Okhrana

The Okhrana, formally the Department for the Protection of Public Security and Order, was created in 1880–1881, after the attempts on Alexander II, within the Police Department of the Ministry of the Interior; it worked with the Special Corps of Gendarmes. It had branches in St Petersburg, Moscow and Warsaw and a foreign agency in Paris. It opened private mail, kept card indexes and recruited informers in the revolutionary parties. Estimates of their number vary widely, from fewer than 2,000 to over 20,000.

Its most famous agents were Yevno Azef, head of the Socialist Revolutionaries' Combat Organisation, and Roman Malinovsky, leader of the Bolshevik group in the Duma, whose denunciation sent Stalin and Sverdlov into exile. After Rasputin's murder in December 1916 the head of the Okhrana led the investigation. On 27 February (12 March) 1917 a crowd stormed and burned its building in Petrograd, and the Provisional Government abolished the whole political police. In December 1917 the Bolsheviks created their own, the Cheka.