Book Review

Through his discussion of the Russian state's and police's failure to withstand the tide of social activism in the late Imperial period, Daly raises a question that has plagued generations of Russian historians: who was to blame for the demise of the Romanov state? Though Daly only alludes to it, the 1917 Revolution looms large: while this study focuses on the fragmentation of Russia's security forces in the period leading up to the 1905 Revolution, the author's ultimate aim is explaining the autocracy's collapse.	1
For Daly, Russia's reliance on harsh policing was neither anomalous nor responsible for the regime's failings. He accurately observes that the autocracy's deployment of security forces to resolve crises fits squarely within a European framework: statesmen used similar tactics in nineteenth-century France, Austria, and the Germanies. However, according to Daly, what made Russia peculiar is that, unlike its Western counterparts, its leaders were unable to crush revolutionary opposition through policing.	2
To explain this phenomenon, Daly suggests that overlapping problems confronted Russia's leaders. First, restating a thesis advanced by numerous scholars of the late Imperial period, Daly asserts that the state was experiencing growing pains. This stemmed from the fact that the regime was no longer fully autocratic: even after the 1881 regicide of Alexander II, Russia's tsars were reluctant to repudiate the 1864 Judicial Reforms, fully censor the press, or clamp down on emerging civil society. Rather, Russia's last three rulers deemed it necessary to court public opinion, or at least reduce its alienation. As late as 1905, the government attempted to avert repression. This fragmented the Russian myth of the well-ordered police state, yet the autocracy was incapable of replacing it with a new legitimizing principle.	3
Daly relates this to a second problem: Russia's statesmen consistently vacillated between coercion and conciliation. This conveyed to antigovernmental forces that the autocracy was incapable of proper administration. Daly argues that, by the turn of the century, the transmission of such mixed messages, combined with the state's failure to protect the population from famine, disease, land-hunger, and industrial exploitation, broadened the opposition. No longer were police faced with terrorism perpetrated by a handful of disciplined, fanatical revolutionaries such as the People's Will. Instead, from 1891 to 1905, they were forced to grapple with diverse masses—students, workers, liberals, and peasants—mobilized against the regime.	4
To make matters worse, old bureaucratic institutions were unsuited to the increasingly complex late Imperial context. Third Section gendarmes, established by Nicholas I in 1826, who had once garnered considerable respect by upholding noble mores befitting their privileged status were unfit and reluctant to perform the dirty work required of a professional security force. Even the strongest security directors lacked resources to train modern police corps. Consequently, not only was the autocracy undergoing an identity crisis, but so was the police. The cumbersome, outmoded structure of the Russian state compounded this: officials' failure to coordinate and centralize their activity and bureaucratic infighting made policing impotent. Daly argues that, taken in tandem, these problems not only explain the failures of the Imperial security policing but also why the autocracy's 1906 victory was short-lived.	5
Given this, it is not uncanny that the Romanov regime collapsed; rather, it is amazing that it lasted as long as it did. Daly attributes the police's capacity to face down opposition to two anomalous, strong-willed individuals who constitute the true heroes of this work. Daly credits Moscow Security Bureau chief Sergei Zubatov with understanding how to integrate traditional and sophisticated policing methods: he advocated the systematic use of plainclothes agents and mobile surveillance brigades and combined repression with paternalistic, state-sponsored reform. Yet Zubatov was a flawed protagonist. Daly attributes Zubatov's failure to his attempts to innovate a bureaucracy resistant to change and to the fact that his efforts to consolidate the police were frustrated from above and below.	6
Daly accords less space to his second hero, Petr Durnovo, Acting Interior Minister during the 1905 October General Strike. Daly considers Durnovo the sole decisive official in Nicholas II's government. Condemning the administration for its continued attempts at rapprochement with insurrectionaries, Daly maintains that Durnovo clearly understood that only concrete, coordinated action could break the revolutionaries and strengthen the forces of order countrywide. Only once Durnovo's approach prevailed was the autocracy once more able to reassert authority.	7
Yet, that Daly rationalizes the autocracy's survival of the 1905 Revolution by focusing on heroism points to a weakness of this volume: while Daly maintains that the Romanov government lacked support and that its actions were haphazard and doomed from the outset, the state did survive the insurrection. Daly can only reconcile this by attributing the regime's successes to the agency of "great men." This makes his conclusion that, in spite of their earlier inconstancy, authorities were "ready—and able—to back ... with vigorous support" Durnovo's plans for repression by late December 1905, puzzling (180). Equally problematic is that, because Daly conceives of the revolution as predetermined, he offers little corroboration for contentions like "the regime was losing legitimacy in the eyes of many educated Russians, while revolutionary activism and political opposition acquired an aura of sanctity" (51), that the "confrontation between the government and university students was probably inevitable" (108), and that "it seems likely that large numbers of administration officials began to question whether their defense of the absolutist system could still be justified" (169).	8
At its finest points, Daly's work draws on police archives declassified in 1989 and memoir and journalistic accounts, which add texture to this work and make it come alive; nonetheless, while this book contributes to our understanding of the inner workings of the late Imperial bureaucracy, it remains too close to the dissertation. At times, Daly recapitulates secondary findings without substantially extending them. For example, his opening chapter scarcely broadens Monas's thesis concerning the nature of the Third Section (Sidney Monas, The Third Section: Police and Society under Nicholas I [1961]). Simultaneously, Daly neither adequately establishes why Nicholas I circumvented the ministerial structure by establishing His Majesty's Own Chancery nor the contextual distinctions between the early nineteenth century, the era of the 1848 Revolutions, and the eve of the Great Reforms. These shortcomings mar the first half of this study, which is repetitive and characterized by narrative confusion. The second half is more forceful, yet here, too, Daly often relies on material and arguments gleaned from secondary sources to substantiate his claims. More careful editing, organization, and a toning down of his tendency to read material through the rubric of 1917 would have permitted Daly to examine his sources more fully on their own terms and more substantially enriched our understanding of the security police's culture and its interaction with state and society during the late Imperial period.	9
Abby M. Schrader Franklin and Marshall College

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