What really ruined the Russian Empire
The next anniversary of the creation of the All-Russian Extraordinary Commission to Combat Counter-Revolution and Sabotage (VChK), celebrated in December, and since 1995 turned into the Day of State Security Officers in our country, is certainly not a holiday for everyone. To our great regret, the “black” myths and outright slander against the domestic “organs” and their history, which were driven into the consciousness of our fellow citizens with enormous scope and tenacity during the years of “perestroika”, turned out to be extremely tenacious. And what about the “fighters against the bloody gebnea” who turned this occupation not just into a profession, but into the meaning of their own life?
All of this audience, with uniquely worthy of better use of fervor and perseverance reproaching the Soviet Chekists and their current heirs, stubbornly does not want to admit that neglect of the state to structures that provide its protection from both external and internal enemies will inevitably lead to death. It simply has not been given otherwise - and the history of the Russian Empire proves this postulate to the fullest extent.
You can relate to the leaders of the 1917 revolution who became the creators of the Land of Soviets and to the activities of those, however, even with minimal objectivity, anyone will have to admit that they were not fools at all. And yet - they saw and understood perfectly all the mistakes, miscalculations and weaknesses of that state, which, not particularly straining, managed to defeat. One of these, without a doubt, was the extreme weakness in tsarist Russia precisely of the structures responsible for its security. If it were different, no Social Revolutionaries or Bolsheviks could simply destroy the great country.
It should start with the fact that for many centuries the vast Empire lived, in fact, without state security organs. Yes, there was a creepy Preobrazhensky order and the Secret Office of Peter I, the Secret Expedition of Catherine the Great ... However, all these "offices" periodically merged, divided, weakened to complete insignificance, or even completely abolished. At the very dawn of the reign of the same Catherine, in particular, it seemed that she would do without them. Some Russian sovereigns showed either exemplary philanthropy, or completely unprecedented carelessness, completely neglecting the "organs" as such. Well, and what kind of, say, systemic and full-fledged work of such could come after this?
The state institution, which could reasonably be called a full-fledged secret police, was created in the Empire, in fact, only in 1826 - after the accession to the throne of Nicholas I, whose accession was marked by the uprising of the "Decembrists". Only this noble-guard rebellion, which nearly pushed the country into the abyss, made its powers that be, excuse me, "comb my hair." Conspiracies and attempts at a military coup, perpetrated, in the most literal sense of the word, under the nose of a reigning house, are no longer jokes. Yes, and Nikolai Pavlovich was, we must pay tribute to him, a monarch quite sensible, and certainly not a fool. He created the very Third Department of His Imperial Majesty’s Own Chancellery, whose employees were subsequently called domestic liberals other than “executioners,” “royal satraps” and “stranglers of freedom in Russia”. Strangled them ... Yeah, how so!
The number of the Third Division, together with its subordinate Separate Corps of Gendarmes, was not just small - scanty! At the time of its creation, the “ominous” Third Division “entangled the whole of Russia with its networks” numbered ... 16 people! By the time of its abolition, it, of course, had grown unusually. Up to 72 units of staff. To all of Russia ... The gendarme corps, which played the role of a "power" unit (the closest analogy is the Internal Troops), from four thousand increased by sixteen to 1916. For comparison, Pavel Pestel, one of the leaders of the “Decembrists” uprising, considered it necessary to create a secret police of 50 thousand “bayonets” at least in the “country liberated from tsarism”! In what - in what, and in the creation of "punitive organs" the Russian revolutionaries never trifled.
Speaking about the activities of the Third Division, it should be noted that it was not limited to purely political investigation. Its employees had the duty to combat counterfeiting, forgery of documents, bribery, suppress the activities of schismatics and sectarians, watch over foreigners in Russia, deal with the expulsion of “harmful and suspicious” persons, and oversee places of detention of state criminals. And in addition - to deal, for example, with reports of "buried treasures" and "inventions made." You can only imagine how many crazy and dreamers these people had to deal with!
Well, and, of course, like every self-respecting special service, the Third Department was engaged, in the modern language, in preventive and organizational-analytical work regarding potential sources of all kinds of dangers for the country. The Emperor had to report personally - and you won’t go to such a level with empty chatter ... In general, this structure was initially established, as planned by Nicholas I, so that all the inhabitants of Russia without exception would be "in peace and prosperity." I don’t know how much truth is in the story that when appointing the first chief of the Third Division - Alexander Benkendorf (who, incidentally, was the initiator of the creation), the monarch gave him a handkerchief with the order to “wipe away the tears of those suffering” - and how more is better. In any case, it seems to be true - this organization definitely did not pull on the “punitive organ”.
