Home | Business News | Browse by Publication | H | History Review

Police, spies and double agents: Russia 1881-1914: Chris Corin exposes the huge apparatus created by Tsarist Russia to combat the threat of revolution.

Article Excerpt
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

The People's Will, which carried out the assassination of Alexander II in 1881, had a profound effect on both the revolutionaries and the authorities in the years before the 1917 revolution. Both revolutionary parties which developed at the end of the century--the Socialist Revolutionaries (SRs) and the Social Democrats (SDs)--can be considered the heirs of the People's Will, while the assassination led to the development of new policing methods and an enhancement of the Okhrana, the secret police. Here we enter konspiratsia (world apart), a twilight zone where the worlds of the security police and underground activists met. It was an arena of police, spies and double agents, in which both sides acted stealthily to forestall the penetration of their defences while undermining the other's operations. As one Russian writer put it, 'One wonders who learned from whom: the Okhrana from the revolutionaries or the revolutionaries from the Okhrana'. This article is an exploration of how the police countered the revolutionary threat and the very significant impact their actions had on the revolutionaries, both before and after 1917.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Sudeikin and Degaev

Georgii Sudeikin, who was given responsibility for maintaining public order in St Petersburg in July 1881, illustrates konspiratsia. Expecting to be assassinated himself, he acted like an agent, with several aliases, passports and residences, wearing different uniforms and meeting contacts in hired cabs or suburban cottages. In 1879 and 1880 the People's Will had managed to get one of their agents into the police department, and when he was unmasked in 1881 Sudeikin drew an important lesson. He decided that, rather than trying to deter revolutionaries by severe punishment, the police should destroy them from within. They should use information from captured revolutionaries to forestall their attacks, and at the same time they should sow confusion in their ranks by accusations that 'the most dangerous revolutionaries were spying for the police'.

When revolutionaries had been arrested, after softening them up with a spell of solitary confinement and total silence, the friendly and courteous Sudeikin tried to persuade them to act with progressive elements in the government, like himself, for the good of the country. Throughout this period in fact most secret agents were recruited from the ranks of the revolutionary movement. In 1882 a prominent member of the People's Will Sudeikin recruited in 1882 was Sergei Degaev.

Degaev was arrested after an underground printing press was found in his apartment. When he had been won over, he was released in January 1883 by means of a staged escape, and the information he gave led to a wave of arrests. The People's Will were suspicious, and when Degaev was confronted and confessed his crimes they insisted that he murder Sudeikin as a partial penance.

Sudeikin was brutally murdered by Degaev and two accomplices in his flat in December 1883. Degaev then fled the country with his wife and ended up as Alexander Pell, the admired Professor of Mathematics at the University of South Dakota. His popularity among his students increased when he fought alongside them when rival supporters tried to steal the college football colours. 'Jolly Little Pell', as he was referred to in a campus newspaper, may have undergone a successful transformation, but Sudeikin's fate shows the dangers of konspiratsia.

Zubatov

When Sergei Zubatov became...

View this article FREE - Now for a Limited Time, try Goliath Business News
Free for 3 Days!