Word: okhrana
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...make his own distinctly Russian substitute for a "form of social order," Czar Nicholas I (called "The Nightstick") in 1826 decided to create a new thing, a secret police which later came to be called the Okhrana (Guard). The inception of this dreadful institution took place in a scene of sentimental horror. When the Okhrana's first chief, Count Alexander Benckendorff, reported to the Czar for instructions, the monarch pulled a white handkerchief from his pocket and said: "Dry the tears of the oppressed. May your conscience and the conscience of your subordinates ever remain as stainless as this...
Most unscrupulous and most famous Okhrana agent was Evno Azef. He went so far in preventive criminology that he became a leader of the pre-revolutionary Socialists whom he was assigned to watch. He betrayed each side to the other, not once or twice, but day in & day out over nearly 20 years. He sent his revolutionary comrades to Siberia and organized the murder of several Czarist bigwigs. Where did his real sympathies lie? Probably with Azef. He managed to get out of the country and lived out his days in Germany, peacefully playing the stockmarket and horsing around...
...institutions and tried to impose a form of society of which 99 Russians out of 100 had never heard, which had not been tried anywhere, and for which Russia was called unfit by the very men who had invented this idea of society. If Czarism needed an Okhrana, clearly the Bolshevist state would need a super-Okhrana to fill the larger social vacuum...