparing to overthrow the Russian monarchy by means of a march from British India, through Persia, Georgia and Astrakhan. He did not produce a single name or fact to back this up, yet Nicholas, while thinking it a little ‘unclear’, believed that ‘in our times nothing should be ignored’, so the matter was pursued.
In January 1831, Yakov Ivanovich Sanglen, now aged sixty-four and retired, was summoned by the tsar. When he arrived he found Nicholas in a state of panic, having received a report which he asked Sanglen to study and assess. The report painted a lurid picture of a conspiracy by the Illuminati, who had apparently infiltrated the highest circles of Russian society, making converts among the late Tsar Alexander’s closest advisers and even, it suggested, Alexander himself. It claimed that the entire civil administration, including the Third Section, had been infiltrated and that Nicholas was surrounded by traitors only waiting for an opportunity to assassinate him. The inclusion of the Third Section was something of a giveaway, and it is now known that Sherwood had a hand in the report, in an attempt to get his own back. Sanglen managed to convince the tsar that it was nonsense and restore his peace of mind – but not for long.17
A few days later he received a communication from Magnitsky, also in retirement, warning him that Europe was threatened by a vast plot by the Illuminati. Quoting a dizzying array of supposedly original sources, Magnitsky took Nicholas through the whole well-worn story, from the foundation of the Illuminati in the 1780s, their invention of acqua tofana, their possession of a sacred box in which their secrets and the counterfeit seals of thirty kings were kept, which was designed to explode if touched by a profane hand, to their involvement in the French Revolution and their defeat of the allied intervention against it in 1792 by the Duke of Brunswick, an adept, rigging the outcome of the battle at Valmy. From that point onwards, ‘conspirators of whatever name against God and rulers, Masons of various degrees, Rosicrucians, Knights of the Sun, pupils of Voltaire and Rousseau, Templars, followers of Swedenborg, Saint-Martin and Weishaupt, all came together under the name of Jacobins’. They had infiltrated the whole of Europe and Russia, and the murders of Kotzebue and the duc de Berry, and the Decembrist rising, had all been their work.18
In further letters, Magnitsky exposed the more insidious aspects of the conspiracy. ‘Literature, all the sciences, and all the arts have already been geared to its aims by means of the most poisonous artifice, because from the most elementary children’s books to the courses of higher education classic illuminism is inserted with such artfulness that on the one hand it is detectable only upon most experienced and minute examination, and on the other hand (and this is essential to the Illuminati) it is easily accessible to the most simple minds.’ Liberals pressed for wider education only so they could spread their creed, and by branding anyone who opposed them as a ‘Jesuit’ or an obscurantist, they shamed and ridiculed right-thinking people. German scientific congresses were no more than staff meetings at which they discussed strategy, and the Churches, particularly the Anglicans and the Methodists, were controlled by the Illuminati, along with ‘worshippers of fire and the Dalai Lama’. Most of the establishment of Europe had been infiltrated, and the French and English governments were little better than Lodges, with the Duke of Wellington a typical example of a man apparently supporting the throne, but actually bent on its overthrow.
