Today we know only two authentic forms of totalitarian domination: the dictatorship of National Socialism after 1938 and the dictatorship of Bolshevism after 1930. These forms of domination are essentially different from any kind of dictatorial, despotic or tyrannical rule; and although they were the result continuous development party dictatorships, their essentially totalitarian qualities are new and cannot be derived from one-party systems. The purpose of one-party systems is not only to seize leverage government controlled, but also to fill everything government agencies members of the party, to achieve a complete merger of state and party, so that after the seizure of power, the party becomes a kind of propaganda organization for the government. This system is “total” only in a negative sense, namely that the ruling party will not tolerate any other parties, any opposition and no freedom of political opinion. When a party dictatorship comes to power, it leaves the original distribution of power between the state and the party intact; the government and the army have the same power as before, and the “revolution” consists only in the fact that all government posts are now occupied by party members. In all these cases, the party's power is based on a monopoly guaranteed by the state, and the party no longer has its own center of power. The revolution initiated by totalitarian movements after they have seized power is much more radical in nature. From the outset, they consciously seek to assert the essential differences between state and movement and to prevent the government from absorbing the movement's "revolutionary" institutions. The problem of seizing the state machine without merging with it is solved by the fact that high positions in the state hierarchy are only allowed to be occupied by minor members parties. All real power is vested only in the institutions of the movement, external to the state and military apparatus. All decisions are made precisely within the movement, which remains the center of action in the country where all decisions are made; the official civil services are often not even informed of what is happening, and party members who harbor ambitions of obtaining ministerial portfolios always pay for their “bourgeois” desires by losing their influence over the movement and the confidence of its leaders. Totalitarian power uses the state as an external facade, supposed to represent the country in a non-totalitarian world.
The core of power in the country - the super-efficient and super-competent secret police services - is located above the state and behind the façade of ostentatious power, in a labyrinth of many institutions with similar functions, at the basis of all power movements and in the chaos of inefficiency. Reliance on the police as the only authority and, accordingly, neglect of the seemingly much larger arsenal of power of the army, characteristic of all totalitarian regimes, can be explained in part by the totalitarian desire for world domination and a conscious disregard for the difference between someone else and native countries, between strangers and our own internal affairs. Military forces, trained to fight a foreign aggressor, have always been a dubious instrument in civil war; even under conditions of totalitarianism, it is difficult for them to look at their own people through the eyes of a foreign conqueror. More important in this regard, however, is their dubious value even during war. Because a totalitarian ruler bases his policies on the premise of his ultimate world domination, he treats the victims of his aggression as if they were rebels guilty of treason, and therefore chooses to rule the occupied territories through police rather than military force.
Even before coming to power, the movement has a secret police and spy services with an extensive network in different countries. Subsequently their agents receive more money and powers than regular services military intelligence, and are often the secret heads of embassies and consulates. Their main task is to create fifth columns, to direct the activities of branches of the movement, to influence the internal politics of the respective countries and, in general, to prepare for the moment when the totalitarian ruler - after the overthrow of the government or military victory- will be able to openly make himself at home in a foreign country. In other words, secret police affiliates in other countries are the transmission belts that constantly turn foreign policy ostentation into totalitarian state into a potentially internal matter of a totalitarian movement. However, these functions performed by the secret police in order to prepare the implementation of the totalitarian utopia of world domination are secondary in comparison with those that must be performed for the current implementation of the totalitarian fiction on the territory of one country. This dominant role of the secret police in domestic policy totalitarian countries naturally contributed greatly to the common misconception of totalitarianism. Every despotism relies heavily on the secret services and fears its own people more than the people of other countries. However, this analogy between totalitarianism and despotism only applies to the early stages of totalitarian rule, when political opposition still exists. In this respect, as in several others, totalitarianism capitalizes on the misconceptions that exist in non-totalitarian countries and consciously maintains them, no matter how unflattering they may be. In a speech to Reichswehr personnel in 1937, Himmler acknowledged himself as a mere tyrant when he attributed the continued expansion of police forces to the likely existence of a “fourth theater of action within Germany in the event of war.” Similarly, Stalin, at almost the same time, almost convinced the old Bolshevik guard (whose recognition he needed) of the existence of a military threat to Soviet Union and, therefore, in the possibility of such emergency, which will require maintaining the unity of the country, even at the cost of despotism. The most amazing thing is that both statements were made after the destruction of all political opposition, that the secret services were expanding, when in reality there were no longer any opponents to spy on. During the war, Himmler did not need to use, and did not use, SS troops in Germany itself, except to ensure work concentration camps and for the supervision of foreign labor force; the bulk of the SS troops were sent to Eastern front, where they were used by " special purpose" - usually for implementation massacres- and to pursue policies that were often opposed to those of both the military and civilian Nazi hierarchy. Like the Soviet Union's secret police, SS units usually emerged after military forces had pacified conquered territory and dealt with open political opposition.
