Edit: Related: if there wasn't a Tsarist secret police, did the Cheka inspire Chekism or did Chekism inspire the Cheka?
Pushing the character limit here — I hope this answers most of your questions, but happy to clarify anything I've glossed over. Anyway, let's get into it...
#From Okhrana to Cheka There was indeed a Tsarist secret police force — or rather, a series of them, starting with the Oprichina of the 16th century and eventually evolving into the Okhrana (formally, the Department for Defense of Public Security and Order), created after the assassination of Tsar Alexander II by a proto-socialist militant in 1881. Part of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, the Okhrana was tasked with monitoring and disrupting the growing assortment of left-wing revolutionary groups that had sprung up within Russia.
The Okhrana proved a dangerous foe for revolutionaries in Tsarist Russia: highly adept at the recruitment of agents-in-place and the infiltration of agents provocateurs into revolutionary groups, and a pioneer in the field of cryptography. The perennial fear of penetration by the secret police made revolutionaries deeply anxious and paranoid — with good reason, it turns out: well-placed Okhrana agents included Roman Malinovsky, leader of the Bolsheviks in the Duma and a key ally of Lenin; Georgy Gapon, the priest and populist ideologue who led the Bloody Sunday march in 1905; there have even been longstanding (though never definitively proven) allegations that Stalin was an Okhrana informant.
As one of the most feared and despised components of the Tsarist apparatus of repression, the Okhrana was quickly abolished after the February 1917 revolution. After the Bolsheviks seized control in October 1917, the need for their own internal security force to defend the nascent revolutionary state was immediately apparent. In December, the All-Russian Emergency Commission for Combating Counter-Revolution and Sabotage — better known by the abbreviation Cheka — was established.
The Cheka is the direct ancestor of the KGB (and, by extension, most of the modern Russian intelligence services) — long after the Cheka name was abandoned in 1922, officers of the Soviet security services proudly called themselves 'chekists', and, according to intelligence historian Christopher Andrew, "were paid their salaries not on the first but on the twentieth of the month ('Chekists' Day') in honor of the Cheka's birthday."
There was, initially and very deliberately, no continuity whatsoever between the Okhrana and Cheka. The founder and first chief of the Cheka, Felix Dzerzhinsky, was a longtime revolutionary and zealous Bolshevik who had spent many years in Tsarist prisons. The Cheka was to be the 'sword and shield' of the state (a symbolism that carried over into the insignia of the KGB — and even into that of the post-Soviet FSB.) Chekists were ideological enforcers, not just professional intelligence officers.
There were some cases of former Tsarist personnel being brought into the fold, usually to provide specific technical expertise, but they are exception rather than rule. Vladimir Dzhunkovsky, who served under Tsar Nicholas II as First Deputy Minister of the Interior, overseeing the Okhrana, and as chief of the Special Corps of Gendarmes, became an unofficial advisor to Dzerzhinsky and his successor, Vyacheslav Menzhinsky. Ivan Zybin, one of the Okhrana's most talented cryptanalysts, became a key figure in the Spetsotdel, a department of the Cheka created in 1921 as the Soviets' first cryptography and signals intelligence service.
But, lacking any institutional expertise in intelligence or counterintelligence, Dzerzhinsky and the first chekists had little choice but to learn from and mimic the tactics employed by the Okhrana. Again, per Andrew:
Dmitri Gavrilovich Yevseyev, author of two of the Cheka's earliest operational manuals, Basic Tenets of Intelligence and Brief Instructions for the Cheka on How to Conduct Intelligence, based his writings on a detailed study of Okhrana tradecraft. Though the Cheka was "an organ for building the dictatorship of the proletariat," Yevseyev insisted—like Dzerzhinsky—that it must not hesitate to learn from the experience of "bourgeois" intelligence agencies.
A while ago I came across a very interesting doctoral thesis which explores in detail the methodological/tactical continuity between the Okhrana and the Cheka — and how the Cheka and its successor services built on that foundation to develop their own complex doctrines of internal security, political policing and counterintelligence. Christopher Andrew, meanwhile, has done peerless work on Soviet foreign intelligence — a unique and challenging discipline which had not been a particular specialty of the Okhrana — beginning in 1920 with the INO (the Foreign Department of the Cheka) and eventually evolving into the First Chief Directorate of the KGB.
The Cheka underwent a long series of reorganisations and rebrandings between 1920 and 1954, when the KGB was formed, but the core of the organisation and its missions remained more or less the same. Here's the chronology of names:
Most of these reorganisations were simply down to fairly banal administrative reorganisations: the secret police function was repeatedly shuffled between ministries — sometimes it was independent, and given various ranks (Directorate, Main Directorate, etc.); for the most part it was under the supervision of the People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs (NKVD), later the Ministry for Internal Affairs; eventually it was made a standalone ministry/all-union committee.
