OFFICER. MOUNTED SERGEANT. FOOT SERGEANT. ]
Nothing can be done in Russia without police permission. A person cannot build a bathroom in his house without leave. A physician cannot practise without it; he must have leave even to refuse to attend to night calls; he cannot prescribe anæsthetics, narcotics, or poisons without special permission; and no chemist would make up a prescription containing any of these drugs unless the doctor's name were on his special list. No new journal can be established without permission, no printing office, no bookshop, no photograph gallery; special police leave is needed to sell newspapers in the streets; a reader at one of the public libraries who wishes to consult standard works on social subjects must be armed with a permit; no concert for charitable purposes can be organised without leave from the police, and the proceeds must be handed over to them to be passed on to the recipients or embezzled on the way. All freedom of movement within the empire is checked by the police. A native Russian must have leave if he wishes to go fifteen miles from home. A foreign traveller is forbidden to enter the country without leave, he must have leave if he wishes to remain more than six months, and must ask for leave to go away again; every change of residence must be notified to the police. The passport system, although at times unevenly and unequally administered, is a potent weapon in the hands of the police, by means of which they can control the movements of everyone within the empire.
To give some idea of the wide-reaching functions of the police, the power assumed in matters momentous and quite insignificant, we may quote from the list of circulars issued by the Minister of the Interior to the Governors of the various provinces during four recent years. The Governors were directed to regulate religious instruction in secular schools, to prevent horse-stealing, to control subscriptions collected for the Holy Places in Palestine, to regulate the advertisements of medicines and the printing on cigarette papers, to examine the quality of quinine sold, and overlook the cosmetics and other toilet articles--such as soap, starch, brilliantine, tooth-brushes, and insect powder--provided by chemists. They were to issue regulations for the proper construction of houses and villages, to exercise an active censorship over published price-lists and printed notes of invitation and visiting-cards, as well as seals and rubber stamps. All private meetings and public gatherings, with the expressions of opinion and the class of subjects discussed, were to be controlled by the police. In a word, quoting one high authority,[16] the Russian police collect statistics, enforce sanitary regulations, make searches and seizures in private houses, keep thousands of "suspects" constantly under surveillance, reading all their correspondence, and, of course, violating the sanctity of the post office. They take charge of the bodies of persons found dead; they admonish those who neglect their religious duties and fail to partake of the Holy Communion; they enforce obedience to thousands of diverse orders and regulations supposed to promote the welfare of the people and guarantee the safety of the State. There are 5,000 sections relating to police in a Russian code of laws, and it is hardly an exaggeration to say, as Mr. Kennan puts it, that in the peasant villages, away from the centres of education and enlightenment, the police are the omnipresent and omnipotent regulators of all human conduct--a sort of incompetent bureaucratic substitute for Divine Providence.