Security Services in Imperial and Soviet Russia (2003)

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Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History, Volume 4, Number4, Fall 2003 (New Series), pp. 955-973 (Review)

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DOI: 10.1353/kri.2003.0054

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Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 4, 4 (Fall 2003): 955–73.

Review Essays

Security Services in Imperialand Soviet RussiaJONATHAN DALY

Zinaida Ivanovna Peregudova, Politicheskii sysk Rossii, 1880–1917 [PoliticalInvestigation in Russia, 1880–1917]. Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2000. 431 pp.ISBN 5-8243-0063-1.Frederic S. Zuckerman, The Tsarist Secret Police in Russian Society, 1880–1917.New York: New York University Press, 1996. xvii + 345 pp. ISBN 0-8147-9673-7. $50.00.Anna Geifman, Entangled in Terror: The Azef Affair and the Russian Revolution.Scholarly Resources, 2000. x + 247. ISBN 0-8420-2651-7. $19.95 (pap).Leonid Grigor′evich Praisman, Terroristy i revoliutsionery, okhraniki i provoka-tory [Terrorists and Revolutionaries, Political Policemen and Provocateurs].Moscow, ROSSPEN, 2001. 432 pp. ISBN 5-8243-0164-6. $26.00.Sergei Galvazin, Okhrannye struktury Rossiiskoi imperii: Formirovanie apparata,analiz operativnoi praktiki [Political Police Organizations in the RussianEmpire: Formation of an Apparatus, Analysis of Operations]. Moscow:Sovershenno sekretno, 2001. 192 pp. ISBN 5-8904-8094-4.Nikolai Vladimirovich Grekov, Russkaia kontrrazvedka v 1905–1915 gg.:Shpionomaniia i real′nye problemy [Russian Counter-intelligence, 1905–1915:Spy Mania and Real Problems]. Moscow: Moskovskii obshchestvennyinauchnyi fond, 2000. 355 pp. ISBN 5-8955-4171-2.V. K. Vinogradov et al., eds., Boris Savinkov na Lubianke: Dokumenty [BorisSavinkov in the Lubianka: Documents]. Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2001. 574 pp.ISBN 5-8243-0200-6.

The history of the late imperial Russian security police has recently becomesomething of a cottage industry, though the Zaionchkovskiis, Avrekhs, Cher-menskiis, Diakins, Ganelins—even the Startsevs—have steered clear of thesubject. Before 1989, when sensitive archival materials were declassified, it was

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technically impossible to illuminate the inner workings of the system, but nowthat those materials are available, it seems that no major historian wants todelve into the tawdry details of the institutionalized betrayal that stood at theheart of the system, of which the secret informant was the “linchpin,” as oneWestern historian has rightly asserted.1 Without the secret informant, argued asenior gendarme officer for operations, “the security police is blind.”2 And itwas precisely the documents relating to the deployment of secret informants(along with those relating to plainclothes surveillance and the interception ofmail—the other two key methods of intelligence gathering) that had long beendenied to researchers. Surely no self-respecting, morally sensitive historianwould deign to probe the evidence of human depravity lurking within thosefiles. Self-respecting historians, no, but, ironically, one of Russia’s greatestpoets—yes. In 1917, as part of the team of researchers set by the ProvisionalGovernment to investigate the “crimes and abuses” of the former government,Aleksandr Blok read reams of police materials and observed the interrogationof dozens of police officials. He concluded that the police apparatus was “theonly properly functioning institution that took into account the political situa-tion and understood how dangerous the organized educated public was for agovernment in disarray,” but “the dying regime could not hear their loud voiceany more.”3

In the last decade or so, the Russian-language historical literature con-cerned with just these questions has mushroomed. The first major investiga-tions of the imperial Russian security police were Soviet kandidatdissertations.4 They remain highly valuable and largely unpublished.5 A few

1 Nurit Schleifmann, “The Internal Agency: Linchpin of the Political Police in Russia,” Cahiersdu monde russe et soviétique 24 (1983): 151–77.2 Aleksandr Vasil′evich Gerasimov, Na lezvii s terroristami (Paris: YMCA Press, 1985), 56.3 Aleksandr Blok, “Poslednie dni starogo rezhima,” Arkhiv Russkoi revoliutsii, 22 vols., ed. IosifVladimirovich Gessen (Berlin: [Slowo-Verlag], 1922–37), vol. 4, 13.4 A. V. Khokhlov, “Karatel′nyi apparat tsarizma v bor′be s revoliutsiei, 1905–7 gg.” (Candidate’sdiss., University of Ivanovo, 1974); A. N. (Oleksandr Nazarovych) Iarmysh, “Politicheskaiapolitsiia Rossiiskoi imperii, 1880–1904" (Candidate’s diss., University of Rostov-na-Donu,1978); Liubov′ Ivanovna Tiutiunnik, “Departament politsii v bor ′be s revoliutsionnymdvizheniem v Rossii na rubezhe XIX–XX vekov (1880–1904 gg.)” (Candidate’s diss.,Moskovskii gosudarstvennyi istoriko-arkhivnyi institut [MGIAI], 1986); Z. I. Peregudova,“Departament politsii v bor′be s revoliutsionnym dvizheniem (gody reaktsii i revoliutionnogopod′′ema)” (Candidate’s diss., MGIAI, 1988); Aleksandr A. Miroliubov, “Politicheskii syskRossii v 1914–1917 gg.” (Candidate’s diss., MGIAI, 1988); Iurii Fedorovich Ovchenko,“Moskovskoe okhrannoe otdelenie v bor ′be s revoliutsionnym dvizheniem v 1880–1904 gg.”(Candidate’s diss., Moscow State University, 1989); Natalia V. Shatina, “Mestnyigosudarstvennyi apparat samoderzhaviia v bor′be s pervoi rossiiskoi revoliutsiei (na primere

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book-length studies and collections of chapters on the Russian security policehave appeared in the past ten years,6 to say nothing of numerous articles. Theauthor of one of the most important dissertations, Zinaida Ivanovna Peregu-dova, is the foremost Russian historian of the security services of late imperialRussia and the most prolific. For years she headed the section on pre-revolutionary opposition and social movements at the State Archive of theRussian Federation (formerly the Central State Archives of the OctoberRevolution) in Moscow, enjoying access to an enormous range of archivalmaterials that were closed to most researchers. In addition to sharing herexpertise with countless Soviet, Russian, and Western researchers, her positionrequired her to pronounce Solomonic judgment on whether given individualshad served the pre-revolutionary police. She was an important archivist indeed.