Other changes were more substantive: SMERSH was a wartime reorganisation of the counterintelligence function, and KI was a decidedly unsuccessful experiment in unifying the foreign intelligence departments of the MGB and the Red Army's intelligence service, GRU. (That particular experiment was a kneejerk response to the news that the United States was unifying its foreign intelligence functions into the new CIA.)
These reorganisations often also reflected shifting power dynamics in the Politburo: the re-merger of MGB and MVD in 1953 was a power-play by Lavrentiy Beria, who sought to shore up his control over the Soviet security services; the splitting-up of regular and political police forces and the creation of the KGB in 1954 was a direct effort to undo that centralisation. But despite the dizzying array of acronyms (and a great deal of turmoil in personnel and leadership, particularly during the Stalinist purges), there's a direct line of evolution from Cheka all the way to KGB — and beyond.
#Post-Cold War I wrote at some length about the post-Cold War evolution of the Soviet security services in this thread. The short version is that the KGB wasn't so much abolished as it was dismantled; its subordinate directorates were hived off and merged together to create the modern Russian security and intelligence services, particularly the SVR and FSB, with a great deal of continuity in terms of personnel, institutional philosophy and methodologies. (That breaking-up of the KGB now looks like it's in the process of being substantively reversed, however — but it'll be another 19 years or so before we can talk about that on /r/AskHistorians without incurring the wrath of the mods...)
Significant state censorship and surveillance followed the failed 1825 uprising known as the Decembrist movement. Tsarist Russia, by the late nineteenth century, had a secret police force called the Okhrana which was preceded by a brutal, infamous, secretive police unit called "the Third Section" which was abolished by Tsarist decree in 1880. The Okhrana served the state by enforcing censorship of dissident opinions, including secret files on the Russian intelligentsia whose writings were closely monitored. In 1917, the Cheka, derived from the initials referring to the "Extraordinary Commission to Fight Counterrevolution and Sabotage," began to persecute writers and activists who wrote subversive texts against the Bolsheviks. The fanatical and efficient Felix Dzerzhinsky or "Iron Felix" led the Cheka as an organ of state repression during the Russian Civil War until his death in 1926 of a heart attack. Several anarchist and "counterrevolutionary" forces were arrested and tortured at the dreaded Lubyanka Prison in Moscow. Leon Trotsky also led Cheka units, along with the nascent Red Army, in executions of "Kronstadts" or White Russians and Mensheviks who opposed the regime and had taken shelter in Kronstadt, Finland, then still a part of the new Soviet Union in the Kronstadt Revolt. After the Civil War, the Cheka became the State Political Directorate or GPU which by 1934 had been reorganized with broad judicial powers over forced labor, the persecution of "rightists" opposed to the regime, and the ability to execute enemies of the state after brief interrogation and trials. This successor agency, the NKVD, formed in 1934 used their expanded role in the Soviet state to perform the extrajudicial killings of political opponents to the regime, specifically during the Great Purges from 1936-1938. The Great Purge was started after the mysterious murder of Sergei Kirov, a party leader in Leningrad. Some, such as historian Martin Malia, suspect the NKVD was responsible for the murder at the behest of Josef Stalin and was used as pretext to purge the Politburo and Orgburo. The NKVD recorded and punished internal dissent and was responsible for the removal of key members of the upper echelons of the Soviet establishment who had fallen from favor. The NKVD also controlled the vast labor colony system, gulags, of the Soviet Union, and used slave labor to build public works for the Stalinist regime. In the Red Army, the NKVD worked through politruks or political commissars, to monitor and police dissent. Soldiers who complained about the war effort during the Great Patriotic War (eastern front in WWII) could be prosecuted for sabotaging the war effort. The NKVD politically indoctrinated soldiers, or attempted to do so, considering many Red Army soldiers did not like or trust politruks. During the Second World War, SMERSH, from an acronym of Russian words for "Death to Spies," was formed to police the failing army in 1941-1942. SMERSH troops formed behind the lines of attack to shoot deserters. SMERSH and NKVD troops policed Soviet communities behind the frontline, seizing vital goods and arresting deserters. NKVD troops were also responsible for the infamous 1944 mass deportations of Chechen, Ingush, and Tatar populations to Central Asia due to fears that these traditionally persecuted populations would be a fifth column sabotaging the war effort. As the Second World War drew to a close, the NKVD was responsible for contact with Polish communists to establish a puppet regime in Poland and also looked to round up and destroy both a Russian raised German unit called Vlasovites after Andrei Vlasov, a captured Soviet officer who led other Soviet POWs against the Soviet State and anti-Soviets in Ukraine. In 1941 and again from 1943-1946 the Soviet state formed "The People's Commissariat for State Security" or NKGB which had a broad influence over Soviet society including policing ideology, stopping sabotage of the war effort, and conducting intelligence gathering operations abroad. The NKGB also worked to control and coordinate partisan bands behind German lines during the Second World War. The creation of the NKGB's successor agency, the KGB (Committee of State Security), in 1954, actually signaled a vast reduction in power and autonomy for the secret police forces and intelligence services of the USSR under the De-Stalinization reforms of Nikita Khrushchev. As Martin Malia wrote in The Soviet Tragedy, "This was a signal to the nomenklatura and to the population at large that the mass terror had ended and that the Party was now supreme in the country." (p. 318).
