Spinning the Web: Plehve and the Expansion of the Political Police Network

Abstract

By the end of the nineteenth century the dissident elements within Russian society were coalescing into political groups which ranged from moderate monarchist reformers to ardent, committed agrarian and marxist revolutionaries. The most prominent group became known as the Liberation Movement, under whose banner marched the entire political spectrum of the legal opposition. The Liberation Movement through its speeches, publications and actions gave respectability to the opinion that the behaviour and outlook of the regime was inappropriate for a modernising state entering the twentieth century. These men from the ranks of the professions, from the zemstva and from the landed gentry, in growing numbers, believed that the transformation of the autocracy by peaceful means into a constitutional regime ruled by law, not by men – a true Rechtsstaat – would be Russia's only salvation. For the members of this movement the remaining conceivable alternatives to a Rechtsstaat? were a bloody leftwing revolution or a steadily increasing reaction.¹ The persistent intransigence of the regime, however, drove the Liberation Movement steadily to the Left. The founding of the Beseda circle – a group of prestigious zemstva men who met several times a year between 1902 and 1905² – and its increasing domination by the constitutionalists and the subsequent publication of the constitutionalist emigré journal, Osvobozhdenie (Liberation), infuriated and worried the MVD.³