Paul
Goble
Staunton, June 13 – An important
source of Stalin’s paranoia and repressive actions lay in his knowledge of the
success the tsarist secret police had in penetrating all opposition political
parties before 1917. According to the archives, the Okhrana had more than
10,000 paid agents in these parties, including 2,000 in the Bolshevik Party,
and 40,000 more who cooperated.
Part of this network was exposed just
after the revolution, Pavel Pryanikov’s Tolkovatel
portal says; but many of the records were destroyed by revolutionary crowds and
thus at least some were able to escape being punished, as the trials of others
showed (ttolk.ru/articles/sistema_iz_10_tyisyach_provokatorov_tsarskoy_ohranki_i_paranoyya_stalinskih_repressiy).
“This fact must be
considered when we talk about the causes of the repressions of the 1920s and
1930s (and even of the 1940s and 1950s),” Tolkovatel says. “Only after October
1917 was exposed the extent of the infiltration of agents among the opposition,
including among the Bolsheviks.”
In the event, the site continues, “paranoia reached the top of the Bolshevik Party, especially given that … part of the cases on the provocateurs had been destroyed. Each could suspect another of being a secret agent of the Okhrana … Some Bolsheviks suspected that even Stalin had been a secret agent of the gendarmerie,” not to speak of more junior party people.
“Moreover, many of the provocateurs
were double agents, working for the Russian Okhrana and foreign intelligence
services” and that not surprisingly gave the OGPU and NKVD the occasion to look
for “’spies under the beds.’”
Tolkovatel quotes extensively from
Vladimir Ignatov’s 2014 book about the intelligence service operations of this
kind. According to it, “of the 10,000 exposed agents, about 5,000 were Social
Revolutionaries,” about the same number among the Bolsheviks, and sizeable numbers
in the Bund, Paolei Tsion and Polish left.
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