Adrian Lee is a solicitor-advocate in London, specialising in criminal defence, and was twice a Conservative parliamentary candidate.
During the Cold War, curious Conservatives could find a wealth of information on Soviet subversion tactics in the West. Authors like John Barron (“K.G.B.: The Secret Work of Soviet Secret Agents” (1974), “K.G.B. Today: The Hidden Hand” (1983)), Harry Rositzke (“K.G.B. – The Eyes of Russia” (1983)) and Brian Freemantle (“K.G.B. – Inside the World’s Largest Intelligence Network” (1982)) sold their books in large quantities. All of them were distributed by reputable publishing houses and were available from high street bookshops. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the trend continued with the two volume Mitrokhin Archive by Christopher Andrew and Vasili Mitrokhin.
However, most of these studies did not examine the story of Russian espionage before the Bolshevik regime. The story always seemed to start with Felix Edmundovich Dzerzhinsky and the establishment of the Cheka. Whilst it is true that the totalitarian nature of the Communist state made the Soviet secret services far more repressive and thorough in their methods, it is a mistake to think that the Cheka was formed in a historic vacuum.
The first modern Russian intelligence organisation, the Secret Prikaz, was established in 1654 and was succeeded by the Prebrazhensky Prikaz in 1686, then the Secret Chancellery in 1731, the Secret Expedition in 1762, the Third Section of His Imperial Majesty’s Own Chancellery in 1862 and finally in 1881 the Department of Protection of Public Safety and Order, better known as the Okhrana (literally meaning “The Guard”). Spying, surveillance, promoting regime propaganda and the brutal suppression of dissent has been a feature of the Russian Empire since its inception. The result of this is that covert action by the state, including employing agents of influence overseas, has seeped into the Russian psyche far deeper than in most other nations.
The Okhrana, the final manifestation of Tsarist intelligence, provides arguably the most fascinating example of Russian methods in the pre-Bolshevik era. Formed in the wake of the assassination of Alexander II in March 1881, the Okhrana was far more extensive and thorough than any predecessor. Its immediate predecessor, the Third Section, had failed to protect the Tsar and the government believed that it was ill-prepared to deal with modern terrorist organisations. They also realised that they now faced an ideological threat from those wishing to bring about violent revolution.
Initially, the Okhrana was formed around three “Security Sections” in St. Petersburg, Moscow and Warsaw. Eventually, secret Police stations and offices were established throughout the Russian Empire and in August 1881, a new security law was passed permitting political investigations and the exile of opponents to Siberia without trial. In 1897, a “Special Section” was created to centrally direct the whole organisation. This body handled the most important infiltrators and informants and centralised intelligence gathering. Despite all of this, most Russians knew little about it until after 1917.
A network of Okhrana spies was also established in the capitals of the most influential foreign states. Ostensibly, this was to keep an eye on revolutionary Russian emigres’ activities. However, they would not hesitate to plot assassinations and covert operations overseas. The most notorious of these tactics was committing terrorist offences in foreign states and blaming them on the exiles. The aim was to antagonise the host country to expel the anti-Tsarists and hopefully repatriate them to Russia where they could be suitably dealt by the home authorities. By 1900, Scotland Yard concluded that it was difficult to conceive of any criminal activity by Russians in London that was not political in nature.
At home, the Okhrana infiltrated the ranks of their opponents and sometimes, ironically, ended up funding the activities of the very people that they sought to undermine. For example, Georgy Sudeykin from the St. Petersburg office provided in 1882 a printing press to “People’s Will”, the late nineteenth century socialist-anarchist terrorist organisation responsible for the murder of Alexander II. The belief was that by gaining the revolutionaries confidence, the Okhrana could lead them astray and generally undermine them from within. However, this was not always a successful tactic, and the Tsars became increasingly angry when discovering that their relatives had been assassinated by people funded by the state. The Okhrana had a habit of often tying itself into knots.
Between 1906 and 1910, over 10,000 Tsarist officials ranging from the Sub-Postmasters to Cabinet Ministers, were murdered by revolutionaries. The surest way of combating this trend was to have well placed agents inside the revolutionary network. At its peak, the Okhrana’s double agent network included Jacob Zhitomirsky, an early leading light in the Bolshevik Party and a personal confidant of Lenin, Yevno Azef, an assassin employed by the Socialist Revolutionary Party and, most infamously, Roman Malinovsky, another associate of Lenin who discouraged his leader from reuniting the Russian Social Democrats by healing the rift with the Mensheviks. Malinovsky went onto become a member of the Duma, where he led the Bolshevik Group. Exposed after the October Revolution, he was executed by firing squad the following month.
Okhrana double agents led schizophrenic lives. One such person later wrote “I knew I would have to live an eternally divided life and I would not be able to distinguish lies from truth”. Frequently such a lifestyle played havoc with a double-agent’s sanity. The most notorious case was that of Dimitri Bogrov, who assassinated the Russian Prime Minister, Petr Stolypin, by shooting him during a performance at the Kyiv Opera House in 1911. On that occasion, he acted as the dedicated revolutionary, but he had also worked as a paid Okhrana agent and had betrayed many of his fellow conspirators.
To detract potential recruits from joining revolutionary trades unions, the Okhrana established their own unions. This phenomenon was known as “police socialism”. The enterprise started off well, but eventually the Okhrana sponsored trades unions started becoming more militant, resulting in 1903 with the Odessa region union calling a strike and successfully bringing the city to a standstill. Another state-sponsored union, the Assembly of Working Men, started the 1905 Revolution and the Bloody Sunday massacre.
Probably the Okhrana’s most famous operative was Pyotr Ivanovich Rachkovsky, who rose through the ranks to become its Chief. Rachkovsky was originally based in the organisation’s Foreign Agency office in Paris and developed an extensive network of penetration agents in left-wing parties across Europe and North America. He has been accused by certain historians of devising schemes for terrorist activities and then passing these plans onto the revolutionaries. If they committed the heinous act in question, Rachkovsky could persuade the Tsar more convincingly that his government needed to fund the Agency more generously.
The Okhrana was, for its time, one of the most sophisticated spy organisations in the world. It was led by highly educated officers, skilled in developing propaganda and misinformation. It embraced technology by pioneering listening devises and developing bulletproof vests. It built a formidable cryptography department and employed staff proficient in multiple foreign languages. It also maintained a continuously updated card file index containing over a million names of subversives and revolutionaries.
Up until the outbreak of the Great War in July 1914, the Okhrana was regarded as a highly successful spying organisation. Terrorist violence had significantly declined throughout the Russian Empire and the principal revolutionary organisations had been forced either underground or into exile. Furthermore, the ranks of these groups were often bitterly divided due to Okhrana infiltrators. With the coming of war, the Okhrana was directed away from these activities, towards protecting borders and producing morale boosting propaganda for the general public. Spies were increasing focused on issues like the loyalty of the Volga Germans and the Muslims in the Caucasus region (rumoured to be sympathetic to Turkey). By 1917, army mutinies and food shortages in the Russian cities could no longer be held back by the Okhrana.
Probably the Okhrana’s longest lasting legacy is the publication of a scurrilous forged document entitled “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion”, which is remembered as the most notorious Anti-Semitic tract in history. The lies that it perpetuated fuelled the Nazi movement in Germany and was later distributed throughout the countries of the Middle East.
Today, the Okhrana is somewhat overlooked and forgotten. However, in these troubling times it is worth remembering that Russian espionage predates the K.G.B. and Putin’s F.S.B. It is in the DNA of the Russian state.
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