Some sources;
Sheila Fitzpatrick. The Russian Revolution, 1917-1932. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982.
Sheila Fitzpatrick. Everyday Stalinism, Ordinary Life in Extraordinary Times: Soviet Russia in the 1930s. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999.
Catherine Merridale. Ivan's War: Life and Death in the Red Army, 1939-1945. New York: Picador, 2006.
Martin Malia. The Soviet Tragedy, A History of Socialism in Russia, 1917-1991. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1994.
Norman Naimark. Fires of Hatred, Ethnic Cleansing in Twentieth Century Europe. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001. (Specifically chapter 3 for information on the Chechen-Ingush and Tatar deportations of 1944)
A good survey for Russian history for context on patterns of repression through secret police and censorship is Catherine Evuthov et. Al A History of Russia, People's, Legends, Events, Forces. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2004.
Expanded from an earlier answer of mine
There indeed was a tsarist secret police known as the Okhrana, but there was very little continuity in either personnel or mission between the Soviet secret police and its tsarist predecessor.
The tsrarist state set up the Okhrana in the wake of the assassination of Emperor Alexander II and it continued in the tradition of other semi-official policing by the state of potential subversives. The overarching actions of this tasrist state agency was often shrouded in a degree of mystery which the Okhrana chiefs often contributed. Most infamously the Okhrana employed agents provocateurs paid agents that would infiltrate subversive organizations and chaos by encouraging rash or violent actions. The extent to which the Okhrana's activities lived up to their reputation though was questionable. There was a large political underground in tsarist Russia but it did not help matter that the Russian state including the Okhrana considered most political opinions subversive. The Okhrana certainly paid a good many people as informants, but there is evidence that many of these radicals were playing a double game by accepting money and continuing their politics. Stolypins's assassin in 1911 was a paid informant of the Okhrana and the Okhrana did not help matters by sometimes falsely planting rumors of cooperation onto individuals they could not turn.
Although the Okhrana proved to be reasonably effective at suppressing the various opposition parties within Russia, it could not resolve the underlying causes of political dissent. Its operatives could not stop the 1905 Revolution, nor could the secret police fully eliminate subversive groups. The scale of the task was simply too large. The Okhrana's most visible (and dubious) legacy was to perpetuate the forged Protocol of the Elders of Zion which alleged a global Jewish conspiracy was behind various subversive groups around the world.
Although the bureaucratic chaos created by the civil war precludes any firm answer, there were very little institutional continuities between the Okhrana and its Bolshevik successor, the Cheka (or more properly, VeCheka for this time period). The personnel who transitioned over from the Tsarist police forces to the Cheka tended to be white-collar types and other administrative personnel who were needed to staff the nascent Bolshevik state. Specialists in cryptography managed to make the transition as did one Okhrana agent in Paris, but the number of personnel used was quite limited. This was break in what was a common practice for the Bolsheviks during this period which tended to be pragmatic when it came to employing specialists who worked the same jobs in the pre-1917 regime. But the Cheka, by the very nature of its mission, tended to be very leery of employing personnel of the former tsarist state. One study based on the Soviet archives found that the Cheka had the second-lowest percentage of white-collar employees from the former regime among the central state organizations.
Much of the groundwork for this administrative culling of the Okhrana had been laid by the Provisional Government's actions after the February Revolution. While the Bolsheviks and subsequent Soviet propaganda held that they were the primary targets of the Okhrana, the reality was that the secret police's mission portfolio had expanded significantly since the turn of the century, and included keeping tabs on all sorts of potential sources of disquiet. Not only did this expansion chip away at the Okhrana's much vaunted, and quite overblown, effectiveness, but it made it an enemy to a broad spectrum of Russian political opinion. Thus one of the first acts of the Provisional Government was to put Okhrana leaders under arrest and begin a large-scale ministerial shuffling of Imperial police, including abolishing the Okhrana's parental organization, the Ministry of Police. After the Bolsheviks seized power in the October Revolution, they completed this process of official ostracization and exclusion for the secret police. The Soviet constitution of 1918 had provisions directed against the Okhrana denying them civil rights and sanctifying their automatic arrest.
