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the power of the autocrat from being helplessly dissipatedthrough the multitudinous routine channels ofthe ordinary mechanism of government. His corps ofgendarmes were instructed that one of their principaltasks was to break through the official wall shutting offthe tsar from the mass of his subjects and to encouragethe idea that through the police "the voice of eachcitizen can reach the throne of the tsar." Nicholas,who himself looked every inch a tsar, could appear inthe role of 'father of his people' to great effect, but hisconception of the role of the police had the fatal consequenceof increasing both the rivalry between it andother organs of government and the use of denunciationand espionage. The employment of agents-provocateursby the police among the revolutionary groups, and in adifferent form among the trade unions, went to itsfurthest lengths under Nicholas II; as shown mostnotoriously in the public (and in part official) revelationsmade in 1909 as to the career of Azev, at one and thesame time secret service agent and terrorist conspirator,who, apart from other assassinations, was deeply involvedin the murders of two ministers and the governorgeneralof Moscow, the tsar's uncle. 1The great development of organized police rule in thelast hundred years was paralleled by a new characteristicof tsarism, the policy of uniformity. The enormousextension of the empire in the century preceding 1815involved in large part a new kind of acquisition, namelythat of long-settled lands previously belonging toEuropean states, Sweden and Poland, with very differentcustoms and methods of government from those ofRussia, with a different religion (Lutheran or Catholic),with a more advanced upper-class culture, and for themost part with a non-Russian population (the Balticprovinces, 1721; the partitioned Polish lands, 1772,1Azev appears as Doctor Berg in What Never Happened (1912;English translation, 1919), the semi-autobiographical novel by theterrorist and social-revolutionary leader Boris Savinkov, writing underthe name of V. Ropshin. This and his still more powerful earlier novelThe Pale Horse (1909; English translation, 1917) are very remarkableboth as works of literature and as studies of terrorism and the 1905Revolution.H—R.H. 113