Who were the Tsarist secret police anyway? | AskHistorians Archive Observer

There is a book about the secret police of the Russian Empire called "Fontanka 16" after the location of it's headquarters in Saint Petersburg. The authors are Charles A. Ruud and Sergei A. Stepanov. it was first published by McGill-Queen's University Press.

Now: tsar-side plots and conspiracies are, of course, as old as Russia itself, but what you usually mean when refering to "the tsar era secret police" is the Okhranka ("the little guard"), which was instituted by tsar Nicholas, after the decembrist rebellion (a complot of liberal nobles), in 1826. It was created out of the specialised departments inside of the ministry of war and the police and was mainly busy (both in it's domestic and it's foreign offices) with collecting data on the dissidents and acting against them the best way they could.

Of course Okhranka included agents from all walks of life, from the top to the bottom and from the left to the right. Both the people who organized the anti-jewish pogroms and the people who organized left-wing terrorism (see Yevno Azef) were agents of the okhranka, which has made this service not extremely popular with the intelligentsia. But that's the fate of every secret service, isn't it? Bloody anarchists.

The source is the book I have named in the very first paragraph.