She read very widely, publishing minor works on all sorts of topics, fromthe Decembrists to women revolutionaries, Petr Alekseevich Kropotkin, and(after the fall of communism) the Romanov dynasty.7 She has also preparedand published valuable archival documents, including Azef’s letters and thememoirs of Vladimir Fedorovich Dzhunkovskii, recently reviewed in thesepages.8 Finally, Zinaida Ivanovna has also been a highly successful documen-

Moskvy)” (Candidate’s diss., MGIAI, 1989); A. N. Iarmysh, “Karatel′nye organy tsarizma naUkraine v kontse XIX–nachale XX v.” (Doctoral diss., Khar ′kovskii iuridicheskii institut, 1990);and Valentin Viktorovich Romanov, “Politicheskaia politsiia v Povolzh′e v 1905–1907 gg.”(Candidate’s diss., University of Kazan′, 1992).5 The sole exception is V. V. Romanov, Na strazhe rossiiskoi monarkhii: Politicheskaia politsiiaPovolzh′ia v 1905–1907 gg. (Ul′ianovsk: Ul′ianovskii gos. universitet, 1999).6 Feliks Moiseevich Lur′e, Politseiskie i provokatory (St. Petersburg: Chas Pik, 1992); GennadiiGolovkov and Sergei Burin, Kantseliariia nepronitsaemoi t′my: Politicheskii sysk i revoliutsionery(Moscow: Manuskript, 1994); Politicheskii sysk v Rossii: Istoriia i sovremennost′ (St. Petersburg:Izd. Sankt-Peterburgskogo universiteta ekonomiki i finansov, 1997); Charles A. Ruud andSergei A. Stepanov. Fontanka 16: The Tsars’ Secret Police (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queens University Press, 1999); and V. V. Romanov and G. B. Romanova. Zakat politicheskiipolitsii rossiiskoi imperii: Likvidatsiia podrazdelenii Otdel′nogo korpusa zhandarmov v Simbirskoigubernii v 1917–kontse 20-kh gg. XX v. (Ul′ianovsk: Ul ′ianovskii gosudarstvennyi universitet,2000).7 Z. I. Peregudova, Strogo zakonspirirovany (Moscow: Moskovskii rabochii, 1983); idem,“Materialy P. A. Kropotkina v Rossiiskom Gosudarstvennom arkhive (TsGAOR—GARF),” inP. A. Kropotkin i sovremennost′, ed. B. P. Bulavin (Moscow: Moskovskii tsentr Russkogogeograficheskogo obshchestva, 1993), 29–37; and Igor′ Pavlovich Leiberov and Z. I. Peregu-dova, eds., Podvig Nune: Dokumental′naia povest ′ o N. F. Agadzhanovoi (Leningrad: Lenizdat,1985).8 Dmitrii Borisovich Pavlov and Z. I. Peregudova, eds., Pis′ma Azefa, 1893–1917 (Moscow:Terra-Terra, 1994); Vladimir Fedorovich Dzhunkovskii, Vospominaniia, ed. A. L. Panina, 2vols. (Moscow: Izd. imeni Sabashnikovykh, 1997); and Richard G. Robbins, “Vladimir

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tary “detective,” in the sense of carefully investigating purportedly genuine butsuspicious documents. For example, her work on a document that surfaced inthe 1950s suggesting that Stalin had been a pre-revolutionary police agent isnothing short of brilliant, something no scholar lacking her expertise in sourcestudy and knowledge of police documentation could possibly have accom-plished.9 Her book here under review draws on this and numerous other pub-lished articles, her dissertation, and some interesting new research.

The book is divided into three parts and ten chapters. Part 1, containingchapters on the Police Department, the Special Section of the Police Depart-ment, security police outposts throughout the empire, and the security policebureau in Paris, analyzes the structure and functions of the Russian securitypolice apparatus from 1880 to 1917. Part 2 deals with security police methodsand operations. Three chapters detail the use of plain-clothes surveillance per-sonnel, secret informants, and the interception of mail (perlustration) and thePolice Department’s library of illegal imprints as a training and reference tool.The chapter on secret informants reproduces Peregudova’s articles on the Pro-visional Government’s investigating commission and on Stalin. The fourthchapter in part 2 concerns the security police’s treatment of trade unions, cin-ema, and the sound-recording industry. Finally, part 3 investigates efforts bypolice officials to increase the efficiency and effectiveness of the personnel andinstitutions under their purview by means of gendarme officer training coursesand unrealized plans to reorganize the police apparatus from top to bottom.

Dr. Peregudova is an extraordinarily knowledgeable and thorough re-searcher. She asserts that the Russian security police probably employed some10,000 police informants from 1880 to 1917 (most of them for only a fewyears), but only after she has walked the reader through her painstaking analy-sis of Police Department card catalogues, OGPU compilations, and carefulestimates and extrapolations from police registries of informants employed atdiverse institutions at a variety of times. Overall, she reckons, informants en-joying permanent contacts with party organizations never exceeded 1,000.When she affirms that Stalin never served as a police informant, despite anapparently official police document suggesting that he had, it is only after shehas supplied numerous proofs, each more convincing than the former, in-cluding a detailed analysis of every imaginable element of police documenta-tion and bureaucratic practice, and then has noted, devastatingly, that the al-

Dzhunkovskii: Witness for the Defense,” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 2,3 (Summer 2001): 635–54.9 Boris Ivanovich Kaptelov and Z. I. Peregudova, “Byl li Stalin agentom okhranki?” Voprosyistorii KPSS, no. 4 (1989): 91–98.


leged author of the specious document had been transferred to another postfive months before.