Russia, by virtue of its moral strength, attracted the full fury of the sect. It would be attacked at the political level through revolts, wars and diplomatic means, and at the moral level through ‘political demoralisation’. The sect’s means for achieving this were literature and foreign travellers, particularly merchants and bankers, who were only pretending to do business but were in fact spreading the disease. Most of them were Jews, with the Rothschild brothers at their head, though the chief Illuminato in this sphere was the French banker Lafitte.19
The idea that Jews were involved in spreading dangerous disease fell on fertile ground, as Nicholas had long disliked them for their otherness and what he saw as their restlessness, itself essentially subversive. They did not fit naturally into the hierarchical order he believed in, and he would try to assimilate them forcibly. One of his first acts as ruler was to compel them to perform military service (which entailed infringing all their religious laws). He would go on either to subject their schools and institutions to Russian ones or dissolve them, and eventually even to ban their traditional dress.20
Literati and intellectuals were not among Nicholas’s favourite kind either, and the notion that they were undermining society fitted his own suspicions. He tightened censorship with a new law designed to control what young people read, to ensure internal security by fashioning the mores of society, and to manipulate public opinion in favour of the existing system. The first was achieved by censorship of all new publications and the withdrawal from circulation of anything that might provoke speculation. ‘Aside from logic and philosophy textbooks necessary for the education of young people, other works of this kind, filled with fruitless and destructive sophistry of our times should not be printed at all,’ ran the instruction. The second aim, of safeguarding the moral tone of society, was more difficult to implement, and provided grey areas whose shade depended on the degree of prudery of the censor. The third, which ruled out criticism of the government and the administration or anything that weakened respect for the system in any way, degenerated into a nitpicking pursuit of any comment that some member of the civil service might perceive as casting an aspersion on his own work.21
As far as Nicholas was concerned, writers were there to write up the triumphs and greatness of the empire, provide a positive gloss on life and induce a mindset of consensus with the views of the ruler. The Third Section, which effectively took over the task of censorship, therefore kept an eye on what writers were thinking and doing, admonished them when their behaviour seemed politically or morally dubious, and even suggested appropriate subjects. Many writers were content to go along with this, grateful for the pensions and honours that followed. Those who did not were treated with a mixture of incomprehension and exasperation. Benckendorff would call in or write to authors whose works troubled him. His objection to one of Lermontov’s works was not political, he politely informed the poet, it was that the protagonist, Arbenin, left his wife. To Nikolai Aleksandrovich Polevoi, editor of the Moscow Telegraph, he courteously expressed his dismay that ‘such an intelligent man’ as him had in an article on revolutions stated that some had had beneficial effects. He was surprised that such a great mind had descended to writing such ‘nonsense’. ‘A writer of your talents could bring great benefits to the state if he were to direct his pen in a right-thinking direction, calming passions rather than arousing them,’ he cajoled, arguing that young people needed Polevoi’s wise guidance.22
In his annual report on the year 1828, Benckendorff boasted that in the three years of its existence the Third Section had opened files on ‘all those who have in one way or another stood out from the crowd’, and that ‘all liberals, enthusiasts and apostles of a Russian constitution’ had been placed under surveillance. But the quality of his informants was so poor that, according to the Russian historian who enjoyed the widest access to its archives, the Third Section disposed of mountains of irrelevant information, such as the colour of the socks a person wore at a ball or how much they won or lost at cards on a particular day, giving the public the impression that it was omniscient, but no evidence of any substance. And 90 per cent of the information it received from unpaid informants was false.23
Information pouring in to the Third Section was not filtered in any way. A wild accusation or a report that proved to be entirely fictitious did not lead to the reprimanding, let alone punishment, of the agent concerned. Informers were not confronted with the accused, and their word carried greater weight. This lack of answerability was complemented by a disregard for judicial procedures: people could be arrested, sometimes in the middle of the night or in the street, imprisoned for varying lengths of time, and then released without ever being the wiser as to why. Foreigners, particularly if French, were liable to be arrested for no apparent reason and expelled from the county without explanation.24
At the same time, the elaborate mechanisms designed to keep tabs on everyone were hopelessly unreliable, as the correspondence between Benckendorff and Grand Duke Constantine in Warsaw reveals. While Constantine occasionally congratulates the chief gendarme for having ‘directed this matter with the hand of a master’, much of it concerns vain enquiries about the whereabouts of people who had been issued with a passport to go to one place and had either turned up in another or gone to ground altogether, or about suspects who had slipped through a supposedly close mesh of surveillance; the picture which emerges in one of serial incompetence.25
When Arsenii Andreevich Zakrevsky took over the ministry of internal affairs in 1828, he found a shambles. The personnel were lazy and unmotivated, ignored procedures and often took work home with them, with the result that there were papers scattered around lodgings all over St Petersburg. The worst offenders were those working in the department of police, where he found there were 797 important matters lying in the pending tray, some of them having spent up to twelve years there. In a drive to curb corruption, a number of officials at the ministry of finance were summarily sacked. This gave rise to a rumour that they had been dismissed for political reasons. The rumour was picked up by a different person at the Third Section from the one who had been investigating the corruption, and he launched an investigation into a supposed conspiracy at the ministry.26
It did not really matter that the administration was shambolic and the security services a joke. The pall of horror and gloom that overlay Russian society following the sentencing of the Decembrists smothered all desire to revolt and cowed people into a state of acceptance of the immutability of the system. Much the same could be said of most of Europe, and in particular France, which had ceased to brim with revolutionary effervescence.