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Tsarist Secret Police in Revolutionary Russia

Дата публикации: 04 сентября 2007
Публикатор: Научная библиотека Порталус
Рубрика: RUSSIA (TOPICS) - Imperial Russia →
Источник: (c) http://russia.by
Номер публикации: №1188914572


Was the Okhrana, tsarist secret police, effective?

Viewpoint: Yes. The tsarist secret police fulfilled its mission by observing suspects, detaining conspirators, infiltrating revolutionary organizations, and gathering information.

Viewpoint: No. The tsarist secret police failed to carry out its duties because of bureaucratic rivalry, frequent changes in leadership, poor morale, and inaccurate intelligence.

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This chapter debates the effectiveness of the tsarist secret police, the Okhrana. As an authoritarian government, the tsarist state employed political police to monitor opinion, investigate revolutionary groups, follow suspicious and disloyal suspects, and generally prop up the regime through police work.
The more conventional view of the secret police is that it was grossly inefficient. Unable to stop the revolution of 1917 or seize the leading revolutionary figures who led it, it appears the epitome of ineptitude. In the sense that it could not stop the revolution, it failed. Yet, on the other hand, the tsarist secret police was so limited in function and power--itself an attribute of declining autocracy in Imperial Russia--that it was not designed to stop revolution. In any event, it successfully broke up or destroyed conspiratorial circles, arrested revolutionary leaders, forced political opponents into long periods of foreign exile, and infiltrated underground groups operating within Russia. The major traumas of 1917, moreover, took place after the Okhrana's abolition by the Provisional Government.



Viewpoint: Yes. The tsarist secret police fulfilled its mission by observing suspects, detaining conspirators, infiltrating revolutionary organizations, and gathering information.

The success of revolution in 1917 has suggested that the tsarist secret police, the Okhrana, was ineffective and incompetent. Could an effective secret police have allowed the proliferation of revolutionary movements, the persistence of labor unrest, the collapse of the monarchy in March 1917, or the Bolshevik takeover later in the year? The implicit argument here, however, ignores a fundamental fact about the secret police: its mission was never designed to penetrate society to the point where it could forestall massive social revolution, or to be so pervasive and wide-ranging in its powers. It was, in short, not much of a precursor to the vast secret police apparatus founded by the Bolsheviks after the revolution.

To begin with, no police force as small as the Okhrana, even one devoted to politics, could have stopped the revolutionary transformation of Russia in 1917. Much of that collapse was due to the strains and tribulations of World War I, something the secret police could obviously do nothing about. It could not stop military personnel from becoming disaffected, its job was not to keep the domestic infrastructure running much more smoothly than it did and needed to, and it had no control at all over the generals and politicians who urged Nicholas II to abdicate in favor of the Provisional Government in 1917. Since the Provisional Government promptly abolished the Okhrana and other tsarist security organs, they were obviously not there to stem the revolutionary tide or the growth of revolutionary parties that swept over the country later that year. Blaming it for failing to stop Bolshevik victory is like blaming an open field for not stopping a forest fire.

The Okhrana enjoyed some extraordinary successes in its limited mission. It dutifully collected information on the regime's political opponents, insofar as was permitted by the laws of the Russian Empire, and disrupted most of the Empire's revolutionary operations. After the assassination of Alexander II in 1881, it quickly rounded up the dozens of conspirators who helped facilitate and carry out the plot. Virtually all were in jail within two years. Over the course of the 1880s its double agents successfully penetrated the People's Will, the Black Partition, and all other important revolutionary formations, virtually destroying them as meaningful influences in Russian political life. Almost every important Russian radical spent time in prison or exile. As research has revealed, the Okhrana also closely monitored their activities both outside of Russia and in its prisons. In 1898 agents quickly arrested the delegates to the first meeting of the Russian Social Democratic Workers' Party (RSDWP), the Empire's main Marxist formation, almost immediately after they convened in Minsk, and effectively drove the Party's activities beyond Russia's borders for most of the next twenty years. Even the Minsk meeting had only limited significance, for Vladimir Lenin, Iulii Martov, and several other prominent socialists were already in prison or Siberian exile when it took place, the victims of Okhrana dragnets. All of the RSDWP's important meetings before 1917, including the vital congress of 1903, at which the Bolshevik and Menshevik factions were formed, had to be held in Western Europe, while its domestic political activities remained clandestine, incoherent, and subject to near-constant harassment. Gregory Zinoviev, an important party leader, maintained that the Okhrana successfully infiltrated every local cell functioning in Russia. Many of its leaders served as double agents. Controversial evidence suggests that this category included Josef Djugashvili, who, under the alias Josef Stalin, led the Soviet Union for thirty years after Lenin's death. It also included Lenin's top lieutenant in Russia, Roman Malinovsky, who began working as a paid agent for the Okhrana in 1910. Promoted to the Bolshevik Central Committee after he started informing on his colleagues and named leader of the Bolshevik faction in the State Duma in 1912, he regularly betrayed the Social Democrats' goals, structures, plans, and meeting places. So successful were his operations that a formal party inquiry into rumors about his activities concluded that he was not an agent. It was only after the revolution that Malinovsky's work with the secret police became known. According to the historian George Leggett, the Okhrana knew about Bolshevik activities in such great detail that its internal documents form the most complete record of the party's early history.

