Okhrana: Seeds of Paranoia in Revolutionary Russia

Zersetzung: A History of Breaking Minds — Book 3

Long before the KGB, the Stasi, or COINTELPRO, there was the Okhrana — the Tsarist secret police that turned espionage into a science of repression.

From the ashes of Alexander II’s assassination in 1881, the Okhrana rose to defend the Romanov dynasty with methods that shocked even its enemies. Agent provocateurs incited plots only to betray them. Informants mapped every network of dissidents. Intercepted mail, photographic dossiers, and psychological profiling created a proto-database of suspicion. And through false leaks, staged arrests, and selective repression, the Okhrana perfected the art of turning comrades against each other.

This book uncovers how the Okhrana weaponized infiltration and paranoia to weaken movements without mass executions — a strategy that became the template for every secret police system that followed. Though swept away with the fall of the Tsar in 1917, its methods flowed directly into the Bolshevik Cheka, the Soviet NKVD and KGB, and echoed later in the Gestapo, Stasi, and FBI’s COINTELPRO.

Part history, part analysis, The Okhrana reveals the birth of modern political policing — where the true battlefield was not the streets of Russia, but the trust between comrades.

If you’ve read The Jesuit Counter-Reformation (Book 1) and The Inquisition (Book 2), this third volume continues the series Zersetzung: A History of Breaking Minds, tracing how centuries of repression evolved into the psychological warfare of the modern age.