Russian Secret Police Part 2: The Okhrana

And the various secret police of the Romanovs

Welcome to Secret Police!

Secret Police explores the history and methods of the world's most brutal secret police forces. This is Part 2 of the Russian secret police with the main focus on the Okhrana.

The Ohkrana was inspired by the Decemberist Revolution when Russia’s monarchy organized a clandestine force to protect the Tsar and infiltrate revolutionary groups.

We will explore the Ohkrana’s methods to survey groups hostile to the government, how the Ohkrana tried -- and ultimately failed -- to prevent the Soviet storm. We will also meet some historical figures who either were or may have been Ohkrana agents.

From the Oprichniki to the Romanovs

The Oprichniki was disbanded in 1572 and Tsar Ivan the Terrible himself died in 1584. With his first wife, Anastasia Romanova, they had several children, some of which tragically died in childhood. He did however have surviving sons, Tsarevich Ivan Ivanovich and Fyodor Ivanovich.

Ivan the Terrible murdered Tsarevich Ivan in a fit of rage leaving the throne with no heir apparent and the Rurik Dynasty of Russia vulnerable to dissolution. Ivan’s other son, Fyodor, was not fit for the throne. Fyodor actually took the reins of power in 1584 and follow his faith spending many hours in prayer and compilation.

Unfortunately, Fyodor seemed to be cursed with ill health, was physically weak, and did not have the temperament needed to run a government. Fortunately for Fyodor, he married Irina Godunova in 1580, the sister of a man named Boris Godunov.

Boris came from a noble Tatar family and made his career Ivan the Terrible’s court. He married the daughter of one of Ivan’s close associates and worked his way into the Boyar nobility. Boris was successful enough that Ivan the Terrible entrusted him with looking after Fyodor. Upon Fyodor’s ascension to the throne, Boris was tasked with the day-to-day responsibilities in Fyodor’s government. If Fyodor was the CEO, Boris was the chief operating officer who kept the ship sailing.

Under Boris, Russia was victorious in several military campaigns; Boris promoted foreign trade, constructed several defensive outposts, exerted Moscow’s influence in Siberia, and established the head of the Muscovite church as Patriarch. It wasn’t all sunshine and rainbows though because Russia tilted into a turbulent period in its history.

The death of Fyodor in 1598 left Boris in an awkward position because Fyodor’s death meant the end of the Rurik Dynasty. Boris’ competence and his list of major achievements worked in his favor to hold onto power because he was elected sit on the throne in 1598 by a council of clergy and service gentry called the zemsky sobor or quote or the Assembly of Land. Service gentry were people who were awarded land, serfs, and other property assets by the Tsar in exchange for favors.

Boris liberalized or opened up part of Russia by allowing students to be educated in western Europe and allowed the establishment of Lutheran churches inside the largely Orthodox Christian nation. He also solidified his own power by diminishing that of the Boyars. Boris had many of them exiled or banished, including members of the future ruling Romanov family.

Boris himself employed some kind of spy network to weed out people suspected of treason though what this network was called is unknown. Persecution against the Boyars only fueled their resentment towards Boris because of course it did. Russian discontent with Boris grew in the wake of famine and epidemics. Luckily for Boris his popular support got a boost from an strange source. Somebody claiming to be the long-lost Tsarevich Dimitri Ivanovich rallied foreign forces against Russia including Cossacks, or southern Slavic peoples, and Polish armies.

But who was Dimitri Ivanovich?

I mentioned that Ivan the Terrible had several children die in childhood. For example, Ivan had a son named Dimitri with his first wife Anastasia Romanova, but sadly that Dimitri died around the age of two. Ivan had another son also named Dimitri -- Tsarevich Dimitri Ivanovich. Upon Fyodor’s death, Tsarevich Dimitri should have become Tsar, not Boris Godunov.

Boris Godunov, however, liked power and wanted to keep it. He had Tsarevich Dimitri and his family exiled to a town called Uglich, near Moscow. Then Dimitri died in 1591 under mysterious circumstances at eight years old. Many theories have been presented to explain Dimitri’s death including Boris ordering the child’s assassination. Rumors floated around that Boris’ aforementioned spy ring killed Dimitri. These rumors were not quelled by the official investigation which, according to author Robert Hingley, quote “concluded that [Dimitri] had died accidentally, having suffered an epileptic fit while playing with a knife.” I’m no detective, hell I can’t even find things in my own refrigerator, but I call BS on that one. 

That sounds like those TikToks where the caption says “every time I try to eat healthy” while somebody reaches for a piece of fruit, but they trip and land conveniently next to a bowl of chips.

Some say Dmitri’s death was a genuine accident or it was a murder. Whatever the case, people in Uglich weren’t buying the official cause of Dimitri’s death as an accident and blamed Boris. To suppress the rumors, Boris had his agents hunt down the people questioning the official narrative and cut out their tongues. Doesn’t that make Boris Godunov look even more guilty?

Even the principal investigator of Dimitri’s death, Vasily Shuysky, flip-flopped on his confirmation of Dimitri’s death seven different times over the following fifteen years.

Had Dimitri survived, he’d be the rightful heir to the throne threatening Boris’ appointment as Tsar since this incident happened before his election by the zemsky sobor in 1598.

When this rando appeared claiming to be Dimitri, Boris wasn’t buying it and maybe because he knew the real one was dead. This imposter became known to history as False Dimitri.

False Dimitri and his armies attempted a march on Moscow in 1604.

Boris himself died suddenly in 1605, and he was succeeded by his 16-year-old son, Fyodor II. As a fun side note: Did you ever watch Rocky and Bullwinkle? One of the villains was named Boris Badenov. His name is a play on words of the real but long dead Boris Godunov.

In 1606, Russia descended into a chaotic period known as the Time of Troubles which was characterized by foreign invasion, social disorder, violent regime change, and civil war. Unfortunately for Fyodor, False Dimitri was successful in his march on Moscow, and in the ensuing chaos of Moscow’s capture, Fyodor II was murdered only weeks into his rein.

False Dimitri then took the throne by force; however, only a year into his rule, False Dimitri himself was deposed, slaughtered, and torn apart by a mob. His body was burned, and his ashes were stuffed into a canon and fired in the direction of Poland from whence he came.

Vasily Shuysky, the investigator of Tsarevich Dimitri's suspicious death, took power after False Dimitri launched like chard confetti. Shuysky ruled from 1606 to until 1610 when Moscow was captured and occupied by Poland. Shuysky himself was captured, and the Poles made him wear a white smock as they hauled his ass away in an open carriage to Warsaw like a trophy.  

Meanwhile the Poles occupied Moscow for 2 years until 1612 when they were dislodged from the city.

Finally, Tsar Michael, the first Tsar of the House of Romanov, took the throne. This dynasty would last from 1613 until the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917.

Secret Police of the Romanov Dynasty

Russia had many Tsars in 300 and the nation itself changed culturally and geographically as different Tsars had different ambitions for the Russian Empire. Notable Tsars just from memory include Peter the Great and Catherine the Great.

Peter the Great had the city of St. Petersburg constructed during his reign and declared it the capital city. St. Petersburg today is Russia’s second largest city with a population of about 5.5 million in 2020.That’s somewhere between the populations of New York City and Los Angeles in 2020. It’s a big place.

I’m not going to cover every Tsar because great content on the Russian Tsars already exists and that would be too much to write. Instead we’ll focus on the Tsars most relevant to the development of secret police.

According to author Robert Hingley, Russia lacked a formal, institutionalized political police force between the end of the Oprichnina until Peter the Great established the Preobrazhensky Office, which was tasked with investigating political subversion. A probable exception to this was Boris Godunov’s spies.

For the most part, Russia enjoyed expansion and cultural change during the Romanov Dynasty. Those changes weren’t without threats to the state or underlying economic inequality like serfs who were unhappy with the system, but they were powerless to change it. To help keep the empire intact, lesser secret police forces accompanied the rule of a few Tsars. Peter the Great’s Preobrazhensky Office shared duties with a Secret Chancellery -- both were abolished after his death. Anna I established the Chancellery of Secret Investigations. They were succeeded by Peter III’s Secret Bureau.

