Okhrana

Name and Subordination

Its full name was the Department for the Protection of Public Safety and Order; the colloquial short form was Okhranka, and it is often rendered in English as the Guard Department. It was a body of the Police Department of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of the Russian Empire, working alongside the Separate Corps of Gendarmes.[P152][P17][P30]

Formation

The first dedicated security department was set up under the St Petersburg city governor in 1866, after Dmitry Karakozov's attempt on the life of Alexander II. On 6 August 1880 Alexander II, acting on Loris-Melikov's proposals, established the Department of State Police under the Ministry of the Interior, and in 1881 Alexander III added security and investigation stations in Moscow and Warsaw; these became the basis of the later Okhrana. A third department appeared in Warsaw in 1900, and on 13 August 1902 departments were created in Vilna, Yekaterinoslav, Kazan, Kiev, Odessa, Saratov, Tiflis and Kharkov.[P164][P165][P20][P21][P23][P24]

Accounts of the founding date conflict. One narrative gives 1880, another dates the organisation from 1866, and a third records 1881, so we report the alternatives rather than settling on a single year.[P152][P164][P7]

Methods and Activities

The Okhrana deployed surveillance, clandestine infiltration, espionage, counter-intelligence and "perlustration" (the reading of private correspondence), and it maintained offices abroad. Its Paris Foreign Bureau opened in 1883, and Pyotr Rachkovsky headed it from 1884 to 1902. The bureau's records document the tracking of Russian revolutionaries.[P155][P195][P100][P201]

It was notorious for double agents. Yevno Azef, an Okhrana agent who headed the Socialist Revolutionary Fighting Organization, ordered the assassination of Interior Minister Vyacheslav von Plehve on 15 July 1904, and Dmitry Bogrov assassinated Pyotr Stolypin in 1911. Roman Malinovsky rose to be a Bolshevik Central Committee member and a Fourth Duma deputy with Lenin's trust while on the police payroll.[P169][P173][P176]

Sergey Zubatov set up police-run trade unions to divert worker discontent from revolutionary movements, the practice known as zubatovshchina or police socialism. The experiment collapsed in 1903 when an Odessa strike ran out of control, and the Assembly of Working Men formed through Father Gapon helped spark the Bloody Sunday massacre of January 1905.[P168][P169][P156]

Size and Repression

The Okhrana was chronically underfunded and understaffed. All its departments together employed fewer than a thousand people; before 1914 it had just 49 employees across seven offices and never had more than 2,000 informants at once, and it never received more than 10 per cent of the total police budget.[P159][P45]

Claims also persist that torture was not truly abolished. Arbitrary arrest, detention and torture were used to extract information, and torture chambers were said to have operated in Warsaw, Riga, Odessa and most urban centres. These are source claims, presented alongside the documented material.[P161]

Dissolution

When the February Revolution broke out in 1917, the Okhrana was identified as a main symbol of Tsarist repression, and its headquarters were sacked and burned on 27 February. The Provisional Government disbanded the whole organisation; the Russian account dates the abolition of its departments to 4 March 1917. Part of the archives perished in fires and some surviving papers were passed to the Academy of Sciences.[P180][P44]

After the dissolution, the organisation that replaced it was the Cheka, established in December 1917.[P183]