The Russian Album by Michael Ignatieff Page A

normal legal procedure and individual civil rights wherever a strike, an attack or a riot required it. The decree also empowered the government to hand suspects over to summary courts martial, to order house arrests and domestic searches, and to outlaw any meetings, close any institution, or suspend any newspaper as it saw fit. Until 1917, these measures were to remain the key statutes of the autocracy, its chief legal weapon in its losing struggle for survival. It was from their heavy hand that the young Lenin and Stalin were to acquire their contempt for legality and due process.
    Ignatieff also balanced repression with reform. He agreed on a plan with the representatives of local government, the zemstvos, to reduce the head taxes and redemption payments which had burdened the peasantry since Emancipation and to establish an agricultural bank to assist wealthier peasants to consolidate their holdings.
    As Minister of the Interior, he was in charge not only of the great lines of domestic policy – the repression of the terrorists and the building of support among the peasantry – but also of the grinding minutiae of an overcentralized imperial bureaucracy. Everything came across his desk, from the issuing of passports to the regulation of veterinary surgeons. He was incapable of delegation and an omnivorous devourer of dossiers. Followed by a posse of note-taking assistants, he made the rounds of the assembly room outside his office every morning at eleven, listening personally to requests for pensions, concessions, clemency and jobs, dispensing rewards and punishments like an Asiatic grandee. The crazed and the discontented found their way to his office too, and in November, he had to duck when an assassin took aim at him. The bullet missed and killed his assistant instead.
    Young Paul saw next to nothing of his father in that frantic year at the Ministry of the Interior. They lived in the family house at the junction of the Moika and Fontanka canals in a Petersburg gripped by rumours and plots and policed by soldiers at every corner. Paul was eleven that winter, just beginning his lessons at the gymnasium. One cold November afternoon, he was returning home from school in a little horse-drawn sleigh when he noticed that the Troitski Bridge, usually thronged with the carriages of the gentry and workers streaming home on foot, was strangely deserted. The police waved him onto the empty bridge and he began to cross. Halfway across, a magnificent carriage overtook him, and he just had time to spring to his feet and snap to attention as the imperial couple rolled past. The Tsarina smiled broadly at the little boy’s frozen salute, but the Tsar was not amused. At his next meeting with his Minister of the Interior, he was not entirely mollified when told that the boy on the bridge had been the minister’s son.
    By the winter of 1882, Paul’s father was at the pinnacle of his influence, the master of a vast apparatus of governors, spies, police agents and informers, the Tsar’s chief source of information on the fevered state of his dominions. The immediate crisis of the autocracy seemed over. There were still some peasant pogroms against Jewish merchants in the southern provinces, but since these posed no direct threat to the regime itself, and since the peasants’ grievances at Jewish millers, traders, bankers and merchants in the towns found sympathy in anti-Semitic ruling circles, the local police were less than assiduous in putting a stop to them.
    Throughout the southern Ukraine and Bessarabia, Jewish shops were smashed and burned and crowds carrying icons, sometimes with priests at their head, were allowed to rampage through the Jewish quarters of the towns beating and cursing, looting and burning. Delegations of Jewish leaders came to see Ignatieff at the Ministry of the Interior. They told him they were in bondage as under Pharaoh. ‘So when is your Exodus, and where is your Moses,’ he