Analysis of information sources in references of the Wikipedia article "Okhrana" in English language version.
In 1881 a new secret police – the Okhrana – was established.
The opening in 1883 of the Okhrana's Foreign Bureau, centred in Paris, was prompted by the shift of Russian revolutionary activity from the Russian Empire to Western and Central Europe.
The high level of secrecy meant that revolutionaries could only guess at the size and nature of the Okhrana. Consequently the opposition seem to have over-estimated the omniscience of the secret police. Most thought that there was a Black Cabinet in every city and even many towns of the empire. When one Soviet historian dredged the archives he only found evidence of seven such offices with a grand total of 49 employees before 1914; reports of others, he noted, 'were sheer hallucinations'. Activists in the political underground imagined the cities to be infested with watchers and informers, and feared that their ranks were riddled with traitors. Early detractors of the Okhrana estimated that it employed up to 40,000 spies and referred to it as the most important prop to the tsarist regime. Yet when the police archives fell into the hands of the Provisional Government in 1917 they only managed to uncover 600 informers. Recent surveys of the archives have revealed that the Department of Police never employed more than 2,000 informers at any one time and most of these were not high-level spies. The entire Okhrana budget usually accounted for less than 10 per cent of the total expenditure on police, reaching a peak of around five million rubles in 1914 [...].
In the White Army there were men of the Black Hundreds, former members of the Okhrana (Tsarist secret police), gendarmes, hangmen. They occupied important posts in the administration, the counterintelligence and the Osvag.
After 1881, the Russian czar Alexander III created a secret police, the Okhrana, to fight terrorism, and the use of torture increased even more.
Research by a leading Russian historian, Mikhail Lepekhine, in recently opened archives has found the forgery to be the work of Mathieu Golovinski, opportunistic scion of an aristocratic but rebellious family who drifted into a life of espionage and propaganda work.
Research by a leading Russian historian, Mikhail Lepekhine, in recently opened archives has found the forgery to be the work of Mathieu Golovinski, opportunistic scion of an aristocratic but rebellious family who drifted into a life of espionage and propaganda work.
After 1881, the Russian czar Alexander III created a secret police, the Okhrana, to fight terrorism, and the use of torture increased even more.
Research by a leading Russian historian, Mikhail Lepekhine, in recently opened archives has found the forgery to be the work of Mathieu Golovinski, opportunistic scion of an aristocratic but rebellious family who drifted into a life of espionage and propaganda work.
