3,257
edits
Changes
→Later Russia
Foreign intelligence gathering became established professionally by 1810 in Russia through the creation of what eventually became called the Special Bureau. Initially, foreign gathering intelligence was part of the military. This was seen as crucial for Russia to keep enemies such as the Ottoman Empire and European states away. This tradition of developing the main spying services as serving as part of the larger military structure has stayed with Russia to this day, as the GRU (Main Intelligence Directorate) carried out most of the spying that occurred in the Soviet Union days and after the fall of the Soviet Union.<ref>For more on the Special Bureau and related agencies that eventually helped form the GRU, see: Pringle, Robert W. 2006. <i>Historical Dictionary of Russian and Soviet Intelligence</i>. Historical Dictionaries of Intelligence and Counterintelligence Series 5. Lanham, Md: Scarecrow Press.</ref>
In the late 19th century Romanov Russia, a new department was developed to create a modern espionage service. 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. <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 seen as a counter weight to other leftist violent groups. Lenin was opposed to many of the other opposition parties, leading Okhrana to silently supporting him as a counterweight. This also 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, 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.<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>
==Rise of the Soviet Spy System==
