Ochrana
The Ochrana ( Russian охрана or in the diminutive form Ochranka ) was the unofficial generic term for the various secret services and the secret police in Tsarist Russia . The official name for it was Ochrannoje otdelenie ( Охранное отделение , German: "Security Department").
It was in 1881 by Tsar Alexander III. founded and was under the Ministry of the Interior. It emerged from the third department of his Imperial Majesty's own chancellery , which had been set up by Tsar Nicholas I in 1826 after the Decembrist uprising .
This department already performed the tasks of a political secret police. The Ochrana was considered to be a quite effective secret police organ in the fight against political deviants and violent terrorists, at least more effectively than other police institutions in Russia. Even Colonel Redl worked with the secret police and betrayed important operational plans of the Austria-Hungarian army in Russia. After the October Revolution , the Ochrana was dissolved in 1917.
Presumably it was the Ochrana who faked the anti-Semitic protocols of the Elders of Zion to strengthen the position of Tsar Nicholas II . Even today, the ochrana is therefore a popular subject in countless conspiracy and Illuminati theories.
In 1904, the activities of Ochrana agents in Germany uncovered by Hugo Haase were the subject of the Königsberg secret society trial and several Reichstag debates.
In literary terms, Joseph Roth (1894–1939) addressed the arbitrariness of the tsarist secret police in his novel Confession of a Murderer, Told in One Night (1936). The official regulations of the Ochrana served later Soviet secret services, regardless of the completely opposite political interests, as a model, because here a lot of secret police experience z. B. on the recruitment of informants or the covered monitoring and observation of interested persons were summarized.
literature
- AT Vassilyev: The Ochrana. The russian secret police. Edited and with an introduction by René Fülöp-Miller . Harrap, London et al. 1930 (German edition: AT Wassiljew: Ochrana. From the papers of the last Russian police director. Amalthea-Verlag, Zurich / Leipzig / Vienna 1930).
- Alexander Gerasimoff: The fight against the first Russian revolution. Memories. Huber, Frauenfeld et al. 1934.
- Ronald Gaucher: Saboteurs and assassins. Modern terrorism. Kiepenheuer & Witsch, Cologne et al. 1967, DNB 456705139 .
- Ben B. Fischer: Okhrana. The Paris operations of the Russian Imperial Police. Central Intelligence Agency, Washington DC 1997, LCCN 98-115239 .
- Ochrana. In: Helmut Roewer , Stefan Schäfer, Matthias Uhl : Lexicon of secret services in the 20th century . With organizational charts. Herbig, Munich 2003, ISBN 3-7766-2317-9 , p. 325.
- Jürgen W. Schmidt: Social revolutionary terror and its influence on the beginnings of the Ochrana activity in Russian Turkestan from 1906. In: Jürgen W. Schmidt (Hg.): Espionage, Terror and Special Operations Forces. Case studies and documents from 140 years of secret service history. Berlin 2019, ISBN 978-3-89574-965-0 , pp. 65–80.
- Jürgen W. Schmidt: A remarkable Ochrana document: The "observation instruction" from 1906. In: Jürgen W. Schmidt (ed.): Espionage, Terror und Spezialeausführung. Case studies and documents from 140 years of secret service history. Berlin 2019, ISBN 978-3-89574-965-0 , pp. 233-238.
