Historical Dictionary of Russian and Soviet Intelligence

THE INSTITUTIONS

Since Ivan IV created the Oprichninain the 1560s to sniff out treason,

Russian security institutions have been given tremendous leeway to dis-

cover and destroy enemies of the regime at home or abroad. The oprich-

niki, the men of theOprichnina, were given absolute power to punish

Ivan’s enemies and their families and their clans. Villages and cities

were destroyed in the effort to protect the tsar. Petr I (the Great) created

an office to maintain regime stability. The Preobrazhenskiy Prikazacted

as an extralegal body with power to destroy the enemies of the regime.

Detained in secret, Petr’s enemies were often tortured and killed. It is

worth noting that Joseph Stalin, who was a student of Russian history,

approved much of what Ivan and Petr had done. Some Russian histori-

ans have referred to Stalin’s secret police as Oprichniki, noting that the

past did tragically repeat itself.^1

Russian internal security institutions were strengthened in the 1820s

by Nicholas I following the Decembrists’ Revolt. His gift to the leader

of the Third Section of the Imperial Chancery was a handkerchief to

wipe away the tears of orphans and widows. Less poetically, the Third

Section was charged with the surveillance of the educated class, later

termed intelligentsia, who were seen as the regime’s greatest enemies.

It is worth noting that between 1826 and 1880, the Third Section ha-

rassed, imprisoned, and exiled many of the greatest minds the country

produced, including Feodor Dostoyevsky. Yet the service was so feck-

less that it was unable to protect Tsar Aleksandr II from the assassins of

the Narodnaya Volya(People’s Will).

One of the greatest tragedies of Russian history was the attempt by

the last tsars and their chancellors to replace legal reform with police

administration and extrajudicial punishment. The Okhrana, a secret po-

lice formed within the Ministry of Internal Affairs in 1881, could nei-

ther analyze the rising revolutionary expectations of the population nor

cope with the revolutionary parties. The Okhrana, formed to protect the

government, created far more enemies than it identified for tsarist

courts and field courts martial to arrest, exile, and execute. By working

with the same fervor against moderate parties as it did against revolu-

tionary movements, the Okhranaplayed a part in simultaneously fo-

menting unrest through covert action while preventing the rise of a

moderate political opposition.

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