A system of 10 thousand agents of the tsarist secret police and the paranoia of Stalin's repressions

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

Perhaps one of the reasons for the Stalinist repressions of the 1930s was the search for a part of the "enemies of the people" from among the provocateurs of the tsarist secret police. By 1917, the secret police had only full-time agents of about 10 thousand people among the revolutionary parties. Taking into account temporary, freelance agents ("shtuchnik") - more than 50 thousand. For example, among the Bolsheviks, including the top of the party, there were more than 2 thousand of them. All opposition movements in tsarist Russia were permeated by agents of the secret police. Under Soviet rule in the 1920s, some of them were tried, and then the scale of the infiltration of the opposition by secret police was revealed.

Between 1880 and 1917, there were about 10,000 secret officers in the archives of the Police Department. And this is not a complete list. Several times even before the Revolution, when the leadership of the department was changed, some of the cases for agents were destroyed. A significant part of the documents on them was destroyed in February-March 1917 during the pogrom of the police archives. The total number of agents introduced into the environment of opposition parties could reach 20 thousand people. Those. those who received money for their activities. And that's not counting the so-called. "shtuchnikov" - secret employees of gendarme offices who supplied information sporadically, or broke with the secret police after completing a small number of cases. Together with them, the number of secret police agents in revolutionary parties could reach 50 thousand people.

This fact must be taken into account when we talk about the reasons for the repressions of the 1920s and 1930s (and even the 1940s and 1950s). It was only after October 1917 that the scale of the infiltration of agents into the opposition, including the Bolsheviks, was revealed. Paranoia overtook the top of the Bolsheviks, especially considering that, as mentioned above, some of the cases against provocateurs were destroyed. Everyone could suspect the other that he was a secret agent of the secret police, especially by that time - by the mid-1920s - it was already known about the case of the provocateur Malinovsky, who headed the Bolshevik faction in the State Duma, Lenin's favorite, as well as about the affairs of dozens of provocateurs. Some of the Bolsheviks even suspected Stalin that he was a secret agent of the gendarmerie, and what can we say about less significant leaders of the Bolshevik Party.

Moreover, many of the provocateurs were double agents of the Russian secret police and foreign intelligence services. This, too, in the future, in the 1920s and 1930s, gave rise to the OGPU / NKVD to look for "spies under the beds."

In the book of Vladimir Ignatov "Informants in the history of Russia and the USSR" (publishing house "Veche", 2014) tells about the setting up of a system of secret agents in the Russian Empire and the USSR. One of the chapters of the book tells how this system functioned in the late tsarist time. We provide a short excerpt from this chapter.

Contrary to popular belief, only an insignificant part of them (secret agents) could be uncovered before the overthrow of the autocracy.

Social Democrats have faced police provocations before. New and unexpected for many of them was the involvement in the provocative activities of the foremost workers who had come forward during the first revolution. Just as once the participants in the "going to the people" idealized the peasantry, the workers and intellectuals-Marxists did not escape the idealization. In 1909, Inessa Armand stated with bitterness and bewilderment: provocation is becoming widespread, it is spreading "among intelligent workers, who, after all, have a conscious class instinct in opposition to their personal interests." “Some of the local comrades,” she wrote, referring to Moscow, “even argued that this phenomenon is most widespread among the intelligent workers.”

In Moscow, the secret police recruited such well-known party workers as A. A. Polyakov, A. S. Romanov, A. K. Marakushev, well-known in the revolutionary milieu. There were provocateurs-workers in St. Petersburg, for example, V. M. Abrosimov, I. P. Sesitsky, V. E. Shurkanov, who were actively working in the union of metalworkers. The informants were registered with the Police Department, and a case was opened against each of them, containing information about his personality, profession, membership in revolutionary organizations, party names, etc. A card file with information about secret officers was kept in the Special Section of the Police Department.

I did not spare money for "information". For example, the provocateur R. V. Malinovsky, a member of the Central Committee of the Bolshevik Party, had a salary of 700 rubles. per month (the governor's salary was 500 rubles). The writer M. A. Osorgin, who was sorting through the archives of the secret police after February, reports a curious incident: two Bolshevik underground workers who belonged to different currents in the party met and argued by chance. Both wrote a report to the secret police about the conversation and about the interlocutor - both were provocateurs. And in the party there were only 10 thousand people all over Russia! (Of these, as mentioned above, only 2070 secret police agents were documented).

The activities of Anna Yegorovna Serebryakova's secret employee are known, the experience of cooperation with the Moscow security department totaled 24 years. Serebryakova (born in 1857) graduated from the Moscow Higher Courses for Women, Professor V. I. Ger'e, led the political department for foreign literature in the newspaper "Russian Courier". Participated in the work of the Red Cross Society for Political Prisoners. Supplied visitors to her salon club with Marxist literature, provided an apartment for meetings. Her apartment was visited by the Bolsheviks A. V. Lunacharsky, N. E. Bauman, A. I. Elizarova (V. I. Lenin's older sister), V. A. Obukh, V. P. Nogin, the legal Marxist P. B. Struve and many others. In her house in 1898, the Moscow Committee of the RSDLP met. From 1885 to 1908 she was a secret employee of the Moscow security department. Agent pseudonyms "Mamasha", "Ace", "Subbotina" and others. After her husband was arrested, the head of the Moscow security department G. P. Sudeikin, under threat of arrest, forced her to agree to work as an agent for the Police Department.