Alas, the power of the Empire stubbornly did not want to see the true role of the secret police in the system of the state apparatus. No way out political the scene of frankly terrorist organizations like Narodnaya Volya, neither the wave of political killings that swept Russia, nor even the attempt on the Emperor himself made her take drastic measures to strengthen security agencies. After another explosion in the Winter Palace, Emperor Alexander II dismissed the Third Division by decree, creating a state police department in the Ministry of the Interior. The Ministry of Internal Affairs was also reassigned to the gendarme corps. Have these changes become effective? Judge for yourself ... They did not save the life of the Emperor himself, nor the country on whose throne he sat. Yes, Security Departments were created, attempts were made to improve the cause of political investigation and the fight against terrorism radically. However, all measures taken were either belated or completely inadequate.
Is it a joke - until the first serious attempt to arrange a revolution in Russia, which took place in 1905, security departments existed only in St. Petersburg, Moscow and Warsaw! Secret police units on the periphery, in fact, began to be created only in 1906-1907. It is difficult to name what was happening in the Empire in other words, like a bacchanalia, only officers (police, gendarmes, and army) during the revolution of 1905-1906 were killed and wounded more than a thousand. In 1907, this figure has already reached three thousand! This, I repeat, is exclusively about the command structure, and not about the "lower ranks" and freelancers. Victims of terror everywhere became generals, prosecutors, judges, heads of security departments themselves. Following the Pandora’s bloody drawer in Russia, the Narodnaya Volya Socialist Revolutionaries and anarchists reached for revolvers and bombs. And the Social Democrats were already on their way, from which the Bolsheviks would later “hatch”, not exchanging for little things, but planning to take control of all of Russia. Decisively inexplicable - God, forgive the Emperors, like rabbits, and all the Ministry of Internal Affairs of the Empire by the beginning of the twentieth century (with clerks, typists and other "non-combatants") do not reach 50 thousand people. In Britain, with its population, at that time there were more than 55 thousand police officers! The Paris police are four times as numerous as the St. Petersburg police. Well, what carelessness ?!
The most disgusting and terrible thing was that Russian society, on guard of whose rest, in fact, were all the “guards” mentioned above, hated and despised them without exception and completely openly. Even, one might say, demonstratively. And, well, it was a question of exclusively “professional revolutionaries,” whom the secret police and gendarmes crushed like rats. Or, at worst, about the representatives of the “oppressed working people”. So no! To show one’s own squeamish disdain for “chain dogs” was considered an indispensable rule of good form just in “high society”. “I won’t give a hand to the gendarme!” - the words are not just proletarians, but army officers who turned up their noses from those who served the same Fatherland, but wore a uniform of the “wrong” color.
Some kind of madness! The Russian nobility, which, God forbid, constituted one percent of the population of the Empire and lived at ease and well-fed at the expense of the remaining ninety-nine, spittingly spit on the "despicable gendarmes" on whom they should pray! So, in the end, it was spat on ... And what a contribution the defamation of the secret police, as such and its specific representatives, the Russian liberal intelligentsia has made! One Lermontov with his disgusting poem about "unwashed Russia" and "blue uniforms", which today adores Poroshenko to quote so much that it cost. About the rest of the "democrats" and "lovers of progress" and say nothing. They poured mud on the same Benckendorf, the hero of World War II (Berlin, by the way!), Who personally saved people in the icy water during the floods in St. Petersburg, the liberals, who were not worth the dust from his boots, already went from hatred, not being able to clearly substantiate reason for that. Well, the gendarme!
The most interesting thing is that the same “spiritual heirs” —the Soviet intellectuals, especially creative ones — inherited from them the same absolutely pathological craving for the indiscriminate vilification of any state security organs, including the Imperial ones that had long sunk into oblivion. The best example is the picture of the “poor hussar” of the truly ingenious Eldar Ryazanov, which is not just an outstanding collection of historical “mistakes” and stupidities, namely that slandering the Third Division, its affairs and methods are just as ridiculous as vile. What can you do - for this audience, that “the royal gendarmes are satraps”, that “executioners from the NKVD”, that “bloody gebnya” are all one. According to their miserable, worthless opinion, a man who devoted his life to defending the state not in open battle with his enemies, but in a much more difficult secret war, is vicious and disgusting a priori. This is not being treated ...
