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pleading of which might excite public opinion" wereto be held in camera, should the authorities so decide(1881), while the jurisdiction of the courts in anythingof a political nature was almost nullified by the powersof the police to take independent and secret action.Further, during the last fifty years of tsarism, largeparts of the empire were frequently being governedunder special r6gimes of security, which meant the partialor complete supplanting of the ordinary courts andauthorities by the provincial governors armed withspecial powers, by the police, and in the last resort bymilitary tribunals.The rule of the police in the functioning of tsarismhad become even more far-reaching under Nicholas I(b. 1796; reigned 1825-55) than previously, importantthough it had been ever since the mid-seventeenth century.Nicholas, who was faced on his accession by the Decembristrising (see p. 350), reconstituted and greatly extendedthe secret police under what soon became so notoriousas the third section of the imperial chancellery. Russianautocracy for contemporaries of the second quarter ofthe nineteenth century, both at home and abroad, was'the police state' par excellence. Nicholas was not only'the gendarme of Europe,' but much more the gendarmeof his own empire. He ruled it as a colonel his regimentand a paternalistic landowner his estates, yet toiling atmountains of reports, with the same kind of assiduityas Philip II of Spain, whether they dealt with greatquestions of state or individual personal details. Fromhis time onwards the police and the gendarmerie, thoughsubsequently undergoing various changes in compositionand powers, remained the chief arm of tsarism in itsefforts to stamp out, curb, or canalize anything that wasregarded as politically dangerous, and one of the chiefmeans of supplying the tsar with information as to thestate of opinion in the country and in addition, particularly.under Nicholas I, as to the malpractices of his ownservants.Both the third section itself and the rest of the imperialchancellory, as reconstructed by Nicholas, were designedin part to control the regular bureaucracy and to prevent112