Police

• To maintain the autocracy the country had developed into a police-state.
• The police state prevented freedom of speech freedom of the press and travel abroad. Political meetings and strikes were forbidden. Censorship existed at every level of the government.
• The secret state security network was run by the ‘Third Section’ . Its agents kept a strict surveillance over the population and had unlimited powers to carry out raids and to arrest and imprison or send into exile anyone suspected of anti-Tsarist behaviour. They sometimes acted on the word of informers.
• Nicolas I (Tsar 1825-1855 and father of Alexander II) faced a military uprising against his rule in 1825. This encouraged him to follow a path of repression and distancing Russia from the West where the liberal ideas he feared were spreading. While leading intellectuals argued for a civil society based on rule of law Nicholas tightened censorship and set up the Secret Police or Third Section. His reign ended in military defeat in the Crimea which finally brought the long-ignored need for change to the new Tsar’s attention…