Alexander I wanted to abolish the Secret Bureau but the Napoleonic Wars took history in a different direction. Or rather, the subsequent Decembrist Revolt.

The revolt has its origins in Napoleon Bonepart’s invasion of Russia. Under the leadership of Tsar Alexander I, the Russians successfully not just repelled but pushed Napoleon’s Grande Amre back to Paris in 1814.

But pushing Napoleon into France exposed the common soldier serving in the Russian army to Europe and the West as it was at that time. Simply put, Russian soldiers became painfully aware of Russia’s social backwardness, oppressive monarchy, and economic inequality according to Hingley. Frankly, they saw how far ahead western Europe was compared to their own country.

Some in the Russian occupying forces wanted to bring western ideas back to Russia after the war. They didn’t just want to remove the Tsar; they wanted to install a constitutional government and abolish serfdom.

When Alexander’s victorious army returned to Russia from defeating Napoleon, they were forced to partake in a rapid increase in military parades and drills. Soldiers continued to face beatings and mandatory conscription of at least 25 years after which they would return to their lives as serfs. Not exactly a sweet deal for military service.

Imagine you’re a Russian conscript. You just ejected a dangerous aggressor from your land and brought the fight to the enemy. When you return home, you're given no special treatment or thanks. You’re forced to partake in more drills, beatings, and then when you’re done with your service there are no retirement benefits, no GI Bill, no future job opportunities, no support for battlefield trauma. You just return to a life of serfdom. I might be a tad upset about my bleak prospects.

Not surprisingly, there was growing dissatisfaction among the Russian officer class, and they formed secret societies to vent their frustrations. Their grievances were kept on the down low from other officers and commanders – basically anyone outside of these secret groups who didn’t share in their desire to liberalize Russia.

Among the officers who wanted a different type of government, two schools of thought formed: one faction in St. Petersburg and a much more radical faction in Moscow led by an officer named Colonel Pestel. The groups were dubbed the northern and southern conspirators respectively. Northerners were for a constitutional monarchy and southerners wanted a Russian republic; however, they believed that in order to achieve this goal it was necessary to murder the Tsar and his family.

These military groups who opposed the Tsar were called the Decembrists because the attempted coup occurred in December 1825. Leading up to the revolt, Alexander I received many reports about the plots to overthrow him. The conspirators could have been arrested but Alexander I died on November 19, 1825. The Tsar’s death provided the Decembrists with a unique opportunity that likely would not occur again: to launch the coup while the state was headless. The Russian government was without clear leadership for seventeen days. It was uncertain if Alexander’s oldest brother Constantine, or his second oldest brother, Nicholas, would take the throne.

Ultimately, it would be Nicholas. He anticipated the coup, and the government tried to negotiate with the Decembrists. When negotiations failed, Nicholas I ordered that the rebels parading around the Senate Square in St. Petersburg be destroyed with artillery. The southern conspirators in Moscow were destroyed some weeks later.

Now we should understand Nicholas’ perspective because, as a boy, Nicholas witnessed the assassination of his father, Tsar Paul I of Russia. Paul I was likely assassinated because of a proposal to extend freedoms to serfs -- an idea that generally alienated the nobility. Paul’s assassination ushered in the Tsardom of the oldest son Alexander I. Given this experience, Nicholas I was determined to keep tabs on discontent and descent among the Russian people and squash rebellion wherever it flared up inside his massive empire which, at that point. spanned from Poland to Alaska and incorporated Finland and Central Asia.

As the Decemberist Revolt unfolded, many of the conspirators were arrested and brought to Nicholas himself with their hands tied. The Tsar proved to be an effective interrogator which was probably a skill he developed during his time in the military.

Nicholas dealt with each prisoner differently: he shouted and threatened some while expressing sympathy for others. Now normally, those being interrogated are the ones deprived of sleep with few breaks between brutal questioning; however, with Nicholas he was the one interrogating ‘round the clock. Supposedly, he questioned roughly 150 prisoners. He also delegated punishments based on the level of involvement in the revolt in his determination to weed out every conspirator. It's estimated that about 3,000 people were arrested in connection with the revolt. Some of the prisoners were exiled to Siberia.

The Third Section

Nicholas felt confident he’d rid Russia of Decembrists, but he needed a way to actively look for simmering resentment towards the Tsar. Nicholas recruited General Alexander von Benckendorff, a man of Baltic German origin who fought in the Napoleonic Wars. He apparently had a lackadaisical attitude and was known for being absent-minded and occasionally forgot his own name. According to Hingley, he was a quote “a ladies-man who was neither particularly active nor particularly intelligent.”

Nicholas looked at his resume and thought, “he's perfect!”

Initially Berckendorff rejected Nicholas’ idea to create secret police saying quote “[a secret police force] terrifies honest men, but is detected by scoundrels” end quote. Beckendorff might have thought Nicholas was going to create a secret police force with or without him. He recommended such a force be both feared and respected because of the quote “moral qualities” of their chief. Berckendorff proposed this new office should combine the Ministry of the Police and Inspector of the Gendarmes.

According to Merriam Webster, a Gendarme is basically an armed police officer.

Nicholas, however, didn’t want a combined department but rather a governmental structure directly under his control. He established his new secret police organization as part of his personal Chancellery. On July 3, 1826, the Third Section was created. They, the Third Section, got their name by having been the third appendage of Nicholas’ chancellery. The chancellery consisted of several sections or offices that performed different tasks for the Tsar such as preparing orders, writing legislation, or managing domestic matters. Benckendorff was appointed as Third Section’s head as well as chief of the Gendarmes.

There is a story that Benckendorff asked Nicholas for a specific mandate or directive of the Third Section secret police. Apparently, Nicholas handed Benckendorff a handkerchief and said “here is all the directive you need. The more tears you wipe away with this handkerchief, the more faithfully you will serve my aims.”

Third Section was responsible for political security within the Russian civilian and military populations. These units were considered higher police who concerned themselves with politics whereas lower police still concerned themselves with everyday crime and remained part of Russia’s Ministry of Interior. These higher police forces consisted of two groups: the Corps of Gendarmes and the Third Section. Gendarmes were similar to military units. Members were recruited only from the military and wore blue tunics, slacks, and white gloves. There were roughly 8,000 to 9,000 members of the Gendarmes. In contrast, the Third Section consisted of only about 40 civilians in plain clothes – plain clothes for that time and place.  

On an operational level, the Third Section was concentrated inside major cities like Moscow and St. Petersburg, but the Gendarmes were scattered across the Empire in places like Vladivostok, Baku, and Irkutsk. The Gendarmes employed local agents in remote towns to spy and inform on those distant pockets of the population. New agents were attracted with excellent pay and special privileges, but many were deterred by the fact that the job involved clandestine police work. Gendarmes also investigated currency counterfeiting, kept tabs on religious groups, and enforced censorship of anything deemed anti-Tsarist. In the 1840s, the Gendarmes monitored workers on a railway project between St. Petersburg and Moscow. This started a tradition of Gendarmes being employed as railway police during Tsarist times.

Despite the Third Section’s small size, compared to the Gendarmes, they punched well above their weight. They quickly outranked other governmental institutions at the behest of Nicholas I, including their military counterparts, the Gendarmes. The Third Section kept tabs on foreigners inside Russia who were under constant surveillance by Third Section agents.

In 1833, an American envoy was sent to Russia by then US President Andrew Jackson. One diplomat reported to the president that, “you can scarcely hire a servant who is not an agent of the secret police.” Another American diplomat noted he could tell the Third Section monitored his mail since the letters were crudely resealed with wax of a different color than the original seal. They also utilized early bugging devices. One Englishwoman noted a large stack of wood was piled outside her hotel room with a space for a person to crouch and keep her under observation. Russians traveling abroad were closely monitored by Third Section agents. One informant wrote, “in the drawing-rooms of London and Paris, [the traveling Russian] dreads that the eye of the secret police may be upon him.”

