ter; the other … that of Plehve, the late minister of the interior. The former is the Russia of our ‘intellectuals’ and of the people; the other is an anachronism, deeply rooted in the past, and defended in the present by an omnipresent bureaucracy. The one spells liberty; the other, despotism. Throughout the history of Russia, its people have had the increasingly prevalent problem of representation. The peasant commune was essentially the only bastion of representative government in Russia. However, the peasant commune had little influence in any political forum above that of the village or farming community. The divining difficulty of Russia in this period was the power of Tsar Nicholas II. His ideals were rooted in the distant past of autocrats and despots. Though he wished his nation to modernize in its production and industrialization processes, he refused to accept political change. He continued to “impose his will on a vast empire of some 129 million people through a small imperial bureaucracy, which served at the sovereign’s pleasure.” These ancient political views were circumspect in a nation attempting to modernize and improve its status within the world community. Russian history has been characterized as an enduring line of revolution and reaction. In efforts to maintain the power of the autocracy, the Russian state spent an inordinate amount of effort to maintain this reality in the face of a changing Russia. An essential problem within the Russian governing body was that of individual political power. The aforementioned V.K. Plehve, Minister of the Interior, held a post which assumed immense power. The jurisdiction of Plehve’s ministry was vast. The ministry was composed of “various branches of the police, also various departments responsible for the peasant economy and rural life, mails and telegraph, medicine and statistics, non-Orthodox religions, the priso...