Yet pragmatism can sometimes overcome rhetoric, and there were some senior Okhrana personnel who served in the Cheka. The most famous one was the Okhrana's chief cryptographer, Ivan Zybin. Described by his contemporaries as a manic for cryptography, Zybin was at the forefront of one of the few tasks the Okhrana did exceptionally well, decrypting foreign communications and enciphering state documents. But Zybin was very much the exception rather than the rule, and his skills were of obvious, immediate utility for a Bolshevik state that was eager both to export the revolution and protect itself from foreign and White intrigues.
The Cheka's use of agents provocateurs, informants, and other unsavory methods of secret police work called to mind its tsarist predecessor, even among contemporaries. But to term the Cheka an augmented successor to the Okhrana based on it using the same tactics is misleading. For one thing, men like Dzerzhinsky had cut their teeth in underground revolutionary circles and appreciated the need for these tactics; he did not need the precedent of a tsarist secret police to understand the value of political intelligence given his status as a revolutionary. The Bolsheviks' pre-1917 experience acting inside political cells as well as their own styling as a revolutionary vanguard made them ideologically amenable to using these various methods.
One of the main differences between the Cheka and the Okhrana, the former's extensive use of torture, suggests that the Cheka lacked both the manpower and training to immediately take up the duties of its predecessor. Okhrana interrogations seldom used torture and their interrogators tacked to a more subtle and psychological approach that in many cases managed to "flip" the prisoner. While wartime pressures certainly added to the impetus towards the use of torture among the Cheka, it also speaks to the professional immaturity and lack of training of this Bolshevik organization that it did not have the patience for tsarist methods. Although he is definitely a biased source, Petrograd Okhrana chief K. I. Globachev's memoir wrote of the Cheka's in condemnatory terms:
As investigative organs they [the Chekas] were highly unsatisfactory. That is, on the one hand the composition of the personnel was [chosen] by chance, from highly unreliable elements, without specialised knowledge and experience, and on the other hand, the technical work left much to be desired.
Globachev's condescension towards the Cheka is apparent, but it also speaks to the idea that the Cheka, like the Okhrana, was nowhere near as effective an organization in the early years of the Bolshevik state as its predecessor.
Yet the Cheka had the benefit of serving a government that survived its civil war. But as Globachev's dismissal notes, the Bolsheviks' secret police was far from a professional organization. What happened in the 1920s was a professionalization of the Cheka and a further clarification of its duties. This included the "alphabet soup" of renaming (GPU, OGPU, later NKVD in the 1930s) which was not just a caprice of Moscow, but rather a sign of the growing professionalization of the police. The Stalin turn of the late 1920s which coupled collectivization and industrialization created a number of social problems which in turn fed the expansion of Soviet policing. The creation of new industrial towns and the flocking to the cities during the famine years led to greater calls for regulation of the populace and more powers. Discontent and a paranoid political culture also led to the erection of gulags and other forms of forced labor.
The expanding missions of the secret police led to the promotion of individuals that were able to navigate the system. By the 1930s, there was a cadre of youngish professionals who had cut their teeth in the earlier policing regimes of the 1920s and the NKVD (as the secret police was known after 1934) tended to become more professional in its ethos and conduct. The purging of the NKVD's head Yagoda in 1936 was largely because he represented an unprofessional and corrupt form of Soviet bureaucrat. Yagoda's successor, Yezhov, had managed to position himself to succeed his boss by posing as the very type of capable police chief the venal Yagoda was not. Moreover, Yezhov excelled at finding the "evidence" of disloyalty that Stalin suspected existed within the Soviet state, which is always a useful skill for a secret police chief in a dictatorship.
But serving as Stalin's chief of secret police was still a dangerous position as it cultivated enemies. Yezhov's fall was caused by his protege Beria, who in turned remained chief of the secret police, now renamed the KGB (after about 3-4 acronym changes) until Stalin's death, whereupon Beria himself was purged by the post-Stalin leadership. But these purging of the secret police's chiefs should not obscure the long-term process which the secret police had become a professional agency with its own mission and internal powerbase within the Soviet system. The KGB would remain a major facet of the state bureaucracy for the duration of the USSR.
Sources
Daly, Jonathan W. The Watchful State: Security Police and Opposition in Russia, 1906-1917. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2004.
Zuckerman, Fredric Scott. The Tsarist Secret Police in Russian Society, 1880-1917. New York: New York University Press, 1995.
