simultaneously planning the assassination of senior tsarist offi-
cials. Another agent, Father Georgi Gapon, led a demonstration of
loyal peasants and workers to the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg
in January 1905; it was put down by police and army troops and re-
sulted in more than 100 fatalities.
The Okhrana’s Paris bureau, headed by the capable Petr
Rachkovskiyfrom 1884 to 1902, had 40 French detectives on its
payroll and some 30 agents in Paris and elsewhere. The foreign bu-
reau had access to French police records on terrorists and conducted
a mail intercept program in Paris, as they did at home. Agents pene-
trated all the revolutionary movements in France, Belgium, and Ger-
many, and thousands of weapons, not to mention printing presses and
propaganda material, were intercepted before reaching Russia.
The Okhrana, like many security police and intelligence organiza-
tions, took on other missions because it was available to the political
leadership. Agents of the Okhranain Paris dabbled in secret diplo-
macy, serving as a clandestine channel of diplomacy between France
and Russia. At home, the service helped conservative politicians cre-
ate pogromsin which hundreds of Jews were murdered.
Despite its reputation for ruthlessness, the Okhranaand its parent
organization, the MVD, were less effective and far less terrible than
the Chekaor the NKVD. During the reign of Aleksandr II (1855–
1881), approximately 4,000 people were detained and interrogated
for political crimes. Nevertheless, executions were rare: from the
mid-1860s to the mid-1880s, only 44 executions took place in Rus-
sia. By contrast, on the day after Lenin launched the Red Terrorin
September 1918, the Cheka executed 500 people. Moreover, the
Okhranawas far less terrible in the provinces than in Moscow, St. Pe-
tersburg, and Warsaw. In Georgia, Joseph Stalinand many of his col-
leagues received light sentences for crimes that would have sent them
to the gallows in Moscow—and perhaps even in London or Paris.
Many of the leaders of the Okhranasaw themselves as the bulwark
of the autocracy. They observed Russian law by accepting the inde-
pendence of the procuracy. Defendants in political trials had active
and competent defense lawyers. Prisoners were generally well treated
in jail and in exile. Stalin and Leon Trotsky, as well as a host of other
political prisoners, repeatedly escaped exile in Siberia. But the
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