Okhrana penetration of other sources of revolutionary opposition never ceased to be pronounced. In the last decades of tsarist government, it employed some twenty-six thousand informers, usually at a monthly rate of 100 rubles, or about four times the wage of an average industrial worker. The Socialist Revolutionary (SR) Party, a rival revolutionary organization of the Social Democrats, suffered because Yevno Azef, one of its founding leaders and the chief of its "fighting organization," a militant group that carried out assassinations and other revolutionary violence, was himself an Okhrana agent and had been since 1893, eight years before the founding of the SR Party. On two separate occasions before he was unmasked, Azef betrayed the entire apparatus under his command.

Russia's growing labor movement was another target for police infiltration. In the early twentieth century, under the leadership of Sergei Zubatov, himself a former revolutionary and police informant, the Okhrana established strong influence over several labor unions, which the police tried with mixed success to lure away from the revolutionary movement. Although some workers involved in these organizations participated in strikes, thus provoking Zubatov's official disgrace, the idea of reconciliation with the prevailing order lived on in the workers' movement. This development led to the ill-fated 9 January 1905 workers' march in Saint Petersburg, led by the Zubatovite priest Georgii Gapon. In a moment of confusion Russian army units fired on the march, but since the command to fire came from its commanders, the blame can hardly be put on the police, who were indirectly responsible for stimulating labor organization. The marchers were in any case singing hymns, reciting prayers, and bearing portraits of the tsar, hardly indications of the Okhrana's complete failure to co-opt their movement or transform its goals from intractable opposition to loyal appeals. During the national civil unrest that followed in 1905, moreover, the Okhrana penetrated every independent labor organization of political significance, collected voluminous information on disloyal subjects (systematizing them in a national database in 1906), and handily suppressed revolutionary institutions. These activities included the prompt arrest of most members of the Saint Petersburg soviet, a body elected among the city's factory workers in 1905, including its two chairman, Leon Trotsky and Georgii Khrustalev-Nosar, and the penetration and dissolution of several other radical organizations.

Although 1917 did not go nearly as well for the government, the absence of the tsarist secret police was certainly no asset. Indeed, before blaming the Okhrana for the collapse of the regime, it is more useful to note the powers it did not have. It could not arbitrarily assassinate opponents of the tsarist government at home or abroad. Its powers of arrest were rather limited. It had no judicial functions, and prosecutions made on the basis of its arrests or information gathering received due legal process in independent courts. Although there were violations of these limits, it fundamentally lacked the power, personnel, independence, or unaccountability that made the Soviet secret police murderous and unchallengeable. When the Okhrana focused on what it could do--observe suspects, detain conspirators, infiltrate revolutionary organizations, gather information, and so on--it did well.

-- Paul du Quenoy, American University in Cairo


Viewpoint: No. The tsarist secret police failed to carry out its duties because of bureaucratic rivalry, frequent changes in leadership, poor morale, and inaccurate intelligence.

After Tsar Alexander II's assassination in 1881, the Russian government reorganized its police department and added a new section of secret police. This new section, which became known as the Okhrana, was charged with ensuring the security of the state. It prosecuted--and, more importantly, attempted to prevent--crimes such as committing violence against state officials, smuggling arms, inciting strikes and rebellions against the state, and disseminating illegal revolutionary literature. The police had the power to follow suspected revolutionaries, open mail, conduct unrestricted searches, and keep individuals under arrest for up to two weeks, even when they were only suspected of planning a crime.