Napoleon Bonaparte's catch phrase about what awaits a people who does not want to feed its army is widely known and often quoted. The people, society, state, allowing themselves to neglect the special services that ensure their security - visibly and invisibly, publicly and behind the scenes, explicitly and secretly, will not even feed someone else's army. They will simply be destroyed.
All of this audience, with uniquely worthy of better use of fervor and perseverance reproaching the Soviet Chekists and their current heirs, stubbornly does not want to admit that neglect of the state to structures that provide its protection from both external and internal enemies will inevitably lead to death. It simply has not been given otherwise - and the history of the Russian Empire proves this postulate to the fullest extent.
You can relate to the leaders of the 1917 revolution who became the creators of the Land of Soviets and to the activities of those, however, even with minimal objectivity, anyone will have to admit that they were not fools at all. And yet - they saw and understood perfectly all the mistakes, miscalculations and weaknesses of that state, which, not particularly straining, managed to defeat. One of these, without a doubt, was the extreme weakness in tsarist Russia precisely of the structures responsible for its security. If it were different, no Social Revolutionaries or Bolsheviks could simply destroy the great country.
It should start with the fact that for many centuries the vast Empire lived, in fact, without state security organs. Yes, there was a creepy Preobrazhensky order and the Secret Office of Peter I, the Secret Expedition of Catherine the Great ... However, all these "offices" periodically merged, divided, weakened to complete insignificance, or even completely abolished. At the very dawn of the reign of the same Catherine, in particular, it seemed that she would do without them. Some Russian sovereigns showed either exemplary philanthropy, or completely unprecedented carelessness, completely neglecting the "organs" as such. Well, and what kind of, say, systemic and full-fledged work of such could come after this?
The state institution, which could reasonably be called a full-fledged secret police, was created in the Empire, in fact, only in 1826 - after the accession to the throne of Nicholas I, whose accession was marked by the uprising of the "Decembrists". Only this noble-guard rebellion, which nearly pushed the country into the abyss, made its powers that be, excuse me, "comb my hair." Conspiracies and attempts at a military coup, perpetrated, in the most literal sense of the word, under the nose of a reigning house, are no longer jokes. Yes, and Nikolai Pavlovich was, we must pay tribute to him, a monarch quite sensible, and certainly not a fool. He created the very Third Department of His Imperial Majesty’s Own Chancellery, whose employees were subsequently called domestic liberals other than “executioners,” “royal satraps” and “stranglers of freedom in Russia”. Strangled them ... Yeah, how so!
The number of the Third Division, together with its subordinate Separate Corps of Gendarmes, was not just small - scanty! At the time of its creation, the “ominous” Third Division “entangled the whole of Russia with its networks” numbered ... 16 people! By the time of its abolition, it, of course, had grown unusually. Up to 72 units of staff. To all of Russia ... The gendarme corps, which played the role of a "power" unit (the closest analogy is the Internal Troops), from four thousand increased by sixteen to 1916. For comparison, Pavel Pestel, one of the leaders of the “Decembrists” uprising, considered it necessary to create a secret police of 50 thousand “bayonets” at least in the “country liberated from tsarism”! In what - in what, and in the creation of "punitive organs" the Russian revolutionaries never trifled.
Speaking about the activities of the Third Division, it should be noted that it was not limited to purely political investigation. Its employees had the duty to combat counterfeiting, forgery of documents, bribery, suppress the activities of schismatics and sectarians, watch over foreigners in Russia, deal with the expulsion of “harmful and suspicious” persons, and oversee places of detention of state criminals. And in addition - to deal, for example, with reports of "buried treasures" and "inventions made." You can only imagine how many crazy and dreamers these people had to deal with!
Well, and, of course, like every self-respecting special service, the Third Department was engaged, in the modern language, in preventive and organizational-analytical work regarding potential sources of all kinds of dangers for the country. The Emperor had to report personally - and you won’t go to such a level with empty chatter ... In general, this structure was initially established, as planned by Nicholas I, so that all the inhabitants of Russia without exception would be "in peace and prosperity." I don’t know how much truth is in the story that when appointing the first chief of the Third Division - Alexander Benkendorf (who, incidentally, was the initiator of the creation), the monarch gave him a handkerchief with the order to “wipe away the tears of those suffering” - and how more is better. In any case, it seems to be true - this organization definitely did not pull on the “punitive organ”.
