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Soviet Union [USSR] PREDECESSORS OF THE COMMITTEE FOR STATE SECURITY AND THE MINISTRY INTERNAL AFFAIRS
The KGB and the MVD had numerous predecessor organizations,
dating back to the tsarist period. These organizations contributed
significantly to the historical traditions of the modern Soviet
police, which in several ways resembled those of its forerunners.
The Tsarist Period
The 1980s Soviet police system cannot be properly understood
without considering the evolution of the tsarist police,
particularly as it related to Russia's political culture and
governmental institutions. By the middle of the nineteenth century,
Russia was, by all accounts, a "police state," not in the modern
sense of the term, which connotes all the evils of Nazi Germany and
Stalinism, but in the more traditional sense as it applied to
certain European states in the eighteenth and early nineteenth
centuries, e.g., France and Prussia. These states, which
incorporated secret political police, spying, and encroachments on
individual rights with both paternalism and enlightenment, were
motivated by a desire to reform and modernize.
Russia's monarchical police state was similar to those in
western Europe except that it lagged far behind in its political
evolution and was much less efficient. The foundations of the
tsarist police state were established in 1826, when Tsar Nicholas
I formed the so-called Third Section, a political police whose
purpose was to protect the state from internal subversion. The
staff of the Third Section was small, numbering only forty fulltime employees, who were burdened with information-gathering and
welfare functions that extended well beyond the realm of political
surveillance. As a result, its role was vague and poorly defined,
and its efforts to combat political dissent, on the whole, were
ineffective.
In 1880, as part of an effort to improve the effectiveness of
the political police, the much-discredited Third Section was
abolished and replaced by the central State Police Department under
the Ministry of the Interior. Its chief responsibility was dealing
with political crimes, and, although its staff consisted of only
161 full-time employees, it had at its disposal the Corps of
Gendarmes, numbering several thousand, and a large contingent of
informers. In addition, the notorious "security sections" were
established in several Russian cities following the assassination
of Alexander II in 1881. Despite the fact that its operations were
strengthened, the political police was not successful in stemming
the tide of the revolutionary movement, which helped to bring down
the Russian monarchy in 1917. Police operations were hampered by
the low quality of personnel and grave deficiencies in training.
One of the greatest impediments to an effective political police
was the general reluctance on the part of the Russian state to use
violence against political dissenters. Herein lies one of the
crucial differences between the monarchical police state of tsarist
Russia and the Soviet regime, which from the outset used violence
to preserve its rule and gradually extended the violence to affect
broad segments of the population.
Data as of May 1989
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