In the early stages of the establishment of a totalitarian regime, however, the secret police and elite party formations still played the role that similar structures had played in other forms of dictatorship and well-known terrorist regimes of the past; and the extreme cruelty of their methods finds no parallels only in history modern countries West. The first stage of searching for secret enemies and persecuting former opponents is usually combined with the process of organizing the entire population into facade organizations and retraining old party members in the direction of voluntary espionage, so that the dubious sympathy of newly organized sympathizers is not a matter of concern for specially trained police cadres. It is at this stage that more dangerous enemy gradually becomes a neighbor who can detect “dangerous thoughts” than the officially assigned police agents. The end of the first stage comes with the elimination of open and secret opposition in any organized form; in Germany this happened around 1935, and in Soviet Russia- around 1930
The secret services are rightly called a state within a state, and this is true not only under despotism, nor under constitutional or semi-constitutional governments. The very fact of possession classified information gives these services a decisive advantage over all others civil institutions and poses an open threat to members of the government. The totalitarian police, on the contrary, are completely subject to the will of the leader, who alone decides who the next potential enemy will be and who, as Stalin did, can also designate secret police cadres to be destroyed. Since police officers are no longer allowed to use entrapment, they are deprived the only remedy assert their own need independently of the government and become completely dependent on higher authorities to maintain their jobs. Like the army in a non-totalitarian state, the police in totalitarian countries only carry out the existing political line and lose all the prerogatives that they had under despotic bureaucracies. The job of the totalitarian police is not to solve crimes, but to be on hand when the government decides to arrest a certain category of the population. Her main political characteristics is that she alone enjoys trust supreme authority and knows what political line will take place.
Under totalitarianism, as under other regimes, the secret police have a monopoly on certain, vital important information. However, the kind of knowledge that only the police can have has undergone an important change: the police are no longer interested in what goes on in the minds of future victims (most of the time, police officers are indifferent to who those victims will be), and the police have become entrusted with the highest state secrets . This automatically means a huge increase in prestige and improvement in position, even if it entails a certain loss of real power. The secret services no longer know anything that the leader does not know better; speaking in terms of power, they have descended to the level of the performer. From a legal point of view, even more interesting than the transformation of a suspect into an objective enemy is the replacement of a suspected offense with a possible crime, characteristic of totalitarianism. A possible crime is no more subjective than an objective enemy. While a suspect is arrested because he is considered likely to commit a crime that more or less matches his personality (or his suspected personality), the totalitarian version of the possible crime is based on logical anticipation objective development events. The Moscow trials of the old Bolshevik guard and the military leaders of the Red Army are classic examples of punishment for possible crimes. The following logical considerations can be discerned behind the fantastic trumped-up charges: events in the Soviet Union could lead to a crisis, a crisis could lead to the overthrow of Stalin’s dictatorship, this could weaken military power country and possibly lead to a situation in which the new government would have to sign an armistice or even enter into an alliance with Hitler. The consequence of this was Stalin's repeated statements that there was a conspiracy to overthrow the government and enter into a secret conspiracy with Hitler. Against these “objective”, although completely incredible, possibilities stood only “subjective” factors, such as the reliability of the accused, their fatigue, their inability to understand what was happening, their firm belief that without Stalin everything would be lost, their sincere hatred to fascism, i.e. a series of small real details that naturally lack the consistency of a fictional, logical, possible crime. Thus the central premise of totalitarianism, that everything is possible, leads, when all the limitations inherent in the facts themselves are progressively removed, to the absurd and terrible conclusion that any crime that the ruler can imagine must be punished, regardless of whether it has been completed or not. Of course possible crime, like an objective enemy, does not fall within the competence of the police, who can neither reveal it, nor invent it, nor provoke it. Here again the secret services depend on political authorities. Their independent position as a state within a state is a thing of the past.