The Third Section existed from 1826 until 1880. Within that time, they processed many thousands of reports, petitions, and denunciations from citizens across the vast Russian Empire. Their leader, Alexander Benckendorff, died in 1844. The job of Third Section’s chief went to Alexis Orlov who apparently had no experience in secret police work or espionage. Orlov’s appointment was curious though because he was the brother of one of the Decembrist, but Tsar Nicholas was willing to look the other way.

Was the Third Section successful in their mission? In my view, yes. Nicholas faced a Polish Rebellion in 1830 and revolt in Novgorod in 1831. Both were stamped out by the Russian military, and I speculate intelligence was collected and analyzed by the Third Section.

Assassination attempts against the Tsar were also uncovered. For example, a group called the Kritsky brothers, based in Moscow, plotted to kill the tsar and his family. They amassed a stash of the weapons necessary to carry out an attack. Undercover Third Section agents outed the conspirators who were arrested and carted off to Siberia.

Nicholas I died in March 1855 and was succeeded by his son, Alexander II. He relaxed prior censorship measures and announced his intention to abolish serfdom. He ushered in a number of governmental and legal changes including enacting a jury system and rights against arbitrary search and seizure. Despite legal reforms, the administration retained their powers of extra-judicial law enforcement. Notably, Alexander II did not abolish the Third Section, but they lost much of their prior prominence; however, they were not unutilized since revolutionary fervor was growing. For example, there was another Polish revolt in 1863, increasing unrest among the peasants in rural Russia, and discontent among the urban educated class.

Young people with radical new ideas were threats to the Tsar and formed opposition groups like the Nihilists. In May 1862, a series of fires ignited in St. Petersburg, and the government blamed arsonists associated with the Nihilists. Soon it became forbidden to practice or host gatherings in public or private for fear that radical ideas would fester out in hidden spaces. Even the St. Petersburg Chess Club was shut down because it was a hot bed of anti-government sentiment.

Other secret societies formed with the goal of assassinating Alexander II. A man by the name of  Dmitry Karakozov, a student who was expelled from two different universities, obtained firearms to get this job done. Karakozov authored a manifesto explaining why he had to kill the tsar and how he was going to do it. His manifesto was discovered by the St. Petersburg Governor-General’s office but no action was taken to prevent an attack.

On April 4, 1866, Alexander II was enjoying a walk in the Summer Garden Park in St. Petersburg. Leaving the gardens, the Tsar was about to board his carriage when Karakozov ambushed him firing his revolver but missed. Karakozov was detained by bystanders and taken to Third Section headquarters. Third Section reported to Tsar Alexander that all means would be used to extract information from the assailant. Karakozov’s interrogation included sleep deprivation, food deprivation, threats of torture, and a rather unusual form of torment: Hingley describes this as, “obtrusive ministrations of an Orthodox priest, who plagued the prisoner with religious exonerations and ritual.” Basically, this means a priest would show up frequently and unannounced. Karakozov was driven to insanity and provided authorities with information leading to hundreds more arrests. He was later executed in October 1866.

In many ways, this assassination attempt made things worse for ordinary Russians because it redirected the Tsars’ attention from liberal reform to staying alive. In response to the assassination attempt, the leader of the Third Section, Prince Dolgorukov, resigned his position. Alexander II appointed Count Peter Shuvalov as chief of the Gendarmes and Controller of the Third Section. The Tsar also appointed his close friend, General Fyodor Trepov, as police chief of St. Petersburg.

In 1867, there was a second assassination attempt against the Tsar in Paris which queued the Third Section into realizing the threats were far and wide. Tsar Alexander would gradually become more insulated literally and figuratively by his secret police; however, the Third Section approached its expiration date. The year 1874 marked the beginning of a steep decline in their power. Why did this happen? A combination of bad leadership and revolutionary activity.

Revolutionaries adapted to the Third Sections’ tactics and established clandestine organizations largely in cities, but their influence didn’t extend much to rural Russia. A sort of headquarters, called Land of Freedom, was created between 1876 and 1879. On January 30, 1878, a revolutionary named Ivan Kovalsky attempted to kill St. Petersburg’s police chief, Fyodor Trepov. Kovalsky owned an illegal printing press in Odessa, Ukraine and advocated for violence against the Tsar’s regime. His distribution of violent rhetoric inspired other revolutionaries to action.

On February 1, 1878, revolutionaries killed a police informant named Akim Nikonov. Other police officials were also attacked, and some were killed. In 1879, another attack occurred in St. Petersburg where a 23-year-old assassin named Leon Mirsky rode his horse alongside an official’s carriage and fired two shots at General Alexander Drenteln. I know there are many different Alexanders in this story – it can be confusing.

The general wasn’t hit and ordered the driver to pursue Mirsky, who escaped. Mirsky was arrested several weeks later and sentenced to “penal servitude for life,” according to Hingley.

Three weeks following Mirsky’s attack, there was another attempt on the Tsar’s life. This was his third assassination attempt if you’re keeping track at home. A revolutionary named Alexander Solovyov caught Tsar Alexander on his walk outside the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg. Solovyov fired at his target and missed. He was later arrested and publicly executed by hanging.

Failures of the Third Section & Their Downfall

Alexander II was getting fed up with the Third Section’s apparent incompetence.

Meanwhile, revolutionaries were hatching new schemes and reorganizing. The group Land of Freedom was disbanded and formed a more radical group called the People’s Will. They met in August 1879 at an undisclosed location and pledged to the death of Alexander II. The two prominent leaders of People’s Will were Andrew Zhelyabov and the even more infamous Sophia Perovsky. People’s Will, more so than any revolutionary group before it, embraced terrorist tactics to achieve its goals. They laid mines on railroad tracks, especially the line between Moscow and Crimea that the Tsar frequently used. In November 1879, the People’s Will was successful in blowing up one of the Tsar’s trains in Moscow but the Tsar was not onboard at the time.

Following the terrorist attacks in Moscow, police raided various locations around St. Petersburg and found floor maps of the Tsar’s Winter Palace with various and indiscernible markings scribbled on them. Obviously, this raised a red flag, and the Third Section warned Alexander II that there could be another assassination attempt. Since the Third Section found maps of the palace itself, they wanted to thoroughly search the entire building for anything suspicious, but the Tsar refused.

The Winter Palace in St. Petersburg is a massive complex built to resemble French palaces in Versailles. Nestled beside the Neva River, it has 1,500 elaborately decorated rooms and is over 645,000 square feet. The average American home is only about 2,200 square feet. For my American readers, you could fit about 11 football fields in the Winter Palace in terms of square feet. Nowadays the palace houses the State Heritage Museum.

The Tsar’s method to combat terrorism was to order administrative change. He ousted Third Section chief General Drenteln and appointed Count Mikhail Loris-Melikov as chairman of the Supreme Executive Commission in February 1880. In March 1880, Count Loris-Melikov took personal control of the Third Section and gendarmes. The Third Section underwent a lengthy investigation that revealed they’d been a bunch of very lazy secret policemen. Important documents and cases were missing, there was a backlog of over 1,000 cases under review, thousands more Russian subjects were in exile for some loose connection to terrorism while somebody like Sophia Perovsky easily evaded the Gendarmes and supported terrorism.

Simply put, the Third Section arrested many of the wrong people and failed to apprehend actually competent and dangerous revolutionaries. Disorganization and lack of coordination were normal among the Tsar’s police. The Gendarmes had their own list of suspects separate from the Third Section’s list and both competed with the local police in St. Petersburg.

Count Loris-Melikov reported that, “the Tsar of the Russian land, the master of ninety million subjects, could not consider himself safe in his own residence.” He issued a decree on August 6, 1880, officially disbanding the Third Section and assigned their tasks to a newly formed Department of State Police.

The Department of State Police

The reformation and rebranding of the secret police didn’t change the overall mandate to keep tabs on revolutionaries and protect the Tsar. In fact, under Count Loris-Melikov, activities became more clandestine and sneakier.

One agent who transferred from the Third Section to the Department of State Police was a clerk named Nikolai Kletochnikov, who was an undercover agent in the People’s Will. But he was informing the revolutionaries of police activity. Kletochnikov provided the People’s Will with lists of agents and police informers and provided People’s Will (PW) advanced warning of police raids. The police had their own agents inside PW and other revolutionary groups as well. The cost of being caught for either side was your life.

