Pyotr Ivanovich Rachkovsky was chief of the Okhrana, the secret police of the Russian Empire.
17 Facts About Pyotr Rachkovsky
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Pyotr Rachkovsky was based in Paris from 1885 to 1902.
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Pyotr Rachkovsky ended up running the show for the Okhrana, the Russian secret police, in Paris, where so many radicals considered dangerous to the czarist regime had immigrated.
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Pyotr Rachkovsky's aim was to entrap his targets into committing acts that would help ensure that his job seemed of vital importance to the czar.
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For instance, when a penetration agent in Geneva had supplied the essential information about a gathering of terrorists there and external agents had located by surveillance their clandestine printshop and weapons store, Pyotr Rachkovsky could call on Swiss security units to help destroy the underground and arrest the ringleaders.
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Pyotr Rachkovsky devised some plans for using others, but in every major instance, he was the sole operator.
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Pyotr Rachkovsky befriended a Danish journalist, Jules Hansen, during his first visit to Paris in 1884.
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Pyotr Rachkovsky became the principal channel for promoting a friendly press for Russia in western Europe, and he made contacts for Rachkovsky with leading ministers and politicians, including even President Emile Loubet.
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Pyotr Rachkovsky devised and developed access to several other governments besides the French.
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The French police, tipped off through cutouts by Pyotr Rachkovsky, arrested the entire group, and that summer they were tried and sentenced, Landesen in absentia.
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Pyotr Rachkovsky thus scored a victory not only over the enemies of the state but against those in Saint Petersburg who had opposed the Franco-Russian Alliance on the grounds that France was too soft on subversives.
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Pyotr Rachkovsky succeeded so well that historian Alex Butterworth argues he was partly to blame for the Franco-Russian Alliance that helped make World War I such a bloody mess.
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Pyotr Rachkovsky was brought back to head the entire Okhrana, first as MVD Special Commissioner and then as the Deputy Director of Police.
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Pyotr Rachkovsky had the reputation of being an unrivaled master of intrigues and provocation.
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Pyotr Rachkovsky was portrayed in "The Appointment", the eighth episode of the 1974 BBC production Fall of Eagles, by Michael Bryant.
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Pyotr Rachkovsky appears in the novel The Prague Cemetery and is mentioned in Foucault's Pendulum.
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Pyotr Rachkovsky is a character in Will Thomas's detective novel, Dance with Death.