Changes

In the late 19th century Romanov Russia, a new department was developed to create a modern espionage servicethat focused on mostly domestic services. This was the Department for Protecting the Public Security and Order, or Okhrana, which was also mostly a secret police organization. The department was created as a reaction to the attempted assassination of Alexander II in 1866. While most of their activity was to protect the Russian state, they increasingly were concerned with revolutionary ideas that had begun to spread in Europe. This included concerns about left-leaning groups that began to openly oppose the tsar, thus they also infiltrated foreign groups or Russian exiles abroad.<ref>For more on the Okhrana, see: Lauchlan, Iain. 2002. <i>Russian Hide-and-Seek: The Tsarist Secret Police in St. Petersburg, 1906-1914</i>. Studia Historica 67. Helsinki: SKS-FLS.</ref>

The Okhrana were unprepared for the 1905 Russian Revolution, where their actions may have even made events even worse for the regime. Often, agents worked in small groups and did not coordinate activities. This meant information was not well shared and it was not able to properly identify a large, national-level movement had been launched. Reforms after 1905 included creating spy stations in various cities in Russia that would enable the Okhrana, which was within the wider policing structure of the Russian state, to try to centralize information and be better prepared to root out conspiracies. One role the Okhrana became involved with was promoting counter groups to offset revolutionary groups. In fact , the Bolsheviks were , initially at least, seen as a counter weight counterweight to other leftist violent groupsthat were often seen as a greater threat to the state. Nevertheless, prominent members, who later became well known communists, such as Stalin, were detained by the Okhrana at various times for subversive activity or even simple criminal activity (Figure 2). However, Lenin was opposed to many of the other opposition parties, leading Okhrana to silently supporting support him as a counterweight. This also , overall, helped make Okhrana less able to see the rise of the Bolsheviks as a major threat. In fact, in the events of 1917 that led to the overthrow of the Russian monarch, Okhrana's failure was to not monitor the military, where the Bolsheviks and other revolutionaries had many sympathizers, as it saw military espionage as not honorable. Many of the revolutionaries ultimately came from the military. Despite its shortcomings, the succeeding Soviet agencies initially modeled themselves after the Okhrana, specifically the Cheka which became the first secret police after the fall of the Russian Empire. The use of local spy bases and networks that were better coordinated did serve as a useful model for later secret police.<ref>For more on the failure of the Russian spying services to stop the 1917 overthrow, see: Lee, Stephen J. 2006. <i>Russia and the USSR, 1855-1991: Autocracy and Dictatorship</i>. Questions and Analysis in History. London ; New York: Routledge, pg. 73.</ref>