In only one respect is the totalitarian secret police still very similar to the secret services of non-totalitarian countries. The secret police traditionally, i.e. since the time of Fouché, has been profiting from its victims and increasing the state-approved budget from unjust sources, simply acting as a partner in such activities that it supposedly should eradicate, for example, in gambling and prostitution. These illegal methods of replenishing one's own budget, ranging from friendly bribery to open extortion, played a huge role in the release secret services from the authorities and in strengthening their position as a state within a state. It is curious that the replenishment of the secret service's pockets at the expense of victims turned out to be more durable than all the changes. In Soviet Russia, the NKVD was almost completely dependent on financially from operation slave labor, which really seems to have brought no other benefit and served no other purpose than to finance a huge secret apparatus.
If the stories of arrested NKVD agents can be trusted, the Russian secret police came dangerously close to realizing this ideal of totalitarian rule. The police have a secret file for every resident of a huge country, which lists in detail the numerous relationships that connect people, from casual acquaintances to true friendship And family relations; after all, it is only in order to find out their relationships with other people that defendants whose “crimes” are somehow “objectively” established before their arrest are subjected to such biased interrogations. Finally, with regard to memory, so dangerous for a totalitarian ruler, foreign observers note: “If it is true that elephants never forget, then the Russians seem to us completely different from elephants... The psychology of the Soviet Russian seems to make unconsciousness a real possibility.”
History knows many totalitarian regimes that relied entirely on the forces of the secret police when it came to intelligence activities, terror against dissenting citizens and mass executions...
This article presents ten of the most brutal secret police forces that have ever existed in the world. Some of them are probably well known to you, while others you will hear about for the first time.
1. Ministry of State Security of the GDR
GDR Ministry of State Security (or Stasi) – counterintelligence and reconnaissance government agency German Democratic Republic. It was created in February 1950, similar to the Soviet NKGB, with which, by the way, they worked closely during the Cold War.
According to rough estimates, for every 160 inhabitants East Germany each had one informant working for the GDR Ministry of State Security. Stasi informers were everywhere: in schools, hospitals, industrial enterprises and even among “friendly” neighbors.
Until the early 1970s, agents of the GDR Ministry of State Security practiced only arrests and torture, after which they began to resort to provocations, slander, psychological pressure, phone calls with threats, searches and other methods of dealing with dissident citizens. Many Stasi victims subsequently ended up in mental hospitals or committed suicide.
The GDR Ministry of State Security was disbanded in 1989.
2. Central Department for Combating Banditry
The Central Anti-Banditry Department (CDB) is a secret police and intelligence service created in the Central African Republic in the early 1990s to actively combat the rising wave of crime and looting that was sweeping the country after a series of riots and widespread chaos.
The Central Anti-Gang Squad employed people who were ruthless towards criminals and suspects. They carried out reprisals without trial or investigation, regardless of whether the person was guilty or not.
Most crimes committed by the secret police themselves remained unpunished. One of the methods of torture they practiced during interrogations of suspects was called “Le Café”: they beat a person with batons until he lost his pulse, and then forced him to travel long distances in this state.
3. Bureau for Combating Communist Activities
The Bureau for Combating Communist Activities (BCCA) was created by Mariano Faget, a man who had previously had experience in finding and prosecuting communists, fascists and Nazis in Cuba.
BBKD enjoyed the support of the US Central Intelligence Agency. The peak of his activity came in the 1950s (after the emergence of Fidel Castro’s revolutionary organization “26 July Movement”).
The Bureau for Combating Communist Activities was disbanded in 1959.