In one instance, a police agent, named Reinstein, posed as a revolutionary and informed the police of an illegal printing press. Printing presses were targets because those machines produced alternative media and revolutionaries subsequently published anti-Tsarist materials. Reinstein informed the cops about a printing press, the cops raided the location, shut down the press, and arrested some of the operators. It appears Reinstein also knew the identity of Kletochnikov, but Kletochnikov was one step ahead of Reinstein. Reinstein was invited to a “revolutionary meeting” in an empty apartment where he was murdered. The People’s Will published about Reinstein’s death in their paper thumbing their nose at the Department of State Police. The publicity of an undercover officers’ death established death itself as an acceptable punishment for officers posing as revolutionaries.

In another case, a revolutionary assassin named Grigory Goldenberg was arrested while transporting high explosives from Odessa. Goldenberg was locked in a cell with another “revolutionary” who was actually a police officer. The unsuspecting Goldenberg confided in his supposed comrade details about a revolutionary plot. He was later interrogated about those exact details by an officer of the Gendarmes, Dmitry Dobzhinsky, who posed as somebody sympathetic to the revolutionary cause. He convinced Goldenberg that Russia would only achieve liberal reform through terror. Goldenberg supplied the names of his comrades falsely believing Dobzhinsky was a revolutionary. When Goldenberg realized he’d been duped twice, he hung himself.

The Department of State Police may have been more organized and disciplined than the Third Section, but they failed to protect the Tsar’s life. In March 1881, Tsar Alexander II was killed by a homemade hand grenade thrown by Ignatious Grinevitsky. He was part of a four-man hit squad commanded by Sophia Pervsky. They blew up his horse drawn carriage, sending bits of carriage, horse, and Tsar into the air and onto bystanders.

Fortunately for the Empire, they had a spare Alex hanging around and Tsar Alexander III ascended to the throne. He was much more of a hard ass than his father and stopped all liberal reforms. During his reign, political terrorism was greatly reduced but never successful in completely extinguishing revolutionary fervor.

Alexander III relied on a powerful deputy, Constantine Pobedonostsev, who tutored both him and the future Nicholas II. The Tsar, having experienced the assassination of his father, was concerned for the immediate safety of the boy Nicholas. As was the shared concern of high-raking Russian officials. Young Nicholas II last saw his grandfather as a half-blown-to-hell corpse which left a lasting impression on little Nicky. Officials implemented security measures throughout the Winter Palace. They investigated the staff for bad actors and even searched under furniture for assassins. In fact, the Tsar often chose to live in a more remote home in Gatchina south of St. Petersburg.

Alexander III initiated anti-Jewish pogroms. According to Merriam-Webster, a pogrom is an organized massacre of helpless people. Pogroms existed largely in Ukraine. Alexander Drenteln, former head of the Third Section, was at this time now Governor-General of Kiev (or Kyiv) and permitted mobs to destroy Jewish owned business and markets in a three-day riot.

The regime targeted different groups that appeared separate from revolutionaries. The Department for State Police found success in old tactics, particularly infiltration, carried over from the Third Section.

Remember Third Section agents successfully fooled people like Gregory Goldenberg into spilling information. Other agents had success in posing as Nihilist members. Many revolutionaries who were captured seemed to quickly turn on their comrades but that didn’t spare their lives. In one case, an assassin named Nicholas Rysakov was arrested for using homemade explosives, and it turned out he had very loose lips. He provided the police with every detail known to him in the hope he could get some kind of deal. They hung him anyway.

Another police informant, Merkulov, patrolled St. Petersburg and outed every revolutionary he knew to detectives. These methods helped the Department of State Police catch up with Sophia Perovsky -- the notorious leader of the People’s Will and mastermind of Alexander II’s assassination. She was also hanged. By May 1881, most of those involved in People’s Will had escaped to other countries or were arrested.

The Okhrana

On August 14, 1881, a statute was created for the Tsar to declare a state of emergency, or an exceptional emergency, in any part of the Empire where revolution sprouted. Governor-Generals and the Gendarmes were granted additional powers to arrest suspected revolutionaries. Public and private gatherings were forbidden, and special decrees were issued to maintain law and order. This statute broadening police powers was meant to be temporary but remained in place until 1917, when the statute expired because the Tsars expired.

The statute also included yet another reorganization of the police. Special units for investigating political crimes were established in St. Petersburg, Moscow, and Warsaw in Poland. These units were called Protective Sections or Okhrana.

The word "Okhrana" seems to be a loose but commonly used term for the Russian political or secret police starting in 1881 until the end of the Tsars. Their revolutionary adversaries nicknamed them "Okhranka," which means "the little security agency," according to biographer Stephen Kotkin.

Okhrana agents were experienced, often highly educated, and far more professional than the Third Section. Their first leader was Nikolay Ignatyev. He was soon replaced by Count Dmitry Tolstoy. Not to be confused with the famous writer Leo Tolstoy.

In addition to the Okhrana, a bodyguard unit called the Sacred Brotherhood was formed to protect Tsar Alexander III. The Sacred Brotherhood, formed in June 1881 before the Okhrana, was led by a council of First Elders and used ritualistic ceremonies. Hingley estimates the Sacred Brotherhood might have been modeled off America’s Klu Klux Klan due to their similar use of political terrorism, deception, and counterterrorism. Based in an exclusive yacht club in St. Petersburg, they employed about 700 members, with a Volunteer Guard of around 14,000. The Sacred Brotherhood even entered into a secret agreement with what was left of the People’s Will to agree on a truce during Alexander III’s coronation; however, they became more of a menace to the Tsar than the actual revolutionaries. Both the Brotherhood and the Volunteer Guard were dissolved in May 1883.

Okhrana chief Dmitry Tolstoy eventually realized he didn’t want to be an assassination target, but still wanted to stay within the police department. He remained Chief of Gendarmes and appointed General Orzhevsky to take over Okhrana duties. When asked about this decision, Tolstoy reportedly said, “Let them shoot Orzhevsky and not me.”

Word on the street was that People’s Will, despite being weak, hadn’t ceased political assassinations. They targeted General Strelnikov, a particularly cruel prosecutor in southern Russia. Lieutenant Colonel Gregory Sudeykin, a pioneer in police techniques, investigated the plot. Sudeykin posed as a revolutionary and Marxist scholar supporting liberal reform. The Okhrana was his chance to perfect infiltration techniques. Collusion with the People’s Will and other revolutionary groups became the cornerstone of Okhrana strategy.

Sudeykin needed help from inside the People’s Will, so he recruited Sergey Degayev, a prominent member turned police informant. Degayev was involved in the plot to destroy Tsar Alexander II’s train. He benefited from Okhrana protection and tipped off Sudeykin if the People’s Will started to plan an attack. In December 1882, Degayev was arrested for operating an illegal printing press in Odessa. Degayev wrote to Sudeykin that he be released and Sudeykin obliged.

Both men plotted terror attacks against government officials, including Dmitry Tolstoy. Ironically, even Sudeykin became a target, so he resigned but was recalled by Alexander III as Minister of the Interior to combat the very terrorism he’d helped to provoke.

Meanwhile, Degayev traveled to Geneva to meet Leo Tikhomirov, another revolutionary terrorist. Degayev grew suspicious about Sudeykin because Sudeykin had supplied materials for the People’s Will to print their illegal papers, procured with Okhrana resources. The Okhrana’s infiltration went so deep that the revolutionary group had essentially been hijacked. Degayev caught on and lured Sudeykin to an empty apartment in St. Petersburg. Degayev shot him but only wounded Sudeykin. It was up to a few others to beat Sudeykin to death.

Sudeykin alive or dead, Russia still had a terrorist problem. One such terrorist was Alexander Ulyanov. You might recognize the name Ulyanov because he was Lenin’s older brother.