Alas, the power of the Empire stubbornly did not want to see the true role of the secret police in the system of the state apparatus. No way out political the scene of frankly terrorist organizations like Narodnaya Volya, neither the wave of political killings that swept Russia, nor even the attempt on the Emperor himself made her take drastic measures to strengthen security agencies. After another explosion in the Winter Palace, Emperor Alexander II dismissed the Third Division by decree, creating a state police department in the Ministry of the Interior. The Ministry of Internal Affairs was also reassigned to the gendarme corps. Have these changes become effective? Judge for yourself ... They did not save the life of the Emperor himself, nor the country on whose throne he sat. Yes, Security Departments were created, attempts were made to improve the cause of political investigation and the fight against terrorism radically. However, all measures taken were either belated or completely inadequate.
Is it a joke - until the first serious attempt to arrange a revolution in Russia, which took place in 1905, security departments existed only in St. Petersburg, Moscow and Warsaw! Secret police units on the periphery, in fact, began to be created only in 1906-1907. It is difficult to name what was happening in the Empire in other words, like a bacchanalia, only officers (police, gendarmes, and army) during the revolution of 1905-1906 were killed and wounded more than a thousand. In 1907, this figure has already reached three thousand! This, I repeat, is exclusively about the command structure, and not about the "lower ranks" and freelancers. Victims of terror everywhere became generals, prosecutors, judges, heads of security departments themselves. Following the Pandora’s bloody drawer in Russia, the Narodnaya Volya Socialist Revolutionaries and anarchists reached for revolvers and bombs. And the Social Democrats were already on their way, from which the Bolsheviks would later “hatch”, not exchanging for little things, but planning to take control of all of Russia. Decisively inexplicable - God, forgive the Emperors, like rabbits, and all the Ministry of Internal Affairs of the Empire by the beginning of the twentieth century (with clerks, typists and other "non-combatants") do not reach 50 thousand people. In Britain, with its population, at that time there were more than 55 thousand police officers! The Paris police are four times as numerous as the St. Petersburg police. Well, what carelessness ?!
The most disgusting and terrible thing was that Russian society, on guard of whose rest, in fact, were all the “guards” mentioned above, hated and despised them without exception and completely openly. Even, one might say, demonstratively. And, well, it was a question of exclusively “professional revolutionaries,” whom the secret police and gendarmes crushed like rats. Or, at worst, about the representatives of the “oppressed working people”. So no! To show one’s own squeamish disdain for “chain dogs” was considered an indispensable rule of good form just in “high society”. “I won’t give a hand to the gendarme!” - the words are not just proletarians, but army officers who turned up their noses from those who served the same Fatherland, but wore a uniform of the “wrong” color.
Some kind of madness! The Russian nobility, which, God forbid, constituted one percent of the population of the Empire and lived at ease and well-fed at the expense of the remaining ninety-nine, spittingly spit on the "despicable gendarmes" on whom they should pray! So, in the end, it was spat on ... And what a contribution the defamation of the secret police, as such and its specific representatives, the Russian liberal intelligentsia has made! One Lermontov with his disgusting poem about "unwashed Russia" and "blue uniforms", which today adores Poroshenko to quote so much that it cost. About the rest of the "democrats" and "lovers of progress" and say nothing. They poured mud on the same Benckendorf, the hero of World War II (Berlin, by the way!), Who personally saved people in the icy water during the floods in St. Petersburg, the liberals, who were not worth the dust from his boots, already went from hatred, not being able to clearly substantiate reason for that. Well, the gendarme!
The most interesting thing is that the same “spiritual heirs” —the Soviet intellectuals, especially creative ones — inherited from them the same absolutely pathological craving for the indiscriminate vilification of any state security organs, including the Imperial ones that had long sunk into oblivion. The best example is the picture of the “poor hussar” of the truly ingenious Eldar Ryazanov, which is not just an outstanding collection of historical “mistakes” and stupidities, namely that slandering the Third Division, its affairs and methods are just as ridiculous as vile. What can you do - for this audience, that “the royal gendarmes are satraps”, that “executioners from the NKVD”, that “bloody gebnya” are all one. According to their miserable, worthless opinion, a man who devoted his life to defending the state not in open battle with his enemies, but in a much more difficult secret war, is vicious and disgusting a priori. This is not being treated ...
Napoleon Bonaparte's catch phrase about what awaits a people who does not want to feed its army is widely known and often quoted. The people, society, state, allowing themselves to neglect the special services that ensure their security - visibly and invisibly, publicly and behind the scenes, explicitly and secretly, will not even feed someone else's army. They will simply be destroyed.
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