Peregudova’s survey of the organization and structure of pre-revolutionarypolice institutions, and their kalaidoscopic changes, is as detailed and accurateas any historian could possibly desire, making her book a highly valuablereference work. While the chapter on the Police Department, Russia’s centralpolice institution, guides the reader through its thicket of offices and divisions,the chapter on the Special Section, the nerve center of the security police,rightly provides copious information about its operations and leading person-alities, men like Sergei Vasil′evich Zubatov, Russia’s most brilliant security po-liceman; Nikolai Alekseevich Makarov, who blew the whistle on pogromistagitators printing leaflets on a government press; the well-connected EvgeniiKonstantinovich Klimovich (his wife was descended from the poet FedorIvanovich Tiutchev and enjoyed access at court), the first gendarme officer tohead the office (and later the Police Department itself), an ambitious man whowrote detailed reports on the major revolutionary organizations; and AleksandrMikhailovich Eremin, another gendarme officer, who rationalized the office’soperations and instituted systematic inspection tours of local security policeinstitutions. The most colorful of these figures was Leonid AleksandrovichRataev, director of the Special Section from 1898 to 1902 and head of theParis security bureau from 1902 to 1905, who penned myriad reports onFreemasons in Russia and Western Europe and in retirement wrote plays thatenjoyed some popular success in Russia after 1917.

The reader will profit from detailed and accurate examinations of the Parissecurity bureau and will enjoy stories about little-known secret informants em-ployed there, several of them women, and the front organizations behindwhich the Russian police operated.10 Aside from copious information abouthow plainclothes surveillants were recruited, trained, and deployed, Peregu-dova provides intriguing details on whom they watched, for how long, andunder what circumstances. Overall, 20,000 surveillant “diaries” havesurvived— only a fraction of those originally produced—covering themovements of political activists and public figures from Inessa TeodorovnaArmand to Sergei Iul′evich Witte, who dragged a “tail” with him acrossEurope even years after his retirement. When senior police officials receivedword of his passing in St. Petersburg on 28 February 1915, they ordered asearch of his home in the Russian capital and then cabled to police officials inParis, “immediately and completely unofficially” (183) to search and seal his 10 For more biographical material on officers and agents of the Paris bureau, accompanied byinsightful analysis, see Ben B. Fischer, ed., Okhrana: The Paris Operations of the Russian ImperialPolice (McLean, VA: Central Intelligence Agency, 1997).

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personal effects in his residence in Biarritz. Why? To prevent the publicationof his memoirs. Yet the dead man had outsmarted the Russian government(and ultimately Nicholas II): the manuscript was hidden away in a bank vaultunder an assumed name.11 In addition to minutely analyzing the proceduresand regulations governing the deployment of secret informants, Peregudovadiscusses voluminous draft projects for new regulations that, while preventedby the revolution from going into effect, would have substantially expandedthe range of their targets, to include Freemasons, the rural administration,aeronautical organizations, secondary schoolchildren, and religious sects.

After the fall of the tsar, a series of investigations were undertaken by theProvisional Government into security police operations and pre-revolutionarygovernment “crimes.” The investigators focused to a large extent on exposingsecret informants, 40 lists of whom were published before the GPU and theOGPU took over the work in more secretive conditions.12 It was to facilitatethis endeavor that the Police Department’s archives were moved to Moscow in1925, forming the core of GARF.

Some of the book’s most original and exciting contributions concern thecensorship of cinematic and sound recordings.13 The Interior Ministry dele-gated oversight of these media to both its central censorship department and tolocal administrative officials, principally governors, who regulated the displayof movies and the production and sale of sound recordings, sometimes inminute detail though not always successfully. Police officials, expressinggrowing concern about sound recordings of political speeches and porno-graphic stories and songs, because of their accessibility to the illiterate, recom-mended treating record factories the same as book publishers, but the Senatedid not find the two kinds of emporia analogous. Prohibitions of 1910 at-tached to motion-picture “representations liable because of their content, withrespect to either general or local conditions, to provoke violations of publictranquility, to insult the religious, patriotic, or national feelings of viewers, orwhich are against morality and decency” (320). In August 1912, surveillance 11 On this episode, see also Boris Vasil′evich Anan′ich and Rafail Sholomovich Ganelin, S. Iu.Vitte—memuarist (St. Petersburg: S.-Peterburgskii filial Instituta rossiiskoi istorii RAN, 1994),4–6.12 On the main investigating commission, see also Aron Iakovlevich Avrekh, “Chrezvychainaiasledstvennaia komissiia Vremennogo pravitel′stva: Zamysel i ispolnenie,” Istoricheskie zapiski 118(1990): 72–101.13 Recent scholarship on pre-revolutionary Russian cinema, while stimulating and informative,has paid little attention to the question of censorship. See Hubertus F. Jahn, Patriotic Culture inRussia during World War I (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995); and Denise J.Youngblood, The Magic Mirror: Moviemaking in Russia, 1908–1918 (Madison: University ofWisconsin Press, 1999).


over the production and sale of movies was delegated to the PoliceDepartment itself. Starting in January 1913, police officials were obligedpersonally to inspect all films before they could be shown. Numerousdirectives regulated or banned the showing of specific films. AlthoughPeregudova concludes that police surveillance of movies and sound recordingswas far from central to senior officials’ concerns, she has shown both how thePolice Department adapted to new cultural developments and how researcherscan use that institution’s archives to deepen their investigations of importantmedia of expression.

The book contains twelve useful appendices, including a biographicalchart on directors of the Police Department, key procedural documents onsecurity policing, and a few important circular directives. Peregudova has alsosupplied a name index and over 50 high-quality photographs, many of themquite rare.

Apart from an insignificant number of minor errors, for example the lastname “Skandrakov” substituting for “Sudeikin” (70), the book’s only short-coming is its lack of a central argument or overarching conceptual framework.It is encyclopedic rather than analytical, yet this feature is also its enormousstrength. One could not wish for a more detailed, accurate work on most as-pects of the functions, organization, personnel, and methods of the pre-revolutionary Russian security police.

The contrast with Frederick S. Zuckerman’s book, which appeared in1996, could not be more stark.14 Bluntly speaking, The Tsarist Secret Police inRussian Society is unreliable. Assuming this would be obvious to potential re-viewers, I twice declined invitations to review the book myself. In the interestof collegiality, I also omitted to draw attention to the book’s serious flaws inmy own monograph on the subject.15 Yet since no reviewer has pointed themout, and because the book continues to be cited as authoritative, I consider itmy responsibility to set the record straight. It is an unpleasant but necessaryduty, for if we cannot reasonably expect scholars to cite their sources accu-rately, then scholarship becomes impossible. Scholars should worry that some-day a colleague may systematically verify their references; this thought will helpkeep us honest and scrupulously accurate.