Jonathan Daly, George Leggett, and Iain Lauchlan are among the scholars who argue that the secret police succeeded in its duties because it had greatly weakened Russia's most significant revolutionary parties by 1917. Proponents of the opposing viewpoint embrace what Lauchlan calls the "Okhrana myth": that the police department's accomplishments came "at the expense of the moral credibility of the tsarist regime," and that its activities undermined popular support for the government it was supposed to be defending. The revolutionaries and Soviet writers who propagated this view obviously had an interest in undermining the imperial government's reputation, but the historical evidence has also convinced more-objective observers.

In the final analysis, the latter viewpoint, the "Okhrana myth," is closer to the truth. Both sides agree that the Okhrana's effectiveness waxed and waned in the years leading up to the revolution. Historian Donald J. Raleigh notes that the police generally enjoyed the upper hand over the revolutionaries in 1907-1910, 1914, and 1916, whereas in 1905-1907, 1910-1912, 1915, and 1917, revolutionaries controlled the flow of events. To judge the Okhrana's overall success, it is necessary to weigh its moments of success against its moments of failure. As one might guess from the number of years in which the police could only react to the revolutionary movement's activities, the failures ultimately outweigh the successes.

On the positive side, the police managed to gather and organize vast amounts of information on individual revolutionaries and the organizations those individuals participated in. They excelled at breaking the revolutionaries' codes. Using the information gathered from secret agents, informants, and intercepted mail, the police foiled several would-be assassins, captured smuggled weapons shipments, confiscated illegal printing presses and literature, and generally disrupted revolutionary activities. They arrested thousands of Socialist Revolutionaries and Social Democrats. As a result, many revolutionary leaders fled abroad and lost much of their influence over events in Russia, while some of the demoralized revolutionaries who remained imagined spies lurking around every corner. Nicholas II might have benefited from paying closer attention to police reports, which warned in 1914 that war posed a grave danger to the state, and in early 1917 that the country was close to revolution.

As the police themselves recognized, however, they failed in their primary duty: to prevent terrorist actions against the state. In December 1904, A. A. Lopukhin, then director of police, warned of trouble ahead: "For the past three years," he wrote in a memorandum, "six terrorist plots have been exposed, approximately seventy underground presses have been seized, numerous antigovernment circles have been smashed, yet the movement itself and its most dangerous, terrorist elements continue to grow intensively." Over the next six years, "terrorist" attacks killed more than 2,000; some historians place the number as high as 9,000. Sheila Fitzpatrick found that "in 1908, a comparatively quiet year, 1,800 officials were killed and 2,083 were wounded in politically motivated attacks." Among the most prominent victims of assassination were three ministers of the interior (D. S. Sipiagin in 1902, V. K. Plehve in 1904, and P. A. Stolypin, who also held the post of premier, in 1911), a minister of education (N. P. Bogolepov, 1901), and a grand duke (Sergei Aleksandrovich, 1905). The role of terror in the revolutionary movement did eventually decline, but as Maureen Perrie has argued, this shift most likely occurred because other tactics began to prove more useful, not because the police were able to discover and prevent more attacks.

This ineffectiveness continued even though the police focused mainly on stopping terrorism. In fact, the Okhrana's continual surveillance of political groups that had a history of violence may have further limited its effectiveness. It sometimes overlooked the activists whose attempts to revolutionize groups of workers and peasants were nonviolent but illegal. It also missed signs of impending trouble among the workers themselves; one internal memo complained that the massive and disruptive strikes of 1912 had taken the police completely by surprise.

Why did the secret police so often fail in its duties? For one thing, the police allowed the conflicts that pervaded the imperial bureaucracy to distract them from their work. Instead of cooperating, the regular police (known as the Corps of Gendarmes) and the secret police hid information from each other and impeded each other's investigations. Within the secret police, the top staff changed frequently, partly because of the department's lack of success in stemming the revolutionary tide and partly because of shifting rivalries at court. As a new director tried to tear down his predecessor's work, investigation and analysis gave way to paper shuffling and a flurry of orders that the next director would immediately rescind. Many lower-ranking officers also began to place ambition before duty. Some actually encouraged revolutionary activity so that they could later take credit for stopping it. Others, knowing that advancement could depend on finding and pleasing a patron, took every opportunity to show their blind loyalty.