4. "Tonton Macoutes"
The Haitian Guard "Tonton Macoutes" (National Security Volunteers - Milice de Volontaires de la Sécurité Nationale) was created by dictator François Duvalier in 1959. Its members were particularly cruel, which is why the people of Haiti considered them not people, but mythological creatures like ghouls who kidnapped and ate bad children for breakfast.
National security volunteers reported only to the president of the country. They were tasked with stopping any attempts by the dissatisfied to overthrow the Duvalier regime. The Tonton Macoutes are responsible for thousands of rapes, tortures, kidnappings and executions of innocent people. They burned their victims alive, stoned them to death, and then put their bodies on public display so that no one would ever again have the desire to go against the dictatorial regime. During the reign of Francois Duvalier and his son, more than 60 thousand people were killed.
5. SAVAK
SAVAK - Iranian Ministry of State Security during the reign of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi (1957-1979). It worked closely with the CIA and dealt with dissidents (mainly communists and Shiites) quickly and mercilessly.
SAVAK members resorted to torture methods such as blows electric shock, pulling out teeth, tearing off nails, dousing them with boiling water and sulfuric acid, keeping them in solitary confinement for a long period of time, sleep deprivation, cauterization with fire and hot iron, and so on.
Iran's Ministry of State Security was disbanded after the revolution ended in 1979. Instead, a new secret police was created - SAVAMA, whose members were even more cruel than their predecessors.
6. Department of State Security
One of the largest and most brutal secret police forces of the Cold War was the Romanian Department of State Security (or Securitate), founded in 1948 with the assistance of the Soviet Union.
Members of the Securitate were given the goal of tracking and spying on Romanian citizens who showed dissent, arresting them, torturing them and executing them. About half a million informants worked for the Department of State Security. Even one word spoken in the wrong place and with the wrong intonation could result in severe punishment. In such conditions it was almost impossible to resist the regime.
Members of the Securitate were directly involved in the suppression of the dissident movement in the late 1960s on behalf of the totalitarian ruler Nicolae Ceausescu.
The Department of State Security was disbanded and reorganized by the Romanian Parliament in 1991.
7. Santebal
The Cambodian secret police, the Santebal, were created during the reign of the Khmer Rouge; Over time, it essentially turned into a fighter squad.
Santebal members are responsible for the murder of tens of thousands of people who ended up in prison camps, of which there were about 150 in Cambodia. The most notorious of these was Tuol Sleng, where approximately 20,000 prisoners were held between 1976 and 1978, of whom only seven survived. Over the course of 11 years, members of Santebal killed more than two million Cambodians to please the Khmer Rouge regime.
8. People's Commissariat of Internal Affairs of the USSR
The People's Commissariat of Internal Affairs of the USSR (NKVD) played an important role in the creation of the Gulag camps, which during the entire existence of the organization were visited by about ten million people.
The People's Commissariat of Internal Affairs of the USSR ceased to exist after the death of Joseph Stalin (1953), to whom they were subordinate.
9. Gestapo
The Gestapo, Hitler's secret state police, created in 1933, terrorized Nazi Germany for thirteen years, serving as the main instrument in the suppression of dissent, as well as the mass extermination of the Jewish population - the Holocaust.
During World War II, the Gestapo was headed by Heinrich Himmler. Under his leadership, the organization transformed from simply a secret police into an intelligence service and body dedicated to finding and prosecuting enemies of the Nazis both among German citizens and those living in the occupied territories.
The Gestapo, along with the SS, played a major role in the adoption final decision Jewish question, which meant the mass extermination of Jews in Europe.
After Germany's defeat in World War II, the Gestapo was recognized as a criminal organization, and many of its members were executed as war criminals.
10. Central Intelligence Agency
The CIA is an agency of the US Federal Government, created on September 18, 1947, which initially does not seem such a terrible organization, because in fact it collects data, but in fact it for the most part The CIA is the bloodiest intelligence agency in the world. The United States has already admitted that in addition to collecting data, the CIA is engaged in torture and has its own secret prisons, and not only on its territory. It is also worth recalling that the United States created Al Qaeda, which then returned the favor to them.