Although I verified only a small portion of Zuckerman’s references, be-cause my time was limited and many of his sources were unavailable to me, I 14 The book is based on Frederick S. Zuckerman, “The Russian Political Police at Home andAbroad (1800–1917): Its Structure, Functions, and Methods,” (Ph.D. diss., New YorkUniversity, 1973).15 Autocracy under Siege: Security Police and Opposition in Russia, 1866–1905 (DeKalb: NorthernIllinois University Press, 1998).

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found 37 separate mis-citations where his assertions in the text found abso-lutely no corroboration (or were contradicted) in the cited sources, either inthe pages indicated or in adjacent pages. I also found 34 instances whereZuckerman bases assertions on sources that cannot support them. In somecases he cites one concrete informational directive from the Police Departmentto support general conclusions about police behavior or operations. In othershe cites prescriptive police regulations as descriptive sources. In yet others herelies on former police officials or revolutionary activists for information onwhich they were far from authoritative or were self-serving or about whichthey were simply not in a position to know anything substantive. In general,Zuckerman places more trust than is warranted in several authors lackingcredibility in regard to Russian security police affairs, including former policeofficials Mikhail Efimovich Bakai, Viktor Nikolaevich Russianov, and NikolaiVladimirovich Veselago, as well as radical activists who hastily producedstudies of the security police in 1917 and 1918.16

There are, moreover, at least 16 important assertions lacking any referen-tial basis. Finally, in eight cases Zuckerman puts forth general statementsabout Russian security police institutions and operations for which no authori-tative evidence is available or for which further archival research would be re-quired.

The book also contains well over 100 factually inaccurate or exaggeratedclaims and assertions. Specifically, I discovered 46 false assertions, 33 exagger-ated assertions, 32 misinterpretations of evidence, 10 cases where the authorcontradicts himself, and 20 minor factual errors.17 All these problems appearto stem from the author’s sloppiness in using sources.

I believe the book to be unusable as a work of scholarship. The level ofknowledge and understanding of the imperial Russian security police onewould have to assume in a reader seeking illumination on the subject from thismonograph but wishing to distinguish fact from fiction would exceed that ofall but a tiny handful of scholars in the world.

The books by Anna Geifman and by L. G. Praisman both tell the story ofEvno Fishelovich Azef (notwithstanding Praisman’s title) from childhood tohis final years in a most gripping manner, with excellent prose and enormous 16 V. Zhilinskii, “Organizatsiia i zhizn′ okhrannogo otdeleniia vo vremina tsarskoi vlasti,” Golosminuvshego 9–10 (1917): 247–306; A. Volkov, Petrogradskoe okhrannoe otdelenie (Petrograd:Znanie-sila, 1917); Valerian Konstantinovich Agafonov, Zagranichnaia okhranka: Sostavleno posekretnym dokumentam Zagranichnoi Agentury i Departamenta Politsii (Moscow: Kniga, 1918).17 For a full and detailed inventory of these errors and inaccuracies, seehttp://tigger.uic.edu/~daly/homepage/~research/Zuckerman.htm/.


biographical and historical detail, laced with sprightly anecdotes, and drawingon extensive research in formerly classified archives. Praisman’s style is moreliterary; indeed, his book at times reads like a novel divided into very shortchapters but with copious asides and spicy parallels to contemporary reality,while Geifman peppers her writing with literary references, illustrative or expli-cative, increasing the reader’s enjoyment. It is an amazing coincidence thatthese books appeared within a year of each other, but in their arguments theycould not be more dissimilar. The two authors take up the main questionsabout Azef—whether he was a provocateur and a double agent and why AlekseiAleksandrovich Lopukhin betrayed him to the revolutionaries—and reachdiametrically opposing conclusions. Moreover, Geifman, adopting “an inter-disciplinary approach, incorporating contemporary findings in human psy-chology,” argues that a pathological fear governed Azef’s outlook and behaviorand “ran like a red line through his entire existence” (6). Praisman, by con-trast, eschews any attempt to psychoanalyze his subject, noting that “to de-scribe the storms and passions, which collided and struggled in the soul of thatperson, who on the outside appeared completely unflappable, one would need… the talent of F. Dostoevsky.” Nevertheless, he attributes to Azef an inexpli-cably “desperate bravery” (otchaiannaia smelost′, 187), by which he suggeststhat Azef may have wanted to prove to himself and others that no one couldcontrol him and which Geifman explains by imagining him placing himself indangerous situations as if to exorcise his demons of fear. She writes that “in hisdesperate determination to rid himself of what he perceived, rationally or not,to be the causes of this all-pervasive fear and the associated anxiety, he invaria-bly immersed himself more deeply in the quagmire of risk and physical threatnearly until the end of his life” (5).

Among the most valuable sources both scholars use is voluminous testi-mony to a Party investigating commission by witnesses who knew Azef.18

Geifman gathered much valuable material in the Hoover Institution Archivesin Stanford, California, and the International Institute of Social History inAmsterdam, while Praisman brings to bear rarely cited memoirs of eyewit-nesses written in Hebrew, for example by Ia. Maze whose dacha was next toAzef’s in 1901.

On much factual detail, as well as several elements of interpretation, thetwo authors agree. Azef was neither a good speaker nor a theoretician. His po-litical views were left-liberal or even constitutionalist. He loved both savingand extravagantly spending money but convinced all his party comrades and

18 “Sudebno-sledstvennaia komissiia tsentral′nogo komiteta partii sotsialistov-revoliutsionerovpo delu Azefa,” Gosudarstvennyi arkhiv Rossiiskoi federatsii (GARF), f. 1699.