Furthermore, while revolutionaries responded to a changing political climate with changing tactics, the Okhrana stuck to techniques more tried than true. It continued to rely on informants for much of its information even when the informants had little to offer them. One informant, who drew a salary from the police for almost two years, filed only a few reports and spent his time working to buy arms for revolutionaries. The police were aware of his activities but kept paying him in the hopes that he would tell them something important. Police chiefs were always complaining that their work was underfunded; yet, they continued to waste money on unhelpful informants. Occasionally, in their attempts to glean information from revolutionaries pretending to be informants, they ended up revealing more about their own work than they had intended to. Indeed, revolutionaries sometimes succeeded in infiltrating the police department.

More importantly, the Okhrana's approach to stopping antigovernment activities was closer to carpet bombing than to surgical strikes. The police used mass arrests, long prison terms, and occasional death sentences to destroy revolutionary organizations and frighten potential revolutionaries into good behavior. Such harsh tactics hardened the resolve of committed revolutionaries, who began to portray themselves as martyrs persecuted by an unjust state. The experience of arrest and imprisonment pushed some less-committed individuals more firmly into the revolutionary camp. Moreover, the Okhrana's choice of tactics increased the general population's hostility toward the government it represented and was supposed to protect.

The secret police's most controversial tactic was its use of provocation. Department protocol discouraged agents from "so-called provocation--i.e. taking part in criminal actions or leading other people to do this while playing a secondary role." At the same time, though, agents were "not to refrain from playing an active role in party work in order to secure their position" within the revolutionary groups they had infiltrated. In practice, agents often participated in illegal activities. Their involvement extended from publishing illegal literature (with department funds) to plotting assassinations. The Okhrana's most famous agent, Yevno Azev, worked within the Socialist Revolutionary Party for years. Historians have long thought that he had a significant role in at least three successful assassinations and one unsuccessful attempt to assassinate Nicholas II. Anna Geifman has argued that Azev was less involved in terrorism and more faithful to his Okhrana employers than previously believed. Nevertheless, his hands were not entirely clean. In employing agents like Azev, the police knowingly participated in deception and encouraged illegal activity.

The fact that they did so in order to prevent future illegal activities did not excuse them in the eyes of society. Even the government itself viewed the secret police as dishonest and possibly corrupt. It was no wonder that the police usually suffered from poor morale. Some police officials eventually defected to the revolutionaries, bringing with them classified documents and the names of active secret agents. They left the Okhrana with an even greater image problem and with another distraction from its work.

In the long run, the Okhrana's participation in revolutionary activities, instead of weakening the revolutionary movement, may have made things much worse for the monarchy and the state. It attempted to redirect the labor movement by organizing legal unions, and one of their agents led union members in a protest that sparked the 1905 revolution. It succeeded in placing an agent, Roman Malinovsky, in the Fourth Duma, and he made dozens of speeches that provided good publicity for the Social Democratic Party. They secretly promoted a split in the Social Democratic Party, and the split strengthened its Bolshevik faction, which eventually oversaw the final destruction of the old order.

Of course, even a perfect police force would not have been able to prevent the spread of revolutionary ideas completely. The huge expanse of the Russian Empire provided too many places for revolutionaries to hide, and the social hierarchy protected high-ranking liberals who encouraged dissent. Furthermore, the police could not create respect for a government that seemed to be doing all it could to lose the respect of the public.

As this essay has shown, however, the tsarist secret police were far from perfect. The Okhrana's bureaucratic culture and questionable tactics contributed to its overall failure to prevent thousands of terrorist attacks and other crimes against the state. Its use of provocation in particular not only antagonized the general public but also directly aided the revolutionary cause. The first rule of medicine is to avoid harming the patient one is supposed to protect. Similarly, the first rule of police work ought to be to avoid harming the state one is supposed to protect. By this standard, the tsarist secret police failed utterly.

