Fontanka 16: The Tsars' Secret Police

Rolf Hellebust is a professor of Russian language and literature at the
University of Calgary.

Number 16 on the Fontanka Embankment, St. Petersburg, is where Tsar
Nicholas I established the headquarters of his political police in 1826.
Until 1917, it remained the central office of what Russians would come
to call the Okhranka. During the first part of its existence, the
imperial security service was chiefly involved in censorship and the
tracking of public opinion through letter-opening and other forms of
spying. However, by 1881, when Russian terrorism peaked with the killing
of Tsar Alexander II, the Okhranka was faced with a genuine and
unrelenting threat to national security in the form of a multitude of
shadowy revolutionary organizations.

One of the observations of this well-written book is the extent to
which the subversives resembled their tsarist opponents in both
personality and political method. Fontanka 16 is a solid academic work
that will also appeal to nonspecialist history buffs with its stories of
double agents, assassinations, and high-level intrigue. Of particular
interest are the chapters on the anti-Semitic disturbances of the last
decades of the Empire, including the legend (refuted by the authors) of
the Okhranka’s involvement in the concoction of the infamous Protocols
of the Elders of Zion. Ruud and Stepanov also describe in fascinating
detail the futile efforts of the security service to save the image of
the royal family by intervening in the Rasputin affair. Although the
ever-increasing resources devoted by the Okhranka to its battle with
subversion led to some notable successes, the regime’s ultimate fate
of the regime depended on factors far beyond the reach of any of the
ingenious tools in the security service’s secret arsenal.