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even his wife that he was a pauper. (Geifman adds, however, that anxiety overfalling into poverty tormented him.) He was extremely cautious and attentiveto operational detail but also a brilliant operator and manipulator. Forexample, Praisman, noting that Azef befriended Vera Nikolaevna Figner, sug-gests plausibly that he wanted to be surrounded by former Populists whoseaura of revolutionary authority could shield him from suspicion. His policehandlers, especially L. A. Rataev, at times displayed terrible incompetence,which placed him even more on his guard. Praisman gives many examples ofAzef providing clever, sometimes cryptic, hints to the police about impendingterrorist attacks, which they often failed to decipher. Azef “over-insured him-self at every chance” (54), wrote Praisman. Even so, Geifman and Praismanboth greatly esteem A. V. Gerasimov’s professional capacities and his reliabilityas a memoirist. They agree that in some periods Azef was more loyal to thepolice than others, sometimes withholding information, sometimes divulgingmore, most of it extremely valuable, though never all he knew. Both describeseveral occasions when Azef tried to abolish the party’s program of terror, andboth insist that numerous terrorist plots, especially ones hatched starting in1906, succeeded or failed without Azef’s participation. They also argue thatthe obscure plot to kill Nicholas II aboard the Riurik in a Scottish port in Sep-tember 1908, which Azef apparently organized but of which he breathed not aword to Gerasimov, was destined to fail, supposedly as Azef had planned,though it seems to me that it failed only by chance. Each paints intriguing por-traits of Vladimir L′vovich Burtsev, the “revolutionary Sherlock Holmes.”Praisman devotes more attention to terrorist operations Azef was not involvedwith, so the book could be called “Azef and Terror in Russia.”

Geifman asserts rather than proves that Azef grew up in desperate povertyand an atmosphere of “insecurity and threat” (15). His father, she insists, was“apprehensive, inhibited, and fearful” (16), but somehow he managed to movehis family 800 miles away, from Grodno province to Rostov-na-Donu, to setup his own business, “a modest drapery shop” (14), and to send young Evnoto a technical high school. Geifman claims that “Azef was hopelessly ugly”(19), an assertion frequently encountered in the literature, but she providesone photograph, from the early 1900s, in which he seems, if not handsome, atleast pleasant looking.

Geifman argues that Azef’s “most important priority was to elude the fearof getting hurt” (57). He also was squeamish about gore, which “rendered itimpossible for him to take personal part in terrorist acts” (57), but she admitsthat Grigorii Andreevich Gershuni, the “tiger of the Revolution” and thegreatest Russian terrorist mastermind, “never resorted to arms personally” (51).Was not Azef’s penchant for gambling and risk-taking a better explanation for


his decision to become a police agent and then to go deeper into the revolu-tionary underworld as an agent? Overall, his “career” choice was bizarre for aman gripped by fear. Perhaps he was more greedy than he was fearful? Indeed,after his exposure, he made a fortune and “never chose to disguise himself withmakeup or even to wear dark glasses” (160), despite the threat posed byrevolutionary activists on the lookout for him.

On the points of disagreement between the two authors, one could penvaluable scholarly articles; unfortunately the space allotted here is inadequate.19

Geifman is convinced that Azef never served the revolutionary camp, that is,was not a double agent. Nor was he, she insists, a provocateur, an inciter tocrime. He sometimes withheld information from the police, usually out of fearthat they would misuse it and cause his exposure, but he never took an activeand earnest part in terrorist plots. By contrast, Praisman believes that Azefmasterminded, among other crimes, the assassination of Viacheslav Konstanti-novich Plehve, the interior minister in 1904. Geifman asserts that Azef neverrecruited any major terrorists. “Azef rarely took part in the recruitment proc-ess,” she writes, “and when he did, his involvement was strangely reminiscentof sabotage” (60). Praisman, citing a Hebrew source, claims that he recruitedand guided “many dozens” of terrorists, none of whom appealed for clemencyor cooperated with the police, including Ivan Platonovich Kaliaev, who threwthe bomb that killed Grand Duke Sergei. It seems quite reasonable to argue, asdoes Praisman, that Azef wished to avenge the Jews killed in the Kishinev po-grom of 1903, which many contemporaries blamed on Plehve’s administra-tion. Interestingly, Geifman and Praisman agree that after taking part in thewounding of Fedor Vasil ′evich Dubasov, Azef served the government loyally,while also feeding his handlers some false information and fabricating “plots”against the emperor in order to enhance his own importance. Yet why did somany Socialist-Revolutionaries adulate Azef as a terrorist mastermind? A ques-tion whose answer is straightforward for Praisman is rather tortured forGeifman. Gershuni’s “almost mystical aura of veneration,” she writes, was“automatically extended to Azef, his successor” (135). Why this should havebeen so remains unresolved. Geifman is surely right that it was in the interestof his erstwhile comrades to depict Azef as a loyal partisan of terror—after hisduplicity had become manifest—yet why would they have done this before hisunmasking? She suggests that he cleverly rushed to claim most of the “glory” 19 There is much valuable information and argumentation on these matters in MikhailIvanovich Leonov, Partiia sotsialistov-revoliutsionerov v 1905–1907 gg. (Moscow: ROSSPEN,1997); R. A. Gorodnitskii, Boevaia organizatsiia partii sotsialistov-revoliutsionerov v 1901–1911gg. (Moscow: ROSSPEN, 1998); Konstantin Nikolaevich Morozov, Partiia sotsialistov-revoliutsionerov v 1907–1914 gg. (Moscow: ROSSPEN, 1998).

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from the murder of Plehve and Sergei, but why would Boris ViktorovichSavinkov, the supposedly true mastermind, have let him get away with it?

While the two authors agree that A. A. Lopukhin was no liberal and in-deed enjoyed the strong support of Plehve, Geifman argues that he must havebeen coerced into denouncing Azef to Burtsev. There is no doubt thatLopukhin’s daughter disappeared briefly in London in October 1907, butwhereas Geifman assumes that she was abducted by terrorists in league withBurtsev, Praisman suggests that she may have simply been off on a romanticescapade. To bolster her case, Geifman notes the interesting coincidence thatonly in early 1908 did Burtsev begin openly to accuse Azef of informing. Theproblem with this interpretation, however, is that neither at his trial, whereattenuating circumstances might have lessened Lopukhin’s stiff sentence ofexile to Siberia, nor after the fall of the monarchy (he wanted to preserve hisimage as a moral crusader, she suggests) did Lopukhin breath a word publiclyabout the alleged abduction. Geifman adduces as further evidence for her casethat Lopukhin told the revolutionaries only about Azef—and not otherinformants—though it would seem that had they really had him in a vice hewould have been ready to spill everything he knew about security police affairs.Praisman notes, moreover, that never before had Russian revolutionarieskidnapped anyone, much less an official’s daughter. He also accountsdifferently for Lopukhin’s revelation, suggesting that it was voluntary and thatLopukhin’s ties to Freemasons, including Aleksandr Isaevich Braudo and S. E.Kal′manovich, may have facilitated it.20 It also seems plausible, althoughneither author develops such a line of argument, that Lopukhin, an embitteredman who felt angry and betrayed by senior police officials, may have hoped tocurry favor with the Kadets, into the leading ranks of which he hadunsuccessfully tried to insinuate himself, assisted by his brother-in-law SergeiDmitrievich Urusov, himself a leading Freemason.

