The abolition of the police by the order issued on April 17th was one of the acts of the Government which seriously complicated the normal course of life. In reality, this act only confirmed the conditions which had arisen almost everywhere in the first days of the Revolution, and were directly due to the wrath of the people against the Executive of the old regime, and especially of those who had been oppressed and persecuted by the police and had suddenly found themselves on the crest of the wave. It would be a hopeless task to defend the Russian police as an institution. It could only be considered good by comparing it with the militia and with the Extraordinary Bolshevik Commission....
In any case it would have been useless to resist the abolition of the police, because it was a psychological necessity. There can be no doubt that the attitude and actions of the old police were due less to their political opinions than to the instructions of their employers and to their own personal interests. No wonder, therefore, that the gendarmes and the policemen, insulted and persecuted, introduced a very bad element into the Army, into which they were subsequently forcibly drafted. The Revolutionary Democracy, in self defence, grossly exaggerated their counter-revolutionary activities in the Army; nevertheless, it is absolutely true that a great many ex-officers of the police and of the gendarmerie, partly, perhaps, from motives of self-defence, chose for themselves a most lucrative profession--that of the demagogue and the agitator. The fact is that the abolition of the police in the very midst of the turmoil--when crime was on the increase and the guarantees of public safety and of the safety of individual property were weakened--was a real calamity. The militia, indeed, far from being a substitute for the police, was a caricature of them. In Western countries the police is placed as a united force under the orders of a Department of the Central Government. The Provisional Government placed the militia under the orders of _Zemstvo_ and Municipal Administrations. The Government Commissars were only entitled to make use of the militia for certain definite purposes. The cadres of the militia were filled by untrained men, devoid of technical experience, and, as often as not, criminals. By virtue of the new law, there were admitted to the militia persons under arrest or who had served a term of imprisonment for comparatively grave offences. The system of recruiting practised by some forcibly "democratised" _Zemstvo_ and Municipal institutions tended quite as much as the new law towards the deterioration of the personnel of the militia.