Alexander Ulyanov and his conspirators plotted to kill Alexander III on March 1, 1887, the six-year anniversary of Alexander II’s assassination. The Okhrana intercepted a letter detailing the plot and arrested several conspirators, including Ulyanov. They all confessed that Ulyanov was their main ideologist and bomb maker. Their bombs were designed with strychnine pellets for poison shrapnel and hidden inside innocuous objects like books. Despite the failure, Ulyanov and his group were hanged. Alexander’s death came to haunt the government as it galvanized Vladimir Lenin to lead a revolution.

Another individual, Sophia Ginsberg, joined a terrorist group in Switzerland and traveled to Russia with a false passport, intending to kill the Tsar. The Okhrana caught her and found a manifesto advocating for the Tsar’s murder. In 1890, Ginsberg was sentenced to life in penal servitude.

Many revolutionaries fled to western Europe, including Lenin. Nations like England and France didn’t outlaw revolutionary gatherings, making them a haven for such activities. The Russian government wanted to spy on these revolutionaries living abroad. This wasn't new— the Third Section had done similar operations. The Police Department’s Foreign Agency, not the Okhrana, spied on revolutionaries outside Russia. Agents used bribery, detective tactics, and plain-clothes surveillance to track their targets. Some of the revolutionaries turned into government agents through bribes, threats, or blackmail.

Foreign Operations

Peter Rachkovsky, a brilliant Russian agent, ran the Foreign Agency. Under his watch, People’s Will printing presses were destroyed in Geneva.

In another incident, two revolutionaries in Zurich accidentally blew themselves up while experimenting with explosives. One lost both feet and confessed to the Swiss authorities before dying. In response, Switzerland expelled Russian citizens for suspected terrorist activity.

Many revolutionaries fled to Paris where Rachkovsky had set a trap. In Paris, using the alias Landezen, he infiltrated an émigré group, posing as a violent extremist. He convinced them to plot to assassinate the Tsar, fronting the money, claiming it came from a rich uncle—yeah, if your uncle's name is Okhrana. The group set up a bomb factory, and Rachkovsky fed information to Russian authorities. French police raided the factory and arrested the conspirators, but Landezen was conveniently not there. He had already left for Belgium, having duped them all.

Rachkovsky lived comfortably afterward, enjoying a luxurious villa and as a socialite in France. He even convinced French journalists to become sympathetic to Russia’s counter-revolutionary cause. Despite his success, Rachkovsky’s career ended when he objected to Tsar Nicholas II employing a French hypnotist and conman named Philippe as a spiritual advisor. For speaking up, Rachkovsky was dismissed in 1902.

Ascension of Tsar Nicholas II

On November 1, 1894, Alexander III died of nephritis (kidney inflammation), and Nicholas II took the throne. The Russian people had already lost faith in their government because, during the famine of 1891–1892, private citizens and volunteer organizations did more to provide famine relief than the state did. This absence of government support was further evidence of the state’s incompetence. Nicholas II had an impressive beard, but no amount of facial hair was going to make him any more enthusiastic about being a Tsar. His father hadn’t properly prepared him, and Nicholas seemed indifferent towards the job.

His reign began with scandal. In 1896, during a celebration in Moscow, 1,200 people were trampled to death when a stampede broke out due to a limited supply of free food and beer offered to starving peasants. Instead of mourning the victims, Nicholas chose to party with his wife and the French ambassador at a lavish ball. In his mind, it wasn’t as bad as the government’s famine inaction, so partying shouldn’t destroy the state. He wasn’t wrong, but it didn’t help the growing resentment.

Assassination plots followed Nicholas’ visit to Moscow. Ivan Rasputin (no relation to the infamous Rasputin) hatched a plan to kill the Tsar. Ivan and his student conspirators, attempting to continue the tradition of turning Tsars into charred projectiles, experimented with bomb-making. The plot was uncovered, and they were all arrested.

Leo Tolstoy, then Russia’s best-known living author in the late 1800s, advocated for non-violence. He even wrote Alexander III to request that the Tsar’s assassins be pardoned. Alexander never pardoned them, but he seemed to have a soft spot for Tolstoy and ordered that the author be spared the eyes of police surveillance.

Under Nicholas II, Tolstoy’s immunity continued, even though he wrote about radical topics that the government opposed. Nicholas II occasionally had Tolstoy surveilled but never arrested. Of course, the government censored Tolstoy’s work. But Tolstoy outsmarted them by having his controversial writings printed by a Russian independent media outlet based outside Russia and distributed by revolutionaries.

Another familiar name here is Vladimir Lenin.

Lenin became a cop-magnet in 1893 when he joined a Marxist group and distributed propaganda to factory workers. Despite being on the government’s radar, Lenin was allowed to travel outside Russia in 1895. The authorities likely knew full well that Lenin smuggled illegal revolutionary literature into Russia.

Lenin wasn’t only well-read; he authored subversive works himself, like The Worker’s Cause in 1895 and The Development of Capitalism in Russia in 1899, the latter written while on what was essentially a vacation in Siberia. Exile in Tsarist times had more of a gradient—prison, hard labor, or, in some cases, a fairly comfortable life. It was nothing exile by Lenin or Stalin.

Lenin read Karl Marx’s Das Kapital, which had been available in Russian since 1872. Marxists weren’t on Nicholas’ naughty list yet because they weren’t using terror tactics and existing revolutionary movements were too fractured and fighting amongst themselves. Marxists flew under the radar for some time.

The early 1900s saw an escalation in the fracturing of revolutionary groups and further embracing of violence. One of the first Marxist groups that rose to prominence was the Russian Social-Democratic Labor Party, of which Lenin affiliated, and was the ancestor of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. The second group was the Socialist Revolutionary Party, created in 1902, and was more or less scrounged together with what was left of the People’s Will.

Both parties were clandestine in nature but maintained some legal activity in the Empire. One key difference between these two was the use of violence for political gain. The Social Revolutionaries were cool with it, but you may be surprised to find that Lenin’s Social Democrats were not. Another key difference was their view of the Russian peasants: Social Democrats focused their efforts on the urban factory worker while the Social Revolutionaries smelled ripe revolutionary fruit among the rural population. Both were left-wing in political leaning.

The Okhrana was wholly aware of both group’s methods and aims, but the 1905 Revolution lit a fire under their ass. The 1905 Revolution was the culmination of factory workers demanding better working conditions, peasants demanding land, educated Russians demanding reform, and dwindling support for Russia’s war with Japan. Losing that war further eroded the people’s confidence in Tsar Nicholas.

The spark that put people over the edge was Bloody Sunday when a peaceful protest was violently put down by the government and set a course for a two-year period of unrest without regime change.

Inside the government, six different people held the position of Minister of the Interior over a five-year period. Remember, the Minister of the Interior is the supreme law enforcement officer, and three of six were assassinated.

There was an innovative chief of the Okhrana, Sergey Zubatov. As a student, Zubatov was actually a revolutionary which apparently was not an uncommon path of a secret police agent. Upon becoming chief, he instituted modern policing techniques for the time such as fingerprinting, photography, improved detective techniques, and a general improvement of police professionalism. Zubatov also concentrated on developing provocation techniques. He said, “we will provoke you into acts of terror and then crush you.” Provocation wasn’t new to either the Third Section or the Okhrana, but Zubatov’s main contribution was false organizations. Specifically trade unions that were actually controlled by the Okhrana.

Russia’s economic expansion in the 1890s spurred industrialization in urban areas. With industrialization came appalling working conditions. Factory workers had been demanding better working conditions from the government for a while, but the government just left them on read. Workers staged strikes, and in the environment of heightened revolutionary and terrorist activity, the Okhrana figured it was only a matter of time before factory workers drifted towards extremism.

Zubatov reasoned that worker strikes probably had more to do with material well-being than regime change, so he supported factory workers in their cause; however, the Okhrana quietly set up the Moscow Mechanical Productions Workers’ Mutual Aid Society -- an Okhrana controlled trade union. Zubatov provided a moderate, non-violent organization as an option for factory workers to voice their demands for better conditions. This kept workers from joining more violent groups to kill government officials and enabled the Okhrana to monitor the laborers.