A final question worth posing concerns Azef’s phenomenal success. Howwas he able to hoodwink so many intelligent and suspicious people for so long?Drawing on Lev Davidovich Trotskii, Geifman argues that had Azef tried toplay “an intricate psychological game with the refined intellectuals amongwhom he found himself, he would certainly have botched it” (178). Althoughshe quotes Mark Andreevich Natanson, who believed Azef thought like a chessplayer, analyzing fifteen or more moves ahead, she calls this the product not ofa brilliant intellect but of “a superbly efficient mind” (179). It’s hard to tell thedifference, as Savinkov apparently thought, when, as Praisman notes, he la-mented that no one in the central committee or combat organization “rose

20 This allegation was first credibly made in Gorodnitskii, Boevaia organizatsiia, 150–51.


above Azef to see through him” (208). My tendency is to think he was far clev-erer than most of his comrades. According to Geifman, it was precisely Azef’ssuperior practicality and pragmatism that won the unstinting admiration of hisidealistic and utopian party comrades. Praisman does, however, provide someevidence of Azef’s own utopian dreams. For example, he apparently had highhopes for using airplanes and submarines in terrorist plots. It did not hurt hissuccess either that he seemingly developed no genuine emotional attachmentsand that his wife covered for his every mistake, be it marital infidelity, neglectof his children, or unaccountable monetary extravagances.

The only criticism of both books that I might venture relates to their morethan occasional reliance on semi-scholarly (or even semi-literary) works, in-cluding those by Mark Aldanov, Iurii Davydov, and Richard E. Rubenstein(who does not even read Russian), for factual evidence. It would seem prefer-able to draw from these authors only their stimulating insights.

The volume by Galvazin treats three distinct topics in three separate sec-tions: Russian counterintelligence, security police operations, and efforts byrevolutionaries (in fact mostly the Social Democrats) to elude the security po-lice. The latter two sections, while succinct and generally reliable, are not ofgreat moment, especially compared to the works by Peregudova, Geifman, andPraisman. The first section is largely a compilation of documents drawn froma very rare NKVD in-house publication.21 It is valuable not for its analysis andconceptualization, of which there is little, but for bringing these documentsinto the public domain. They include a long, detailed report on Russia’s coun-terintelligence agents in 1903, the minutes of a conference on setting upcounterintelligence bureaus in 1909, a directive issued in 1911 to guide theirwork, and several others.

These documents complement N. V. Grekov’s excellent study. Drawingon a huge fund of police, government, and military archival documentation,largely relating to the eastern and southeastern borderlands, it provides an ex-tremely detailed, chronologically organized account of the late imperial Rus-sian government’s efforts to protect its military installations and secrets fromforeign espionage. Overall, the officials and agencies so engaged were highlyineffective, which perhaps did not pose a grave danger to the Russian state in-terest solely because Germany, confident in its reliance on the Schlieffen Plan,devoted relatively limited resources to military espionage in Russia. 21 I. Nikitinskii, Iz istorii ruskoi kontrrazvedki: Sbornik dokumentov (Moscow, 1946). I have useda similar NKVD compilation in GARF. See I. Nikitinskii and S. Markov, eds., Zagranichnaiaagentura departamenta politsii: Zapiski S. Svatikova i dokumenty zagranichnoi agentury (Moscow:Glavnoe arkhivnoe upravlenie NKVD SSSR, 1941). Galvazin appears to take some of hismaterial from this source as well, though without citing it.

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Before the Russo-Japanese War, Russian counterintelligence, conductedby untrained, uniformed gendarme officers, whom foreign military attachéshad little difficulty identifying, was insignificant and risible. Even during andafter the war, when these efforts were expanded, interagency tensions,jurisdictional clashes, and legal restraints often hamstrung efforts to deal withforeign military spies. Whereas military authorities encouraged gendarmeofficers to detect a spy in each Chinese and Korean, the Ministry of ForeignAffairs, out of diplomatic considerations, sought to prevent the harassment ofany foreign nationals, even those strongly suspected of espionage by themilitary authorities. Furthermore, gendarmes and policemen, although theirsuperiors regularly promised their full cooperation, almost never paid specificattention to Asians.

Finally in 1909, in the face of renewed tensions with Japan, high-level in-terdepartmental discussions on creating a unified counterintelligence systemtook place, with the civilian authorities attributing more importance to theeffort than previously, though, as Grekov remarks, “No one refused to takepart in counterintelligence, but no one wanted a big role in it” (104). Becauseof bureaucratic conflict, especially resistance from the Ministry of Finance, anddisagreements among senior Ministry of the Interior officials and between theMinistries of the Interior and War about who should supervise and direct theeffort, a network of seven counterintelligence bureaus was instituted only in1911. Each bureau was subordinated to the headquarters of the local militarydistrict but headed by a gendarme officer. Hiring a good one was oftenproblematic, since the military authorities had to rely on recommendationsfrom the gendarme authorities, who were understandably reluctant to partwith their best officers. Those selected had at their disposal mainly regularmilitary personnel deploying methods developed by the security police fordomestic surveillance, though in general it proved quite difficult to recruitinformants among “foreign spies,” who lacked the institutional accouterments(newspapers, trade unions, political parties) that made political activists easierto identify and observe. The entire effort was quite modest. In 1911 the WarMinistry devoted only 0.13 percent of its budget to both intelligence andcounterintelligence.

