The Limits of Reform

One of prerevolutionary Russia’s most prominent government institutions—the Ministry of Internal Affairs—is here analyzed from a wholly new perspective. Daniel Orlovsky examines the structure and personnel of this powerful institution to determine how they interacted and influenced domestic policy and political conflict. This institutional approach, not undertaken in any previous studies, tells us much about the history of late imperial Russia and its bureaucratic institutions.

The Ministry of Internal Affairs (MVD) had a leading part in the 1861 emancipation of the serfs and the 1864 creation of the zemstvo organs of local self-government. By the mid-1860s the MVD directly controlled provincial and district administration and police, censorship, affairs of the nonorthodox religions, orthodox sects, public health and welfare, and a significant number of other economic and social matters. At the height of the Reform Era, the MVD was virtually a state within a state.

But its role changed rapidly—from haven for progressive bureaucrats, to conservative supporter of autocracy and the landed gentry and uncompromising upholder of administrative power. The backlog of incomplete reforms and policies, structural weaknesses in government, and conservative statist ideology passed on to successor governments after 1881 had a profound influence on the course of Russian history. Thus, the Reform Era and its immediate aftermath offer clues for understanding the revolutionary upheavals in the early twentieth century and for comparing the parallel experiences of other conservative renovating regimes in Europe and Asia.