I couldn’t help but wonder if the US government knew about and viewed fake Okhrana-backed unions as a vulnerability. In the United States, near the turn of 20^th Century, Industrialists and the US government were concerned about unionization in the industrial workforce and went to great lengths to prevent the establishment of labor unions. If you’ve ever read Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, you know what I’m talking about. Legitimately terrible working conditions that drove workers to demand better pay, more power and representation through trade unions. I can’t help but wonder if the US government knew about Okhrana organizations and colluded with American industrialists to squash unions because it was either assumed or indeed true that the Okhrana was working on US soil. That’s just me speculating! I have no evidence to indicate if this is true or false.

In Moscow, roughly 50,000 workers joined the Okhrana-controlled union in a procession led by Moscow’s Governor-General Dimitri Trepov, son of Fyodor Trepov, on a march to Alexander II’s monument at the Kremlin on the anniversary of the serfs’ emancipation. For the factory workers this was a symbolic act but the Okhrana had no intention of imploring the government to improve working conditions.

The Okhrana felt as if they had the industrial workforce on a short leash, but with students it was a different story. A student protest in St. Petersburg University was violently stamped out quite literally because mounted police charged at and lashed students with whips. In return, students staged a nationwide university strike. The authorities responded with an automatic military draft for students caught protesting. In retaliation, an ex-student named Karpovich shot and killed the Education Minister, Bogolepov.

In April 1902, the first of the six Interior Ministers was knocked off by another student assassin. What did they teach at those Russian schools?

The assassin, Stepan Balmashov, disguised himself as an assistant and requested an audience with then Interior Minister Sipyagin. Balmashov apparently approached Sipyagin and handed him a “sentence of execution” before pulling out a gun and blasting Sipyagin into the past tense.

The next clay pigeon Minister who took Sipyagin’s place was Vyacheslav von Pleve who tended to lump both moderate and extremist groups into one big terror soup. To von Pleve, they were all the same and he fought both with equal prejudice. 

It turned out Balmashov was part of a group underneath the Socialist Revolutionaries called the Fighting Organization, founded and led by Grigory Gershuni, which was regarded as an especially dangerous group. Despite the Okhrana’s failure to prevent the Education Minister’s death, chief Zubatov was at the height of his career. He expanded the Okhrana’s use of false organizations into southern Russia to help Jewish workers gain equal rights. Workers injured in factories sometimes could not receive compensation until the Okhrana intervened.

These false unions were, however, Zubatov’s undoing when a police-provoked worker’s movement got out of control and worker’s strikes spread across southern Russia, and the regular police intervened. For this mistake, Zubatov was discredited, removed from his position, and placed under police supervision. Zubatov lived until 1917 when he killed himself upon hearing that Nicholas II abdicated the throne.

Okhrana agents (Real & Imagined . . . maybe)

Yevno Azef was born in 1869 and grew up in an impoverished Jewish household. He entered secret police work as a spy. In 1892 he put himself through school in Germany and studied electrical engineering paid for by the police since he was also reporting on fellow students who he could expose as suspected revolutionaries. He was called to Moscow in 1899 and placed among the ranks of police provocateurs by Zubatov himself.

Azef then joined the Moscow detachment of the Socialist Revolutionaries. He persuaded his new friends to move their illegal printing press from Finland to Siberia. He carefully plotted for a few members to be arrested while transporting the machine. He did this while concealing his true identity as an Okhrana agent. He also helped found the Fighting Organization along with their leader, Grigory Gershuni. When Gershuni was arrested, Azef assumed leadership of the Fighting Organization.

Azef was highly successful at being a double agent. He earned frequent and generous pay increases from 50 to 500 rubles a month. It might not seem like much but essentially he enjoyed unprecedented compensation for his work which, on top of his pay, included bonuses and exorbitant expenses on the Okhrana’s dime. Azef also looked like a mob boss, like Russian Al Capone. I would not want to be on this dude’s bad side.

The money Azef made justified fanning political terror in his mind. Several Okhrana agents provoked their way into earning fat stacks of cash. He enjoyed money—probably a bit too much. He spent nights at the most expensive brothel in Moscow. In addition to income from the Okhrana, he collected donations from wealthy elites and staged armed robberies for the Socialist Revolutionaries, which he treated like a personal expense account.

Azef was a master at being two-faced: he fed the Okhrana just enough to keep them happy, but not enough to kill the cash cow that was the Socialist Revolutionary Party. The Party eventually caught on to his deceit, but he still remained a revered figure among his comrades. For Azef, the line between Okhrana agent and revolutionary became blurred.

The Fighting Organization wanted to assassinate Interior Minister Vyacheslav von Pleve, who was essentially Azef’s boss; however, fracturing of the group created competition. Azef found himself in competition with part of the group in another region led by Sophia Klichoglu. She made the mistake of bypassing Azef in the assassination plot, so he exposed her to the Okhrana and she was arrested. An assassin named Igor Sazonov, acting on Azef’s orders, threw a bomb at Pleve’s carriage, sending Pleve to the Almighty in pieces.

Azef had a lot of contempt for Pleve, since he was responsible for a particularly nasty anti-Jewish pogrom. Azef, being Jewish, obviously took offense to this, but the Okhrana as an organization had complicated relations with Russia’s Jewish population. Anti-Jewish pogroms continued under Tsar Nicholas II. Fiddler on the Roof takes place during this time in a rural part of Ukraine. Sadly, anti-Semitism was rife in the Russian Empire. The government found Jews to be a convenient scapegoat to divert blame from Nicholas II’s incompetence. Pogroms were encouraged by the Okhrana and other police.

It’s rumored that The Protocols of the Elders of Zion—a piece of hate-literature detailing a supposed Jewish plan for world domination—was allegedly authored by Okhrana’s Foreign Agency chief, Peter Rachkovsky, though this is unconfirmed. Regardless of who wrote it, this book contributed to the spread of anti-Semitism worldwide, including in the United States.

Another suspected Okhrana agent was Joseph Stalin, then known as Joseph Jugashvili. According to Stalin biographer Stephen Kotkin, Stalin was accused of being an Okhrana agent, but the accusations have never been proven true.

One source claimed that there was a letter written by a high-ranking Okhrana officer, stating that Stalin infiltrated Lenin’s Social Democratic Labor Party but cut ties with the secret police when he was elected to the Bolshevik Central Committee.

Stalin, ever the shrewd tactician, was ambitious and likely more concerned with obtaining power and self-preservation. We’ve seen examples of Okhrana agents getting into positions of power, both within the police and in revolutionary movements. Men like Azef were promoted and rewarded handsomely for their work.

It’s hard to believe Stalin remained completely out of the Okhrana’s service. It would’ve been convenient for him to use the Okhrana’s skill in advancing agents to power, denouncing competitors, and sending them to Siberia. Some degree of Okhrana collusion would’ve been unavoidable for a young revolutionary like Stalin.

Not only does a motive exist but the logistics of Stalin’s conduct across the Russian Empire raise questions. In his revolutionary endeavors, Stalin passed through police checkpoints untouched despite being a wanted man. His prison sentences and exile to Siberia were relatively mild compared to the hard labor others endured, and Stalin evaded Okhrana custody at will.

There’s no concrete evidence proving Stalin was an Okhrana agent. One reason could be the obvious: that he wasn’t an Okhrana agent. Another is that Stalin did his best to erase his past. Biographers note that people who knew him intimately in his early life were executed after being forced to sign documents stating that anything they thought they knew about him was untrue.

To further confuse things, Stalin’s government, successive Soviet governments, and even the Russian Federation have rewritten narratives about him to carefully shape his place in history. If documents proving Stalin was an Okhrana agent ever existed, they’ve likely been destroyed. Whatever the truth, it’s been suggested that “for the Okhrana and Stalin not to have made use of each other’s services would have been as much out of character for the organization as for the man.”

Another agent was Father George Gapon. He was a Russian Orthodox priest who set up an Okhrana-backed workers' union called the Assembly of Russian Working Men in St. Petersburg. On January 9, 1905, Gapon led a crowd of tens of thousands of workers on a march through St. Petersburg. He and the crowd converged on the Winter Palace, where he intended to personally hand Tsar Nicholas II a petition to improve working conditions.