CIA involved:
Towards the overthrow of the legitimate government in Guatemala in 1954 (Operation PBSUCCESS)
- to arm the Afghan Mujahideen in the period from 1979 to 1989 (Operation Cyclone)
- an attempt to overthrow Fidel Castro (the failed Bay of Pigs operation)
This is still a small part of what this Agency is involved in, but in essence, it is through the hands of the CIA that the modern world order is governed. It’s just that it’s often done by someone else’s hands.
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- Abwehr, security police and SD, secret field police, department "Foreign Armies - East" in the western regions of the USSR. Strategy and tactics. 1939-1945, E. G. Ioffe. There are still many “blank spots” in history. One of them is the activities of German intelligence services on the western borders of the USSR during the Second World War. IN this book subversive is revealed...
Today, as in 1991, there is much talk - about teachers who rig elections, about judges who defend teachers who rig elections, about politicians who appoint judges who protect, etc. But today, as in 1991, there is not a word about Lubyanka. Such amazing political hesychasm!
Meanwhile, today Lubyanka is much more powerful than in 1991, much more experienced and richer. This, by the way, largely explains the “protest movement.” It is not against "falsifiers", it is certainly not for " middle class". This is, first of all, the grumbling of economic and military elite, who was fed up with the insolence of the Lubyanka elite.
Of course, as in 1991, any attempts to talk about Lubyanochka cause displeased hissing. Like, what kind of paranoia is that! What pettiness - some kind of eavesdropping, hacked blogs... Fi! Let's talk about the main thing! But who said that this is not the main thing?!
Secret political police was in all countries of the socialist bloc (for residents of Russia it is worth mentioning: outside this bloc it did not exist, comparing the Lubyanka with the FBI is a KGB lie). The secret political police existed in different countries in different ways, but in all countries, after liberation from Russia’s “tutelage,” they dealt with those who worked in the authorities or for the authorities for a long time and painfully. The only country, which does not have this problem is Russia itself. The building of the secret political police was and is - more precisely, dozens of buildings in Moscow and thousands throughout Russia.
There were and are employees of the secret political police - there are thousands in Moscow, tens of thousands throughout Russia, and maybe even a zero should be added.
And then - shut up. In Germany, millions of informers have been identified. In other countries there were fewer, because there was a lack of conscientiousness in reporting. Nevertheless we're talking about about thousands of people. Names have been named, some have been fired, some have resigned, some are unclear.
And only in Russia - nothing! No way! None of the journalists, politicians, scientists, writers knocked, wrote denunciations, implemented the assigned tasks or completed the assignments. One bishop admitted during perestroika that he was recruited by Lubyanka, but then he was derecognized. A couple of people who were definitely known to be “alas, yes” proudly reported that they were engaged in disinformation and re-education of Lubyanka.
There are many known security officers in the ranks of the highest nomenklatura - starting with the Leader of the Nation. But below - starting, for example, with school directors and those equivalent to them - there is not a single one. The firefighters didn't knock, the teachers didn't knock, the athletes didn't knock. And they don't knock! Lubyanka stands still, money is spent on agents, denunciations are received - but no one writes. Denunciations spontaneously generate like... like... In general, if something spontaneously generates, then denunciations. Newspapers and magazines, film directors and actors, politicians and military men do and say things that are extremely consistent with the interests and policies of the Extraordinary Struggle Commission, but the Extraordinary Commission has nothing to do with it. If Gogol wrote “The Inspector General” now, the Governor would declare: “She knocked on herself.”
This is still half luck, but the most fortunate thing is that everyone fought against Lubyanka. The main dissident, as we know, was Andropov, followed by Gorbachev. All members, workers and farm laborers of the CPSU Central Committee dissented, overcoming the stupidity of the dissidents, who, on the contrary, contributed to the strengthening of despotism. Workers and peasants - of course, they are the bearers of reason and freedom. There were no Soviets; they were invented by anti-Soviet people out of drunkenness. Recently it became clear that there was no “education”, there were no superficially educated cowardly philistines with diplomas who did not want to be educated further, but there were sweet, wonderful, freedom-loving Iteerites who reprinted samizdat, listened to “Svoboda”, in general - brought perestroika as close as they could . In Germany, the IteR members knocked, but here, no one!