Counterintelligence operatives faced serious manpower, jurisdictional, andlegal hindrances. First, given their meager resources in funding and personnel,they had to rely for support on provincial gendarme officers, who displayed anunwillingness to cooperate with them. Senior administrative authorities wereof little help. In a directive of July 1912, for example, the Police Departmentwarned gendarme and security officers to lend assistance to the counterintelli-gence bureaus “only in the case of exceptional need” (210). Second, although


most of the officers were military personnel, only gendarmes and policemenhad the legal right to detain people suspected of espionage. Third, actions thatthe War Ministry considered harmful to its security, such as collecting openlypublished information on the Russian military, was not legally prohibited,until a law of 5 July 1912 expanded the range of justiciable offenses to includeassisting a foreign agent to collect information related to state security and en-tering into an agreement with foreign intelligence services. The local militaryauthorities interpreted the law quite liberally, so that the General Staff and theMinistries of the Interior and War issued directives seeking to narrow its focus.Even so, from 1911 to 1914, 33 people were tried for espionage in Russia, ofwhom 31 were found guilty. Most of them were Russian subjects, sinceforeigners were generally expelled from the country. Interestingly, in the1911–13 period, the German authorities arrested 686 people for espionage,compared to 220 in Russia, a country with a far larger population.

The world war caused a massive expansion of counterintelligence opera-tions. Senior police officials of all provinces and districts of the Russian empirereceived orders to arrest people suspected of spying in their jurisdictions, inpart because, except in frontal areas, counterintelligence officers still lacked thepower of arrest. From the war’s outset “spy fever” gripped the population. Pri-vate citizens flooded government agencies with denunciations of suspectedspies. Gendarme officers, who still concentrated on domestic political intelli-gence, often got bogged down in investigating these denunciations; sometimesthey succumbed to the temptation to fabricate spy cases. In September 1914,all Chinese traders were banished from Petrograd city and province, and theyfaced continuous searches and arrests in Moscow and other cities. Germanbusinessmen faced the greatest harassment. The German government had foryears planted agents in German firms throughout Russia, of which there weremany. Prosecuting employees of such firms, let alone shutting down the firmsthemselves, was highly complicated, however, largely because such firms oftenhad strong ties to Allied or Russian business interests. Out of 611 joint-stockfirms with some German or Austrian capital, only 96 were technically subjectto liquidation, and of these 62 managed to avoid that fate.22

Grekov concludes his study, which makes numerous helpful comparisonswith counterintelligence and “spymania” in Germany and Austria, by arguingthat the Russian counterintelligence network was by and large inefficient andineffective. Most important, he argues, it should not have been modeled onthe security police system. Yet he suggests no alternative model and elsewhere 22 On the persecution of enemy aliens in Russia during the war, see Eric Lohr, "Enemy AlienPolitics within the Russian Empire during World War I (Ph.D. diss., Harvard University,1999).

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admits that Russian security policemen stationed at the Paris bureau scoredimpressive coups against German efforts at military sabotage in Russia.Feigning collusion with German intelligence officers, bilking them of manytens of thousands of French francs, a few Russian security officers arranged tobring about relatively harmless explosions inside Russia and then to publicizethem as major acts of sabotage, thus turning their German contacts from anactual pursuit of their goal.23 It may be that the model was less inappropriatethan the manner in which it was implemented in Russia.

The final volume under review is a large collection of documents relatingto B. V. Savinkov’s anti-Bolshevik activities, his capture by the Soviet authori-ties, and his several months in prison inside Soviet Russia concluding with hisapparent suicide. V. K. Vinogradov and Vladimir Nikolaevich Safonovprovide a detailed overview of his struggle against the Bolsheviks. He set upunderground networks of anti-Bolshevik operatives; launched uprisings; joinedthe Directory; created a Russian military force to fight alongside the Poles in1920; joined Semen Petlura and the Don Cossacks; negotiated with Westernleaders, including Lloyd George and Mussolini, who promised funding butdelivered nothing; and plotted to murder Bolshevik officials attending theGenoa conference in 1922. Anticipating Churchill, he adopted the slogan,“with the Devil himself but against the Bolsheviks” (8). In the end, a phonyanti-Bolshevik organization set up by the GPU lured him back to Russia wherehe was arrested on 15 August 1924. His death sentence commuted to tenyears’ imprisonment (allegedly prompting some communists to commitsuicide in protest), Savinkov appealed in print to Russian émigrés to ceasefighting against the new Russian government. Alter L. Litvin and MarinaMogil′ner, in a historiographical essay, suggest that Savinkov returnedwillingly to Russia in the hope of working with the Bolsheviks. Mostintriguingly, they note that no documents exist relating to the five daysfollowing his arrest. His deposition of 21 August, however, “already containedan outline of the explanatory narrative, which thereafter he developed in ‘open’letters to friends and relatives, in published articles, and in testimony duringhis trial” (43). A major feature of the narrative is his staunch and vocal supportof the Bolsheviks. What brought about his rapid conversion remains an openquestion; perhaps its resolution lies in the FSB archives, which still hold manysecrets. Savinkov’s trial was the first in Soviet Russia where the defendantadmitted guilt to all the charges brought against him, thus, argue Litvin andMogil′ner, serving as a model for subsequent trials in the 1920s and 1930s.

23 For more details on these operations, see Fischer, ed., Okhrana, 70–80.


Most of the book is divided into three hefty sections of documents, ar-ranged in reverse chronological order, relating to Savinkov’s life and activitiesfrom 1920 to 1924. The first section, chronologically the last but in dramaticinterest the most compelling, concerns his last nine months. Here we find thestenographic record of his interrogation of 21 August 1924. Urged todenounce his close associates, Savinkov refused, which to the editors suggestshe had merely struck a deal with the authorities and had not been tortured.There is also a chronology of his life, prepared by the security police (OGPU),which emphasizes his terrorist activities, leading one to wonder if they hadn’tlured him back to Russia precisely to discredit him à la Azef and thereby sowconfusion in the anti-Bolshevik ranks and demoralize existing terroristorganizations. There are numerous private and open letters, confessions, andappeals to friends and acquaintances in emigration, in which he claimed thatthe Bolsheviks were “working hard to rebuild the country” (102); that Russiawas not primarily white with a thin red skin, like an apple, no, “the apple isred inside” (105); that he had discovered that chekisty were not “criminals andborn executioners” but sometimes “convinced revolutionaries” (115); thatprison often meant mere confinement to a village with freedom to walk intotown; that the Russian currency was stronger than the British pound. Comesee for yourself, he urges. Almost everyone writes back in shock: either it’s atrick or Savinkov is a traitor, they say.

