Vyacheslav von Plehve

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(1846 - 1904), leader of imperial police then minister in governments of Tsar Alexander III and Tsar Nicholas II.

As a conservative statesman in late imperial Russia, Vyacheslav Plehve (von Plehwe) was a key figure in the tsarist regime's struggle against revolution. An experienced prosecutor, he was tapped in 1881 to head the imperial police following the assassination of Tsar Alexander II. His success in arresting the perpetrators and destroying the People's Will terrorist organization, combined with his remarkable energy and talent, led to appointments as Assistant Minister of the Interior (1885 - 1894), Minister State-Secretary for Finland (1894 - 1902), and Minister of the Interior (1902 - 1904).

Assuming the post of minister in the wake of widespread peasant disorders and his predecessor's murder by revolutionaries, Plehve sought above all to reimpose order and control. With the help of former Moscow police chief Sergei Zubatov, he extended throughout Russia a network of "security sections" (okhrany), which used covert agents to penetrate revolutionary and labor groups. He fired Zubatov when his police-sponsored worker organizations triggered widespread strikes in 1903. He repressed the liberal press and the zemstvo organs of local self-government, leading to bitter clashes with leading public figures. His heavy-handed tactics alienated both the Russian public and his government colleagues, especially arch-rival Sergei Witte, the talented Finance Minister whose efforts to modernize Russia were seen by Plehve as contributing to unrest. But he won the support of Tsar Nicholas II, who relieved Witte of his ministry in August 1903, and he backed aggressive ventures that helped provoke the Russo-Japanese War of 1904 - 1905. He also cracked down on subject nationalities such as Finns, Armenians and Jews; his alleged efforts to divert public anger from the government toward the Jews may have contributed to the Kishinev anti-Jewish pogrom of 1903. Ironically, this so incensed the Jewish police agent Evno Azef, who had managed to infiltrate the terrorists, that he helped them arrange Plehve's murder in July 1904. Plehve thus died a failure, disparaged by both contemporaries and later historians.

Bibliography

Gurko, Vladimir I. (1939). Features and Figures of the Past. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

Judge, Edward H. (1983). Plehve: Repression and Reform in Imperial Russia, 1902 - 1904. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press.

Witte, Sergei I. (1990). Memoirs of Count Witte. Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe.

Zuckerman, Fredric S. (1996). The Tsarist Secret Police and Russian Society, 1880 - 1917. New York: New York University Press.

—EDWARD H. JUDGE

Vyacheslav Konstantinovich von Plehve (Вячесла́в Константи́нович фон Пле́ве), also Pléhve, or Pleve (20 April [O.S. 8 April] 1846 in Meshchovsk, Kaluga Guberniya – 28 July [O.S. 15 July] 1904 in St Petersburg) was the director of Tsarist Russia's police and later Minister of the Interior.

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He came from a German noble family and was raised in Warsaw. After studying law at Moscow University, he became a prosecutor's assistant in 1867 and served in various positions in the Ministry of Justice. In 1881, he investigated the murder of Alexander II and then joined the MVD as a Director of the Department of Police, also in charge of Okhrana. He became a member of the Governing Senate in 1884 and Deputy of the Minister in 1885. Made an Actual Privy Counsellor in 1899, he was Finnish Minister Secretary of State from that year until 1904.

He is credited with the destruction of numerous revolutionary groups. It appears Pléhve did not see a difference in degrees of opposition, and his actions forced the unification of ideological enemies in the Osvoboditel'noe dvizhenie - a significant force in the 1905 "disturbances".^{[citation needed]}

In April 1902, following the assassination of Dmitry Sipyagin, he was appointed Minister of the Interior and Chief of Gendarmes. After a brief attempt at conciliation with the zemstvo conservatives failed, he relapsed - disbanding the police-supported labour unions (zubatovshchina).^{[citation needed]}

In 1902 he also met with Theodor Herzl in Saint Petersburg as part of Herzl's strategy of seeking an alliance with influential anti-Semites, in the hope that they would regard Zionism as a convenient way of "getting rid" of the unwanted Jews in their countries.^[1]

Plehve was an obvious target for revolutionaries. He survived one attack in 1903 and two in 1904 before the Socialist-Revolutionary Combat Group succeeded. On 15 July 1904 a bomb was thrown into Plehve's carriage by Yegor Sozonov, in Saint Petersburg, killing him. He was 58 years old.

Plehve had used his position as Minister of Interior to insist that the assassin of Vilna's governor, Victor von Wehle, Hirsh Lekert, be tried under wartime law, which virtually guaranteed a death sentence.^[2]

Plehve was traditionally believed to be the architect of the Russo Japanese War. Plehve was reputed to have said: "We need a small, victorious war to avert a revolution." However, recent research has shown that this verdict rests upon misinformation deliberately spread by Sergei Witte.^{[citation needed]}

References

1. ^ "Herzl, Jabotinsky, Ben Gurion and the Holocaust" article (in Hebrew) on the The Israeli Classical Liberal Website[1]
2. ^ Hirsz Abramowicz, Eva Zeitlin Dobkin, Dina Abramowicz, Jeffrey Shandler, David E. Fishman, Yivo Institute for Jewish Research, "Profiles of a lost world: memoirs of East European Jewish life before World", Wayne State University Press, 1999, p. 141, [2]

Preceded by Dmitry Sergeyevich Sipyagin	Minister of Interior 1902 – 1904	Succeeded by Prince Pyotr Dmitrievich Sviatopolk-Mirskii
Preceded by Victor Napoleon Procopé	Finnish Minister Secretary of State 1899 – 1904	Succeeded by Edvard Oeström

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