-- Catherine Blair, Georgetown University


AGENTS PROVOCATEURS

As the following personal reminiscence written in 1953 reveals, Vladimir Zenzinov, a member of the Petrograd Soviet Executive Committee, delighted in the seizure of the hated local police headquarters thirty-six years earlier:

I was far more interested in liquidating the Police Department, the Okhrana, [and] the organization of provocateurs who were in the service of the police and who were still, perhaps, to be found in our ranks.

It was precisely this interest that led me to an encounter on this day or this night [February 28]--we could not tell the difference between day and night during this period; this whole period seemed to be one dazzling, radiant, triumphant day to us!--with M. Gorky and his friend, Tikhonov, the editor of Letopisi [Chronicles]. At night I went with the two of them in one of the requisitioned automobiles to the Department of the Okhrana on Kronverskii Prospekt. There I found that the walls were already ripped, the windows broken, the doors torn down. It was with difficulty that I recognized the familiar staircase along which I was at one time led as a prisoner, and I barely managed to find the office of Von Kotten, Chief of the Okhrana, in which he tried to interrogate me during my last arrest in the year 1910. We devoted particular attention to collecting the documents. I suspect that during our searches M. Gorky was motivated not only by political but by literary aims as well; on my part, however, I intended as quickly as possible to disentangle the wily network which by acts of provocation could damage, for a long time to come, the cause of revolution and emancipation. We actually succeeded in discovering several flats used by the Okhrana for conspiratorial purposes and made the rounds of them during the same night. But--strange thing!--all of them were already opened and raided. These nests were being burned out, destroyed by the people independently, and they were discovered, for the most part, by directions [given] by the very same plain-clothes men and policemen. Light and open air was certain death to all these shady characters.

On the basis of the papers we found in the Okhrana and the Police Department, we succeeded in identifying several dozen agents provocateurs who were active in revolutionary parties and were in the service of the Police Department. Several days later their names were published in all the newspapers--the first list contained names of 18 persons, not one of whom was suspected until that time. Among them I remember the name of one prominent Bolshevik--Chernomazov, one of the editors of Pravda. Even before the [list] was published, they were all arrested at the same time and sent to prison (I do not know their fate). This operation was prepared and carried out by several persons, among them the Menshevik Internationalist, Grinevich . . . I, too, participated in this work of disinfection.

Source: Robert P. Browder and Alexander F. Kerensky, eds., The Russian Provisional Government 1917: Documents, Volume 1 (Stanford, Cal.: Stanford University Press, 1961), pp. 215-216.

FURTHER READINGS


References


Bruce F. Adams, "Review of Charles A. Ruud and Sergei A. Stepanov, Fontanka 16: The Tsars' Secret Police," Slavic Review, 59 (Autumn 2000): 670-671.

Jonathan W. Daly, Autocracy under Siege: Security Police and Opposition in Russia 1866-1905 (De Kalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1998).

Daly, The Watchful State: Security Police and Opposition in Russia, 1906-1917 (De Kalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2004).

Sheila Fitzpatrick, The Russian Revolution 1917-1932 (Oxford & New York: Oxford University Press, 1982).

Anna Geifman, Entangled in Terror: The Azef Affair and the Russian Revolution (Wilmington, Del.: Scholarly Resources, 2000).

Geifman, Thou Shalt Kill: Revolutionary Terrorism in Russia, 1894-1917 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993).

Iain Lauchlan, Russian Hide-and-Seek: The Tsarist Secret Police in St. Petersburg, 1906-1914 (Helsinki: Finnish Literature Society, 2002).

George Leggett, The Cheka: Lenin's Political Police: The All-Russian Extraordinary Commission for Combating Counter-Revolution and Sabotage (December 1917 to February 1922) (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981).

Donald J. Raleigh, Experiencing Russia's Civil War: Politics, Society, and Revolutionary Culture in Saratov, 1917-1922 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002).

Charles A. Ruud and Sergei A. Stepanov, Fontanka 16: The Tsars' Secret Police (Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1999).

Nurit Schleifman, Undercover Agents in the Russian Revolutionary Movement: The SR Party, 1902-1914 (London: Macmillan, 1988).

Frederic S. Zuckerman, The Tsarist Secret Police Abroad: Policing Europe in a Modernising World (New York: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2003).

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

Опубликовано на Порталусе 04 сентября 2007 года

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