She handed over to the secret police several revolutionary groups, the Social Democratic organization Rabochy Soyuz, the governing bodies of the Bund, the Social Democratic organization Yuzhny Rabochy, and the Moscow Committee of the RSDLP. Her "assets" include the liquidation of the illegal printing house of "People's Law" in Smolensk and many other "merits", including the arrest in 1905 of the leaders of the committee for preparing the uprising in Moscow. Throughout her career as an agent, Serebryakova received large monthly maintenance allowances from the funds of the Police Department.

The leaders of the Moscow Security Department, the Police Department and the Minister of the Interior P. Stolypin highly appreciated Serebryakova's activities as an agent in the fight against the revolutionary underground. On their initiative, she was paid a lump sum. For example, in 1908, 5000 rubles. In February 1911, at the request of the Minister of Internal Affairs, Emperor Nicholas II approved the appointment of Serebryakova's life pension of 100 rubles a month.

After the October Revolution, when the new government began to search for and prosecute former agents of the Police Department, Serebryakov was exposed. The court hearings in her case were held in the building of the Moscow District Court from April 16 to April 27, 1926. Given her advanced age and disability, the court sentenced Serebryakova to 7 years in prison, offsetting the term served in the remand prison (1 year 7 months). "Mamasha" died in prison.

After the revolution, one of the Bolshevik informers wrote a letter of repentance to Gorky. There were the following lines: "After all, there are many of us - all the best party workers." Lenin's inner circle was literally packed with police agents. The director of the police department, already in exile, said that every step, every word of Lenin was known to him to the smallest detail. In 1912, in Prague, in an atmosphere of the greatest secrecy, Lenin held a party congress. Among the selected, "faithful" and verified 13 of its participants, four were police agents (Malinovsky, Romanov, Brandinsky and Shurkanov), three of whom presented detailed reports to the police about the congress.

Bolshevik recruited by Harting, member of the Foreign Bureau of the Central Committee of the RSDLP Yakov Abramovich Zhitomirsky (party pseudonym Otsov), before starting to work for the Russian police, worked for the Germans. He was recruited by the German police in the early 1900s while studying at the medical faculty of the University of Berlin, where he organized a Social Democratic circle. In 1902 Zhitomirsky occupied a prominent place in the Berlin group "Iskra". In the same year, he was recruited by Harting and became an agent for the overseas agents of the Police Department. He informed the police about the activities of the Berlin group of the Iskra newspaper and at the same time carried out instructions from the newspaper's editorial board and the Central Committee of the party, making trips to Russia on its instructions. Living in Paris from the end of 1908 to 1912, he was in Lenin's inner circle. Informed the Police Department about the activities of the Social Democrats, Socialist Revolutionaries and representatives of other leftist parties in exile. Based on the information sent to the Zhytomyr Police Department, the well-known Bolshevik S. Kamo, agents of the RSDLP, who were trying to sell banknotes expropriated in one of the Russian banks, were arrested.

Zhitomirsky took part in the work of the 5th Congress of the RSDLP (1907), in the plenary sessions of the Central Committee of the RSDLP in Geneva (August 1908) and in the work of the 5th All-Russian Conference of the RSDLP in Paris (December 1908). At the conference, he was elected to the Foreign Bureau of the Central Committee of the RSDLP, and later became a member of the foreign agents of the Central Committee of the RSDLP. During the First World War, Zhitomirsky remained in France, where he served as a doctor in the Russian expeditionary corps. After the February Revolution, when the documents of the Parisian agents of the Police Department fell into the hands of the revolutionaries, he was exposed as a provocateur and hid from an inter-party court in one of the countries of South America.

Some revolutionaries were recruited by the police literally in exchange for life. So, shortly before the execution, Ivan Fedorovich Okladsky (1859-1925), a worker, Russian revolutionary, member of the Narodnaya Volya party, agreed to cooperate with the police. In the summer of 1880, Okladsky took part in an attempt to assassinate Emperor Alexander II under the Stone Bridge in St. Petersburg. He was arrested on July 4, 1880 and at the trial of 16 was sentenced to death. At the trial he behaved with dignity, however, being on death row, he agreed to cooperate with the Police Department. In June 1881, the indefinite hard labor for Okladskiy was replaced by a link to a settlement in Eastern Siberia, and on October 15, 1882 - by a link to the Caucasus. Upon arrival in the Caucasus, he was enrolled as a secret officer in the Tiflis gendarme department.

In January 1889, Okladsky was sent to St. Petersburg and became an unofficial employee of the police department with a salary of 150 rubles. Having established ties with the leaders of the Petersburg underground, he betrayed the circle of Istomina, Feit and Rumyantsev, for which on September 11, 1891, according to the report of the Minister of Internal Affairs, he received a full pardon, with the renaming of Ivan Alexandrovich Petrovsky and transfer to the estate of hereditary honorary citizens. Okladskiy served in the Police Department until the February Revolution. His betrayal was exposed in 1918.

In 1924, Okladsky was arrested and on January 14, 1925, the Supreme Court of the RSFSR was sentenced to death, commuted to ten years in prison due to his advanced age. He died in prison in 1925.

Judging by the number of provocateurs introduced into the revolutionary parties, the Bolsheviks were not leaders in radicalism, arousing the main interest of the secret police. Of the 10 thousand disclosed agents, about 5 thousand were part of the Social Revolutionaries. Approximately the same number as the Bolsheviks had the number of agents in the Jewish (Bund and Paole Zion) and Polish left parties (2-2, 2 thousand).