I spent some time reading Pipes, Russia Under the Old
Regime. I knew Pipes and we worked together in the early 1970s where I headed
up the Massachusetts section of a Coalition for a Democratic Majority, CDM.
In Pipes book it is worth noting some facts. Controlling
People (see this today as Contact Tracing)
Of these, the most effective and most widely used was
denunciation. It had been noted above that the Code of 1649 made one exception
to the rule forbidding peasants to complain against landlords, and that was
when the complaint concerned actions detrimental to the (stste). The range of
such anti-state crimes was broad; included were offences which in the language
of modern totalitarian jurisprudence would be called ‘economic crimes’, such
as concealing peasants from census-takers or misinforming the Office of
Pomestia about the true extent of one’s landholdings.
The Code placed great reliance on denunciation as a means
of assuring that the state obtained the proper quantity of service and tiaglo.
Several of its articles made denunciation of anti-government ‘plots’ mandatory
under penalty of death. The Code specified that families of ‘traitors’
(including their minor children) were liable to execution for failure to inform
the authorities in time to prevent the crime from being committed.
In the seventeenth century crimes against the state (i.e.
against the tsar) came to be known as ‘word and deed’ , that is, either
expressed intention or actual commission of acts injurious to the gosudar.
Anyone who pronounced these dreaded words against another person, caused him to
be arrested and subjected to torture ; as a rule, the accuser suffered the
same fate, because the authorities suspected him of having concealed some
information. ‘Word and deed’ often served to settle personal vendettas.
Two aspects of this practice require emphasis, because
they foreshadow a great deal of later Russian jurisprudence dealing with
political crimes. One is that where the interests of the monarch were
concerned, no distinction was drawn between the intention to commit a crime and
the deed itself. Secondly, that at a time when the state did not concern itself
with crimes committed by one subject against another, it laid down very harsh
punishments for crimes directed against its own interests. Denunciation would
not have been half as effective a means of control were it not for the
collective responsibility inherent in tiaglo.
Since the taxes and labour services of anyone who fled
his tiaglo community fell on its remaining members (until the next cadaster, at
any rate), the government had some assurance that tiaglo payers would
attentively.
This legal monstrosity was revived by Stalin in 1934 when
he was about to launch his terror. Supplementary clauses to Article 58 of the
Criminal Code added that year provided for a minimum sentence of six months of
imprisonment for failure to denounce ‘counterrevolutionary crimes*. In one
respect Stalin went beyond the authors of the 1649 Code in that he established
severe penalties (five years of prison) for members of families of citizens
guilty of particularly heinous anti-state crimes, such as desertion abroad,
even if they had had no prior knowledge of the culprit’s intentions.
Think of this as a
means of both contact tracing and staying at home. You can be controlled by the
state, arrested if you care to use the phrase, if you travel from your
residence, if you try to run your business. You are denounced if you object to
any of the demands of the state.
Pipes finishes with:
Lenin and his fellow-revolutionaries who so quickly on
taking power began the reconstruction of the police state certainly regarded
these moves as emergency measures, exactly as in its day did the imperial
government. The Cheka and the ‘Revolutionary Tribunals’, the mass executions,
forced labour camps, exile, censorship and all the other repressive measures
which they instituted were conceived by them as necessary to uproot what was
still left of the old regime. This done, they were to be dissolved. But the
same fate befell communist ‘temporary’ repressive measures as their
predecessors: regularly renewed, the indiscriminate application of their
violence came to overshadow the order they were meant to protect.
Had they read more history and fewer polemical tracts the
Bolshevik leaders might have been able to foresee this outcome. For the very
idea that politics can be isolated from the vicissitudes of life and
monopolized by one group or one ideology is under conditions of modern life
unenforceable. Any government that persists in this notion must give ever wider
berth to its police apparatus and eventually fall victim to it.
Think now of the Police in New York City. My father and
grandfathers were Police Officers in New York, but the current Cheka like acts
would never have been in their acts.
Perhaps in a sense we are reverting to a Tsarist regime, one
where rights are lost and mandates limit what we can do, where we can go, and
what we can say.
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