Gapon had the petition, but Nicholas had left the Winter Palace the day before, leaving behind troops to stop the march. The situation escalated into a massacre: the Tsar’s troops opened fire on the peaceful demonstration. It’s estimated that at least a thousand were killed, with many more wounded. Some of the victims were police officers just doing crowd control. That day became Bloody Sunday—the spark that led to the 1905 Revolution.

Gapon escaped, thanks to a small protection unit sent by the Socialist Revolutionaries. They threw him to the ground when the shooting started, then helped him escape by cutting his beard and disguising him. Gapon fled abroad, where he did very priestly things like gambling, having love affairs, and taking pride in his revolutionary leadership. Father Gapon eventually returned to Russia and was murdered by one of the men who had protected him during the Bloody Sunday massacre after they discovered he was an Okhrana agent.

This symbiotic relationship between the Okhrana and revolutionaries is fascinating. In some cases, it seems like the Okhrana was working against the Tsar.

The next Interior Minister was Svyatoplik-Mirsky, but he resigned after the events of Bloody Sunday. Alexander Bulygin then took the position.

The Okhrana took a new leader, Lieutenant-General Alexander Gerasimov -- not to be confused with the Soviet painter Alexander Gerasimov—I checked . . . it’s not the same person.

Bloody Sunday and the following 1905 Revolution forced Nicholas II to shift his approach to government. In October 1905, Nicholas renounced his belief in autocracy and announced the formation of a sort of Russian parliament, the State Duma, with representatives elected by the population and with limited authority.

That same month, the St. Petersburg Soviet formed under the leadership of Leon Trotsky. The Soviets acted as an alternative government and even raised their own police force, which often clashed with the official police.

On one occasion, two members of the St. Petersburg Soviet visited the Okhrana office and tricked an assistant into letting them explore the building. These two likely broke into Gerasimov’s office and went through his papers.

Two things became clear: 1) Gerasimov should’ve had those papers password-protected, and 2) the Okhrana felt they were losing control. Some agents went on strike, others feared for their lives and jobs, and the creation of the State Duma threatened the Okhrana’s authority and existence.

Other cracks in the Okhrana’s professionalism showed such as agents carelessly revealing their true identities to their revolutionary comrades. Gerasimov did what he could to perfect tactics developed by Zubatov. He maintained around 150 spies inside opposing groups, including the Socialist Revolutionaries, both the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks, and anarchist groups.

In 1906, a breakaway group formed out of the Socialist Revolutionaries called the Maximalists. Their goal was to employ terrorism, kill officials without a specific plan, and spread chaos. In August 1906, the Maximalists blew up the home of Interior Minister Pyotr Stolypin. Stolypin wasn’t home and even survived several other assassination attempts involving homemade explosives.

The government struggled to contain revolutionary violence. The Imperial judicial system started executing political criminals on a scale not seen under a Tsarist regime for some time. For example, prosecuting political offenders in military courts hadn’t been done since 1878. The Field Courts Martial handed down over 1,000 sentences of execution between 1906 and 1907, often times within 24 hours. Those condemned were shot or hanged.

Field Courts Martial were spread across the empire, with the most active in Warsaw, Poland, and Riga, Latvia, where 59 and 57 executions occurred, respectively.

Those condemned to death in St. Petersburg were shipped down the Neva River to Kronstadt Island, where they were hanged on mobile gallows. Some facilities were built specifically for firing squads. Between 1907 and 1909, the Military District Courts executed roughly 5,000 people and condemned tens of thousands to imprisonment or exile in Siberia.

This was the closest the Tsar came to a reign of terror. The government even had Cossack riot squadrons enforce the law on the Tsar’s behalf who were often compared to Ivan the Terrible’s horse-riding Oprichniki.

Nicholas II was no Stalin – to draw a comparison. For one, Nicholas’s body count was in the thousands, while Stalin’s is measured in millions. The Tsarist government, and the Okhrana, found themselves reacting to revolutionary attacks rather than preventing them as they had done in the past. One could argue that the Okhrana’s proactive strategy of embedding themselves with revolutionaries was like playing with a fire that, once out of control, they were powerless to extinguish.

End of the Romanov Dynasty and the Okhrana

In my opinion, the Okhrana contributed to the collapse of the Tsarist government by assisting revolutionaries too much. They walked a fine line between fanning the flames of revolution and preserving the government, which was clearly a conflict of interest. The Okhrana was skilled in infiltrating revolutionaries, but the revolutionaries adapted to their tactics and could identify the cops in their midst.

For example, Vladimir Burtsev specialized in exposing Okhrana agents. He outed the dreaded Yevno Azef, forcing him to escape abroad using false documents. Azef gained some notoriety abroad, dabbled in trading stocks, and opened a corset shop in Berlin. I’ll say he looked more like an arms dealer than a corset connoisseur. Azef was eventually arrested by the German police and died shortly after his release from prison in 1918.

Political assassinations decreased after Azef was ousted, but ministers were still at risk. In 1911, Interior Minister Pyotr Stolypin attended a gala at the Kiev Opera House with Tsar Nicholas and his family in the Tsar’s private suite. Dmitry Bogrov, a young Okhrana agent, approached Stolypin and shot him dead.

The motive for Bogrov’s killing of Stolypin remains unclear. Bogrov, who was Jewish, might’ve killed Stolypin over anti-Jewish pogroms. Bogrov, like Azef, was skilled at playing the double role of Okhrana agent and revolutionary. The irony is that Stolypin fostered a police apparatus that ultimately killed him, just like the other dead ministers.

Predictably, the Okhrana cozied up to the Bolsheviks. Why? The Bolsheviks were relatively benign compared to other violent movements. They didn’t view the Bolsheviks as a serious threat to the Tsar’s power. And their eccentric leader, Vladimir Lenin, seemed too odd to resonate with the common Russian. In fact, the Okhrana saw Lenin as weakening the revolutionary movement because Lenin was kind of an arrogant jerk. He refused to work with other revolutionary groups to crush their common enemy and desired a Bolshevik coalition loyal only to him.

The Okhrana kept tabs on Lenin through their spy, Roman Malinovsky, whose skill may have surpassed even Azef’s. Malinovsky, a criminal turned Okhrana agent, rose to secretary of a trade union in St. Petersburg. He presented himself as a Social Democrat and infiltrated both the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks. Malinovsky ran for the Fourth State Duma on the Bolshevik side, financed by the Okhrana. He became a Social Democrat deputy and gained a leadership position in the Bolshevik party.

Malinovsky was a great speaker, and once addressed the Duma about a joint venture between the Social Democrats, the Bolsheviks, and the Mensheviks, which only fueled the rivalry between the parties. He was well-rewarded for his work, increasing his stipend from 50 to 700 rubles per month. This was worth the Okhrana’s investment because Malinovsky collected personal information on Lenin. Both the Okhrana and the Bolsheviks trusted him, allowing him to seamlessly move between the two worlds.

Malinovsky became treasurer of the Bolsheviks’ main publication, Pravda (Russian for "truth"). Stalin, the editor, worked with Malinovsky, who used Okhrana funds to finance Pravda. At one point, Lenin was dissatisfied with Pravda’s direction, so he sent comrades Sverdlov and Stalin to St. Petersburg to correct things. Malinovsky informed the Okhrana of their travels, and they were arrested and exiled to Siberia. Malinovsky 1, Sverdlov and Stalin 0 . . . for now. . . remember the rumors about Stalin’s connection to the Okhrana.

Malinovsky’s career ended abruptly in 1914 when the Interior Minister ordered him to resign. His activities were feared to be coming to light, which meant an impending scandal. Some Bolsheviks were already suspicious, but Lenin maintained that Malinovsky was not a spy.  After the Bolsheviks took power in 1917, Okhrana files uncovered confirmed that Malinovsky was indeed an agent.

One group we haven’t talked about much yet is the Russian armed forces. The Okhrana infiltrated their ranks because the military was the government’s most effective weapon against revolutionary subversion. The secret police set up spy networks to monitor the military’s political reliability. Interior Minister Vladimir Dzhunkovsky later banned police espionage in the military, depriving the Okhrana of a valuable ally and information source.

