I recently read that pratically all the well-known Bolshevik leaders such as Stalin, Trotsky and even Lenin (and many others) were once caught and arrested by the Okhrana (Tsarist secret police) on numerous occasions. My main question is, why did the idea never dawn on the police to summarily execute them in order to remove a very dangerous threat from society and to the state? Each time these men were caught, they were 'exiled' to Siberia for a few years, and that didn't do much since they returned and continued more extreme political agitation... This is especially surprising when it comes to Stalin, because besides his troublesome political ideology, he was implicated in bank robberies and murders (1907 Tiflis bank robbery is one example) so he should have been treated as a dangerous criminal first of all. Unlike other Socialist factions, the Bolsheviks were completely un-democratic; they refused to participate in duma elections even and desired the overthrow of the monarchy. Did the Tsarist police not take them seriously as a threat? My follow-up question is, why historians tend to write how "brutal" the Okhrana was (for example that its policies directly influenced how the Soviet Cheka was run etc.), which is laughable compared to how more brutal the NKVD or Cheka were in their millions of executions of innocent people and holding millions of prisoners as forced laborers in gulag camps. It reminds me of how the SAVAK in Iran was called "brutal" when their bodycount and number of prisoners was actually very low, while their post-revolution sucessors murdered hundreds of thousands of more people.