Notes from a Dead House

Secret Police & Russian Censorship in the 19th century

The House of the Dead¹ by Fyodor Dostoevsky (1861-62) is a fictionalized account of his penal servitude in Siberia. He had been sentenced to death in 1949 for participation in the Petrashevsky Circle² which advocated freeing the serfs and opposed the tsarist autocracy, but served a commuted sentence of four years of hard labor. 

What was the context under which he had been surveilled and convicted?

B. Pokrovsky, 'Semionov-platz Mock Execution Ritual' 1849

In Imperial Russia after the Decembrist uprising in 1825 Tsar Nicolas I set up Secret Police— the Third Department, sometimes called Section 3.³ In addition to reporting on various sects and heretical religious groups; reporting on people under police surveillance; looking out for counterfeit money, stamps, and documents; the Third Department also followed up on authors thought to be subversive. They worked closely with the Bureau of Censorship.⁴ The statute on censorship:

1.The Censor has the duty to consider all manner of books and essays that are presented for public consumption.
2. The primary object of this consideration to bring to the public books and essays that contribute to true education of the mind and the formation of manners, and to remove books and essays of ill intent.
3. Pursuant to this end, no book or essay shall be printed in the Russian Empire except following review by the Censor.⁵

But this was not enough. In 1848, in response to revolutions in Europe, Nicholas I established the secret Buturlin Committee⁶ to enforce further limits on censors and the media. Stringent censorship policies, often communicated as “Circulars,” demanded uncritical conformity to official ideology, leading to the construction of a homogeneous worldview. By the time Dostoevsky began publishing in the mid-1840s, censorship requirements were an ever-present reality for writers. ⁷

1. There are many translations but the Penguin version is available and well-done.

2. Frank, Joseph (2010). Dostoevsky: A Writer in His Time. Princeton University Press, pp. 139–140.

3. Третье отделение Собственной Его Императорского Величества канцелярии Tretye otdeleniye Sobstvennoy Yego Yimperatorskogo Velichestva kantselyarii, sometimes translated as Third Department or Third Section.

4. Sidney Monas, The Third Section: Police and Society in Russia under Nicholas I (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1961).

5. Statute of Censorship. Imperial Russian Government. July 9, 1804.

6. Goldstein, Robert Justin. 2000. The War for the Public Mind. Westport, Conn: ABC-CLIO.

7. Zohrab, I. (2016). Censorship. In D. Martinsen & O. Maiorova (Eds.), Dostoevsky in Context (Literature in Context, pp. 295-302). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.