In a short - a couple of weeks - moment, when the voices of those who demanded to close the Lubyanka and reveal its friends loudly began to sound, what a powerful chorus of mercy and reason sounded and continues to sound! Now it is assumed that there is nothing to discuss. There is no KGB, there is the FSB, the law prohibits Lubyanka this, the law prohibits Lubyanka that, the new generation Soviet people doesn’t even know what Lubyanka is...
It looks like an old movie, where a corpse was discovered in one office, they found out that none of the office employees committed murder, and rejoiced - until one secretary asks: “But someone did kill?” The corpse is here.
Isn't it so, Rus'... Everyone is clean, everyone is freedom-loving, everyone is Europeanized to the bones of the marrow, and the main thing is not to ask - whose urine is on the floor of our toilets? Whose-whose is a draw! And so is all of Russia.
The security department appeared in Russia in the 1860s, when the country was swept by a wave of political terror. Gradually Tsarist secret police turned into a secret organization, whose employees, in addition to fighting the revolutionaries, solved their own private problems.
Special agents
One of critical roles the so-called special agents played in the tsarist secret police, whose inconspicuous work allowed the police to create effective system surveillance and prevention of opposition movements. These included spies - “surveillance agents” and informers - “auxiliary agents”.
On the eve of the First World War, there were 70,500 informers and about 1,000 spies. It is known that every day in both capitals from 50 to 100 surveillance agents went to work.
There was a fairly strict selection process for the filler position. The candidate had to be “honest, sober, courageous, dexterous, developed, quick-witted, enduring, patient, persistent, careful.” They usually took young people no older than 30 years old with an inconspicuous appearance.
Informers were hired mostly from among doormen, janitors, clerks, and passport officers. Auxiliary agents were required to report all suspicious persons to the local supervisor working with them.
Unlike spies, informers were not full-time employees, and therefore did not receive a permanent salary. Usually, for information that turned out to be “substantial and useful” upon verification, they were given a reward from 1 to 15 rubles.
Sometimes they were paid with things. Thus, Major General Alexander Spiridovich recalled how he bought new galoshes for one of the informants. “And then he failed his comrades, failed with some kind of frenzy. That’s what the galoshes did,” the officer wrote.
Perlustrators
There were people in the detective police who performed a rather unseemly job - reading personal correspondence, called perlustration. This tradition was introduced by Baron Alexander Benkendorf even before the creation of the security department, calling it “a very useful thing.” The reading of personal correspondence became especially active after the assassination of Alexander II.
“Black offices”, created under Catherine II, worked in many cities of Russia - Moscow, St. Petersburg, Kyiv, Odessa, Kharkov, Tiflis. The secrecy was such that the employees of these offices did not know about the existence of offices in other cities.
Some of the “black offices” had their own specifics. According to the newspaper " Russian word"for April 1917, if in St. Petersburg they specialized in illustrating letters from dignitaries, then in Kyiv they studied the correspondence of prominent emigrants - Gorky, Plekhanov, Savinkov.
According to data for 1913, 372 thousand letters were opened and 35 thousand extracts were made. Such labor productivity is amazing, considering that the staff of clarifiers was only 50 people, joined by 30 postal workers.
It was quite a long and labor-intensive job. Sometimes letters had to be deciphered, copied, or exposed to acids or alkalis to reveal the hidden text. And only then were the suspicious letters forwarded to the investigative authorities.
Friends among strangers
For more efficient work security department The Police Department has created an extensive network of “internal agents” that penetrate into various parties and organizations and exercise control over their activities. According to the instructions for recruiting secret agents, preference was given to “those suspected or already involved in political affairs, weak-willed revolutionaries who were disappointed or offended by the party.”
Payment for secret agents varied from 5 to 500 rubles per month, depending on their status and the benefits they brought. The Okhrana encouraged the advancement of its agents up the party ladder and even helped them in this matter by arresting party members of higher ranks.
