The Russian Secret Police

Muscovite, Imperial Russian and Soviet Political Security Operations 1565–1970

Ronald Hingley

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN:
  9780367752521
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000371352
• Topic: Computer Science
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: Computer Science

This book, first published in 1970, is an important study of Russia's security services from their earliest years to the mid-twentieth century. Ronald Hingley demonstrates how the secret police acted, both under the Tsars and under Soviet rule, as a key instrument of control exercised over all fields of Russian life by an outstandingly authoritarian state. He analyses the Tsarist Third Section and Okhrana and their role in countering Russian revolutionary groups, and examines the Soviet agencies as they assumed the roles of policeman, judge and executioner. This masterly evaluation of Russian and Soviet secret police makes extensive use of hard-to-find Russian documentary sources, and is the first such research that studies Russian political security (Muscovite, Imperial and Soviet) as a whole.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1 From the Oprichnina to the Decembrists (1565–1825)
• 2 The Third Section under Nicholas I (1826–1855)
• 3 The Third Section under Alexander II (1855–1880)
• 4 The Nineteenth-Century Okhrana (1880–1900)
• 5 The Okhrana in the Age of Assassinations (1901–1908)
• 6 The Decline and Fall of the Okhrana (1908–1917)
• 7 The Cheka (1917–1922)
• 8 The GPU/OGPU (1922–1934)
• 9 The NKVD under Yagoda and Yezhov (1934–1938)
• 10 Beria and the NKVD/NKGB (1938–1945)
• 11 Beria and the MVD/MGB (1945–1953)
• 12 The KGB under Khrushchev (1954–1964)
• 13 The KGB after Khrushchev (1964–1970)
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index