11 Facts About Okhrana

Okhrana deployed multiple methods, including covert operations, undercover agents, and "perlustration"—the reading of private correspondence.

Okhrana tried to compromise the labour movement by setting up police-run trade unions, a practice known as zubatovshchina.

Many historians, such as the German historian Konrad Heiden and the Russian historian Mikhail Lepekhine maintain that Matvei Golovinski, a writer and Okhrana agent, fabricated the first edition of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

Suspects captured by the Okhrana were passed to the judicial system of the Russian Empire.

Possibly, the formation of the Okhrana led to increasing use of torture, due to the Okhrana using methods such as arbitrary arrest, detention and torture to gain information.

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Claims persisted the Okhrana had operated torture chambers in places like Warsaw, Riga, Odessa and in a majority of the urban centres.

Okhrana used many seemingly unorthodox methods in the pursuit of its mission to defend the Tsarist monarchy; indeed, some of the Okhrana's activities even contributed to the wave of domestic unrest and revolutionary terror that they were intended to quell.

The Okhrana complemented police socialism and other projects to prevent the conditions in which revolutionary movements could take hold by pursuing initiatives to curtail the activities of existing organizations.

Over twenty years, the Okhrana had focused on interfering with the activities of relatively small, and distinct, revolutionary groups.

Just as the Okhrana had once sponsored trade unions to divert activist energy from political causes, so too did the secret police attempt to promote the Bolshevik party, as the Bolsheviks seemed a relatively harmless alternative to more violent revolutionary groups.

Indeed, to the Okhrana, Lenin seemed to actively hinder the revolutionary movement by denouncing other revolutionary groups and refusing to cooperate with them.