Early Life of Joseph Stalin - Rumours of Being An Okhranka Agent

Rumours of Being An Okhranka Agent

Stalin's apparent ease in escaping from Tsarist persecution and very light sentences bore rumours of him being an Okhranka agent. His efforts in 1909 to root out traitors caused much strife within the party; some accused him of doing this deliberately on the orders of the Okhranka. The Menshevik Razhden Arsenidze accused Stalin of betraying comrades he didn't like to the Okhranka. The prominent Bolshevik Stepan Shahumyan directly accused Stalin of being an Okhranka agent in 1916. According to his personal secretary Olga Shatunovskaya, these opinions were shared by Stanislav Kosior, Iona Yakir and other prominent Bolsheviks. The rumours were reinforced by being published in the Soviet Union memoirs of Domenty Vadachkory who wrote Stalin used an Okhranka badge (supposedly stolen) to help him escape exile. It also appears suspicious that Stalin played down the number of his escapes from prisons and exiles. Still there was no hard evidence of Stalin collaboration with the Okhranka were found and a few alleged reports from Stalin to the Okhranka published by media appear to be forgeries.

Historian Simon Sebag Montefiore, found that in all surviving Okhranka records Stalin is described as a revolutionary and never a spy. Montefiore argues Stalin escaped from his exiles so frequently because the exile system was not secure: an exile only needed money and false papers to escape the village where he was settled, and thousands did. Stalin also had spies of his own in the Okhranka, warning him of their actions. In 1956, the magazine Life published a letter by Colonel Ermin, head of the Tiflis Okhranka, that said Stalin was an agent, but it has since been shown to be a forgery. In his 1967 biography of Stalin, Edward Ellis Smith argued that Stalin was an Okhranka agent by citing his suspicious ability to escape from Okhranka dragnets, travel unimpeded, and rabble-rouse full-time with no apparent source of income. One such example was the raid that occurred on the night of April 3, 1901, when nearly everyone of importance in the Socialist-Democratic movement in Tiflis was arrested, except for Stalin, who was apparently "enjoying the balmy spring air, and in one of his to-hell-with-the-revolution moods, is too impossible for serious consideration." Montefiore, however, wrote that Stalin spotted Okhranka agents waiting for him outside his place of employment whilst he was riding a tram; he stayed on the tram and immediately went into hiding.

A speculation exists, that some Bolshevisks were in fact double agents. Since there was no practical way for the revolutionaries to avoid eventual infiltration of their ranks by the Okhranka provocateurs, the leaders secretly allowed some to become agents in order to gain more benefits for their cause than they had to trade in. A possible example of this was Roman Malinovsky, who was exposed beyond any doubt to have been a provocateur, yet he returned to Russia from abroad after the October Revolution in hopes of being acquitted. And Lenin was very reluctant at believing the evidence, saying the release of it might have been intended by the Okhranka to play the Bolsheviks against one another (which it indeed might have been, if they had figured out Malinovsky's real loyalties). However, faced with the consequences of admitting such a shady practice and the possibility of exposing other such double agents who remained valuable to the party, Lenin had to give up and Malinovsky was shot.