Helen - Outline - Week 6

After talking with Suzanne I decided to go back to the police angle and see what I came up with if I just decided to focus on the development of regular police in England and what I have about the police in Russia.

Thesis: Rebecca McCoy measures the security of Russian society against a modern concept of a police force, and her account reveals both British anxieties about the police and the belief, developing at the time, that the police are a civilizing force in society – somewhere in between “the government” and “the people.”

I. Regular Police

a. In McCoy’s Account

i. Should be preventative, lacking in Russia - “kind of out-of-door servant, called a Dwornick, who may be considered as the real police of the country, for it is he that guards the establishment from thieves, &c” (63)

ii. Uses Russian word – emphasizes difference - “butitchnick or stationary policeman” (67)

iii. Criminality - “wolves instead of the watch-dogs of the community”(67) – relates two (similar) stories about “butitchnicki” murdering women and hiding their bodies under their floorboards

iv. Inefficiency - “This is one of the senseless regulations of the Russian police, that everything must be done by their agency; surely it ought to be lawful to save a fellow-creature’s life” (70) – tells sordid stories to illustrate people dying because of this “regulation” and also to illustrate other “senseless regulations”

v. servility/slavishness in the police –“As for the police, they have been spoken of elsewhere, but I cannot avoid mentioning…the chief master of the provincial police…seems to be a kind of head lacquey, who is expected to run about as an errand-boy…he stood with the humility of a servant before his master” (180)

1. general importance of servility and slavishness

vi. Corrupt - gives a melodramatic description of wronged factory workers; “They pretended ignorance of the whole affair…undoubtedly they knew well whither the money had gone” (179)

vii. Somewhat biased claim that police serve to whip up enthusiasm in wartime - “show that enthusiastic cheers and delighted shouts can be made to order, and according to the regulations of the police, by which everything in fact is conducted in Russia” (214)

b. In Contemporary Britain

i. Move from a broader definition of the word “police” to our modern use of the word

ii. Individual liberties v security of property and person “zealots for personal liberty” and the fact that a new police system would cost taxpayers combined to delay the development of modern police (42 A History of Police in England and Wales 900-1966)

iii. Local v centralized authority

iv. Calquhon, Treatise on the Police of the Metropolis (1797, 8 later editions)

1. Connection between police and “Morals” of the people

2. “In vain do we boast of those liberties…of the security which our Laws afford us” – without police to secure them

v. Peel - 1829 establishment of modern police force in London

vi. Police in Scotland (Policing and Prosecution in Britain in Britain 1750 – 1850)

1. “played a crucial ideological role by the apparent fact of their dissociation from overt class domination and its cruder coercive manifestations”; “the population viewed their local police forces as little more than lackeys of the landlords.” (268)

2. private, more general, police of the burghs v more modern police forces of the rural landlords

II. Political Police

a. In McCoy’s Account (mentioned A LOT but does not use the word police)

b. Spies also play a role in creating patriotic enthusiasm in wartime - “There were also a great many spies doing duty among the crowd, who were placed there in order to hear” (215)

c. On spies – “eighty thousand paid agents” in the country among whom are many “Poles and foreigners” but she has not heard of any Englishman “being so employed” – insincere conversation a result (83)

d. talks about women also being spies (83)

e. Noblewomen being beaten by the secret police for “sympathy with Western powers” (86) – she has “no doubt” of these stories being true

f. Third Section established by Nicholas I, censorship, fear of secret societies

III. Situating her account in Civilized v Uncivilized Rhetoric about Eastern Europe (Larry Wolffe, Inventing Eastern Europe)

a. Despotism and slavery rhetoric

i. “I am confident that most of the defects which appear in their national character are in consequence of the despotism of the Russian government” (Richardson qtd 85) – McCoy echoes this sentiment throughout her account; interrelated with the power of the state and policing of the people

b. Role of beasts (specifically wolves) in “imagining Eastern Europe” (101-103)

i. McCoy’s characterization of the police as wolves (67) and her disproportionate attention to wolves elsewhere (163, 164, 166, 167), including her own encounter with a wolf

c. Significance of her gender and class

i. Her wolf imagery significantly differs from that used by male predecessors

ii. More concerned with the security of her person (ties into O’Loughlin’s theme of women travelers and the body)

iii. Individual liberty more dependent on security provided by a police force

iv. Anxieties about the police less abstract (they literally murder women)

v. Police not a force simply to control lower classes; should actually help the lower classes against oppression and general hardships

vi. Her account is not simply a nationalist diatribe against Russia, and she attempts to prove her objectivity and give a balanced depiction

d. Race and antiquity

i. Eastern Europe during the Enlightenment was “on the academic frontier between ancient history and modern anthropology” (331)

ii. McCoy often compares Russians and ethnic groups in Russia to ancient races and civilizations, though she uses more positive characterizations than barbarian races evoked by her predecessors (e.g. compares the people to paintings on Etruscan vases and Athenian temples (169), one of many examples)

IV. Conclusion - speculate on the significance of police in the relationship between state and people, and what this means for the civilized v uncivilized debate? not sure yet.