The police treated with great caution those who voluntarily expressed a desire to serve in protecting public order, since in their midst there were many random people. As a Police Department circular shows, during 1912 the secret police refused the services of 70 people “as untrustworthy.” For example, Feldman, an exiled settler recruited by the secret police, when asked about the reason for giving false information, answered that he was without any means of support and committed perjury for the sake of reward.
Provocateurs
The activities of recruited agents were not limited to espionage and transmitting information to the police; they often provoked actions for which members of an illegal organization could be arrested. The agents reported the place and time of the action, and it was no longer difficult for the trained police to detain the suspects. According to CIA founder Allen Dulles, it was the Russians who raised provocation to the level of art. According to him, “this was the main means by which the tsarist secret police attacked the trail of revolutionaries and dissidents.” Dulles compared the sophistication of Russian agents provocateurs to the characters of Dostoevsky.
The main Russian provocateur is called Yevno Azef, both a police agent and the leader of the Socialist Revolutionary Party. It is not without reason that he is considered the organizer of the murders of Grand Duke Sergei Alexandrovich and Minister of Internal Affairs Plehve. Azef was the highest paid secret agent in the empire, receiving 1000 rubles. per month.
Lenin’s “comrade-in-arms” Roman Malinovsky became a very successful provocateur. An secret police agent regularly helped the police identify the location of underground printing houses, reported on secret meetings and secret meetings, but Lenin still did not want to believe in his comrade’s betrayal. In the end, with the assistance of the police, Malinovsky achieved his election to State Duma, and as a member of the Bolshevik faction.
Strange inaction
There were events associated with the activities of the secret police that left an ambiguous judgment about themselves. One of them was the assassination of Prime Minister Pyotr Stolypin. September 1, 1911 in Kiev opera house anarchist and secret informant for the secret police Dmitry Bogrov, without any interference, mortally wounded Stolypin with two shots at point-blank range. Moreover, at that moment neither Nicholas II nor the members were nearby. royal family, who according to the action plan should have been with the minister
.
In connection with the murder, the head of the Palace Guard, Alexander Spiridovich, and the head of the Kyiv security department, Nikolai Kulyabko, were brought into the investigation. However, on instructions from Nicholas II, the investigation was unexpectedly terminated.
Some researchers, in particular Vladimir Zhukhrai, believe that Spiridovich and Kulyabko were directly involved in the murder of Stolypin. There are many facts that indicate this. First of all, it was suspiciously easy for experienced secret police officers to believe in Bogrov’s legend about a certain Socialist Revolutionary who was going to kill Stolypin, and moreover, they allowed him to enter the theater building with a weapon for the imaginary exposure of the alleged murderer.
Zhukhrai claims that Spiridovich and Kulyabko not only knew that Bogrov was going to shoot Stolypin, but also contributed to this in every possible way. Stolypin apparently guessed that a conspiracy was brewing against him. Shortly before the murder, he dropped the following phrase: “I will be killed and killed by members of the security.”
Security abroad
In 1883, a foreign secret police was created in Paris to monitor Russian emigrant revolutionaries. And there was someone to keep an eye on: these were the leaders." People's Will» Lev Tikhomirov and Marina Polonskaya, and the publicist Pyotr Lavrov, and the anarchist Pyotr Kropotkin. It is interesting that the agents included not only visitors from Russia, but also civilian Frenchmen.
From 1884 to 1902, the foreign secret police was headed by Pyotr Rachkovsky - these were the heydays of its activity. In particular, under Rachkovsky, agents destroyed a large People's Will printing house in Switzerland. But Rachkovsky was also involved in suspicious connections - he was accused of collaborating with the French government.
When the director of the Police Department, Plehve, received a report about Rachkovsky’s dubious contacts, he immediately sent General Silvestrov to Paris to check the activities of the head of the foreign secret police. Silvestrov was killed, and soon the agent who reported on Rachkovsky was found dead.
Moreover, Rachkovsky was suspected of involvement in the murder of Plehve himself. Despite the compromising materials, high patrons from the circle of Nicholas II were able to ensure the immunity of the secret agent.