Word: okhrana
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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...
...Russia the Soviet secret service has had a long and fascinating history, increasing in respectability with the years. Members of the dread Tsarist Okhrana were remarkably successful in insinuating themselves into the Cheka of Lenin which conducted the original so-called "Red Terror." So odious did the Cheka become that it was finally supposed to have been purged of its baser elements and was renamed the Ogpu. Under the late great Felix Dzerzhinsky, an extremely able and somewhat sadistic Pole, the Ogpu became internationally odious but in Russia it saved the Bolshevik Dictatorship from being overthrown by popular and democratic...