When war with Germany began in 1914, the Okhrana’s mission shifted away from domestic surveillance and toward supporting Russia’s war effort. They engaged in counterespionage against German spies. Due to the war, St. Petersburg was renamed Petrograd to sound less German.

A quick note about Interior Minister Dzhunkovsky: he was arrested during Stalin’s purges in 1937 and executed at the Butovo Firing Range in 1938. Over 20,000 people were executed and buried there, including Tsarist leftovers, landowners, and even some foreigners. Today, Butovo Firing Range is a memorial to the victims of Stalin’s purges. Looking at photos, there’s a long mound of grass marking the mass grave, and the memorial itself resembles the Vietnam War Memorial with the names of the dead carved into reflective stone.

War with Germany briefly relieved the Okhrana from dealing with revolutionaries. War stirred Russian patriotism, and people rallied around Nicholas II—even some revolutionaries. To the Russians, the only thing worse than a Tsar were the Germans.

However, the Germans realized that supporting revolutionaries would weaken Russia’s war effort, so they quietly helped revolutionaries topple the Tsar.

Meanwhile, in Petrograd, Nicholas II and his wife, Alexandra, had four daughters before finally having a son, Tsarevich Alexei. But Alexei inherited hemophilia, a disease that prevented his blood from clotting properly, making even small injuries potentially fatal. Instead of doing rough-and-tumble boy stuff, Alexei had to be careful. A simple fall could kill him, but the Russian people were unaware the heir to the throne was sick.

Rasputin

Nicholas and Alexandra were desperate for a cure or better treatment. Enter Rasputin, a drunken, smelly, Siberian peasant with alleged mystical powers. Rasputin impressed Nicholas by seemingly reducing the severity of Alexei’s condition. How? Likely by taking away his doctor-prescribed aspirin, a blood thinner that worsened hemophilia. Rasputin quickly got close to the Romanovs, raising suspicion from all sides. The Okhrana began surveilling Rasputin, keeping tabs on his servants, his comings and goings, and those who sought his audience.

In 1915, Rasputin allegedly exposed himself during a meal at a restaurant and bragged about sleeping with Tsarina Alexandra. The Okhrana reported this to Nicholas, and the Okhrana’s director was reassigned. The worse Rasputin behaved, the more it angered the Imperial staff. Rumors of Rasputin’s affairs with Alexandra abounded, especially since Nicholas was often away commanding the Russian army at the front. These rumors did nothing to help the Romanovs’ crumbling reputation.

Let’s discuss Rasputin’s infamous reputation, including some rather bizarre legends.

It’s said that Rasputin’s penis is preserved in a jar of formaldehyde at St. Petersburg’s Erotica Museum; however, it may not actually be his wizarding wand. According to an article in Cult of Weird, one of the first objects thought to be Rasputin’s penis turned out to be a sea cucumber. Today, a 12-inch phallus in a jar resides in the museum, bought by the museum’s owner, Dr. Igor Knyazkin in 2000, for $8,000—over $13,000 in 2022 dollars.

Would you spend $13,000 on a pickled pecker?

The story gets even crazier, but it’s important to note that what you’re about to read is more legend than fact. In the 1920s, Rasputin’s daughter, Maria, reportedly discovered a group of women in Paris who worshipped Rasputin’s penis, believing it could cure impotence. They even handed out pieces of it. Gross, right? Supposedly, Rasputin’s penis was cut off by one of Rasputin’s assassins, Felix Yusupov, who took it to France where it was worshipped by this bizarre cult. Eventually, it ended up in the Erotica Museum.

However, Dmitry Kosorotov, the man who performed Rasputin’s autopsy, noted that Rasputin’s genitals were intact. So, the story remains speculative at best. Dr. Knyazkin says he’s “99 percent sure it’s real,” which is probably what you tell yourself after spending thousands of dollars on a mystery object. If it’s not Rasputin’s penis, whose is it?

Was Rasputin an Okhrana agent? Probably not, but maybe he should’ve been, because he certainly contributed to the fall of the Tsarist monarchy.

Bolshevik Revolution

In March 1917, after several days of rioting in Petrograd, Tsar Nicholas II abdicated the throne, ending over 300 years of Romanov rule, starting with Michael Romanov at the end of the Time of Troubles.

Power shifted to the Provisional Government, which appointed new ministers from the State Duma. This effectively marked the end of the Okhrana. The Petrograd Soviet demanded the Okhrana be disbanded. Telegrams were sent to agents in and outside Russia, announcing their dissolution, and the news was reported in the papers. Just like that, the Okhrana and the Gendarmes disappeared overnight.

Former agents tried to hide their ties to the Tsar’s secret police, going underground or abroad. Some stayed and fought in the Russian Civil War on the pro-Tsarist side, known as the Whites. Many who were arrested were shot by the secret police force we’ll cover in Part 3—the Cheka.

The Provisional Government set up a Commission to evaluate the effectiveness of the Okhrana. The Commission uncovered scandals and mishaps associated with Azef, Bogrov, and Malinovsky, particularly the murder of Okhrana chief Colonel Karpov, who was blown up in his own apartment by an explosive placed by a man Karpov had released from prison to become an Okhrana agent.

The Commission also looked into agent provocateurs. Various police chiefs insisted their undercover agents provided political intelligence, not revolutionary support. However, former Okhrana agents told a different story. Many had to actively participate in revolutionary activities to remain believable. None could be passive observers. Some agents took part in assassinations, led workers' strikes, or incited revolutionary fervor. Since they were paid bonuses for busting printing presses, some agents even set up their own illegal printing presses using police money, busted the press, and collected a profit.

The Commission concluded that the Okhrana completely undermined itself and the government it was supposed to protect. When asked how else the Okhrana combated revolutionary groups besides infiltration, the chiefs had no answers.

Other spy tactics included going through mail, as we discussed with the Third Section. The Okhrana had special machines to open envelopes, replace seals, and wash out invisible ink. Revolutionaries sometimes used codes in their letters, so Okhrana cryptographer Ivan Zybin developed methods to encrypt police communications using ciphers based on biblical scripture or love letters.

The Commission gathered interesting confessions from former agents. One agent kept insisting that his wife and children were destitute, but the Commission discovered that, through various extortion campaigns, he had become a multimillionaire. Former chief Gerasimov told the Commission, “when I left the service, I changed completely and saw that in serving the system, I had committed a crime. I am ashamed at having worked there and recently I’ve almost become a revolutionary myself.” Gerasimov later moved abroad and published memoirs with no such statements of regret.

The Okhrana was replaced by a light police force called the Counter-Espionage Bureau of the Petrograd Military District, headed by Colonel Nikitin, which focused on military counterintelligence. The Bureau couldn’t distinguish between German espionage and Russian revolutionary groups, since the Germans were financing Russian revolutionaries to weaken the Provisional Government. Even when Nikitin uncovered German spies, revolutionary mobs often freed them from prison, convincing him that Germany was actively undermining the Provisional Government.

Ultimately, military counterespionage did little to stop Lenin and the Bolsheviks from taking over Petrograd in October 1917 and establishing the Soviet Union.

Agents Dismissed.

Source:

The Russian Secret Police. Ronald Hingley. 1970.

Stalin: Paradoxes of Power. Stephen Kotkin. 2014

Fyodor I

https://www.britannica.com/biography/Fyodor-I

Boris Godunov

https://www.britannica.com/biography/Boris-Godunov-tsar-of-Russia

American home square footage

https://www.statista.com/statistics/456925/median-size-of-single-family-home-usa

Lee, Eric (1993-06-01). "The Eremin letter: Documentary proof that Stalin was an Okhrana spy?". Revolutionary Russia. 6 (1): 55–96. doi:10.1080/09546549308575595. ISSN 0954-6545.

Butovo Memorial

https://coldwarsites.net/country/russia/butovo-execution-and-burial-site-moscow/

Rasputin’s Twig ‘n Berries

https://www.cultofweird.com/curiosities/rasputin-penis/

Inflation Calculator

https://www.bls.gov/data/inflation_calculator.htm

Original script by me, Jack Johannessen. Edits were made with the help of ChatGPT to make it read more like non-fiction than spoken word format.