ABSTRACT
The great reformer of Russia dreamed, as we recall, of reforming his subjects’ mores with the aid of perfect “training” legislation and an ideal state structure so that each would acknowledge, without sparing his life, the need of service to the state, that is to say, to the master, for the sake of attaining the mythical “common good.” The panacea for all calamities and misfortunes that befell his subjects en route to the radiant future Peter saw in the creation of one more state mechanism, conceived as something all-encompassing and all-pervasive. The role of such a system, pervading all of the gigantic building of Russian statehood, ought to be played, to Peter’s way of thinking, by the police. It is crucially important that the police be understood not simply as an institution, but also as a system of relationships, a mode of universal thinking in which the cult of state authority was taken to the limit.