There are also many reports by the security policemen assigned to watchhim and his letters to more senior chekisty. When he went out for walks, five ormore guards accompanied him, supposedly because “it’s just pleasant to walkoutside the town” (163). In the last three months of his life Savinkov yearnedfor freedom. He grew anxious. Three times he asked to be put in a cell withoutbars. In March 1925, he lamented that “prison, that is, forced idleness, isworse than death” (156). Nearly until the end, he may still have believed inthe Bolshevik experiment. In April he wrote in his diary that Europeans have asense of limits, respect women and individuals, and are efficient, hard-working, and careful with words, while the Russians, who tend in the opposi-tion direction on each point, “will have the last say” (185). Still, he was grow-ing desperate. “I did not recognize Soviet power in order to scribble stories”(167), he wailed to one security policeman two days before his death. FromSavinkov’s letter to the head of the OGPU, Feliks Edmundovich Dzerzhinskii,written on the fateful day, one senses that the Bolshevik leaders simply weren’tconvinced that he had earnestly embraced the new order. They could not,therefore, risk his release. At 11:20 PM, he suddenly threw himself from anopen window. Probably it was a suicide. Maybe his guards had tempted himinto it.

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Also of interest is a diary by Emma (Liubov′) Efimovna Dikgof-Derental′,the wife of a comrade, apparently Savinkov’s mistress, and perhaps a policeinformant, who was arrested along with him. She set down details of their ar-rest and interrogation. She was amazed at how civilly they treated her. Savin-kov told her that, 18 years before, during his arrest in Sevastopol′, he had beencalm because “I knew the whole of Russia was with me” (214). He had beenable to escape from prison thanks to assistance from simple people. But nowDzerzhinskii was telling him that 100,000 workers, without any pressure,would come and demand his execution as an “enemy of the people.” She andSavinkov found many “fanatically devoted” security policemen who led asceticlives, worked long hours, and spent their leisure time spreading propaganda invillages. They convinced themselves that socialists were almost never shot andthat prison sentences were in practice nearly always very short. It may havebeen true that few socialists were shot in those days (although, since theOGPU summarily shot 650 people in 1924, it is difficult to know for cer-tain),24 but prison sentences for opponents of Bolshevism, like Savinkov, wereoften long, even though the organized opposition had been utterly crushedand rooted out.

The second group of documents relates to the OGPU’s operation code-name “Sindikat 2,” a fraudulent anti-Bolshevik organization designed to lureSavinkov back to Russia. Among the more interesting documents in this sec-tion are Savinkov’s letters praising fascism and claiming to feel more affinitywith fascists than with Aleksandr Fedorovich Kerenskii or Nikolai DmitrievichAvksent′ev. The final selection of documents concerns Savinkov’s Polish cam-paign. Especially interesting are his newspaper articles where he seemed to beleaning toward anarchism or perhaps some romantic “Bonapartism.” For ex-ample, in January 1921 he wrote that “the Russian peasantry trusts its fatemore to Makhno than to educated Russian émigrés” (540), and in February hecalled for the formation of a “revolutionary army” (548) under the leadershipof a Garibaldi. But perhaps his final role was closer to that of LevAleksandrovich Tikhomirov, the People’s Will leader who turned monarchistin the 1890s, as the Polish newspaper Rabotnik opined in September 1924. IfSavinkov “is to have any influence,” it wrote, “then it will be precisely in therekindling of Russian imperialism in Soviet garb” (560).

24 For data on OGPU executions in 1924, see A. V. Kvashonkin et al., eds., Bol′shevistskoe ruko-vodstvo: Perepiska, 1912–1927: Sbornik dokumentov (Moscow: ROSSPEN, 1996), 305 n.1.Dzerzhinskii claimed that 37 of the 650 were shot for “counterrevolutionary” activity (ibid.,304).


What do these various security agencies in late imperial and early SovietRussia have in common? Before and after 1917, they pursued terrorists likeSavinkov, deployed spies like Azef, infiltrated “target” organizations, inter-cepted mail, and reported on the “mood” of the population, constituting the“eyes and ears” of the government. Yet the battles between state and society, atthe nexus of which the security services in Russia stood, were not analogous.Although Dzerzhinskii may have been lying about the massive grass-rootssupport for his agency’s repressive work, the social resources arrayed against itpaled in comparison with those that hindered its pre-revolutionary counter-part. If common people sympathized with the revolutionaries and abettedthem under the tsars, by 1924 who would have dared? The security police ofthe last tsar combated terrorist plots and openly subversive elements and har-assed the peaceable, legal opposition. The agencies that cleverly lured Savinkovback to his homeland had as their task to implement the wholesale dismantlingof civil society; subversion was no longer defined as active struggle against theexisting constitutional order but failure to affirm an all-encompassingideocratic juggernaut.

It might make more sense to compare Russia’s pre-revolutionary militarycounterintelligence to the Bolshevik security services—not the ineffective,hamstrung, underfunded counterintelligence bureaus but the clever deceptionof German military intelligence during the world war. After all, the Bolsheviksviewed their struggle, from the moment of seizing power, as a desperate mili-tary engagement. Intra-bureaucratic conflicts and other impediments couldstay the “punishing proletarian sword,” especially when the Bolsheviks sharedpower with Left Socialist Revolutionaries, but the security services deployedvast, intricate stratagems for beguiling and ensnaring the remnants of orga-nized opposition both within Russia and all across Europe, of which “Sindikat2” was only one of many. The key distinction needing to be underlined is thatthe security services played a relatively limited role in the life of the state before1917 and a central one after 1917.

History Department, 913 UHUniversity of Illinois at Chicago601 S. Morgan StreetChicago, IL 60607–7109 [email protected]

Security Services in Imperial and Soviet Russia (2003)

Documents

Transcript of Security Services in Imperial and Soviet Russia (2003)