The Russian Secret Police; Muscovite, Imperial Russian and Soviet Political Security Operations

New York: Simon and Schuster, 1970. First U. S. Printing [stated]. Hardcover. Good/Good. xiii, [1], 313, [5] pages. Notes. Bibliography. Index. Some wear to top and bottom DJ edges. Some DJ soiling. Some edge soiling. Dr. Ronald Francis Hingley (26 April 1920, Edinburgh - 23 January 2010) was an English scholar, translator and historian of Russia, specializing in Russian history and literature. Hingley was the translator and editor of the nine-volume collection of Chekhov's works published by Oxford University Press between 1974 and 1980 (known as the Oxford Chekhov). He also wrote numerous books including biographies of Chekhov, Dostoyevsky, Stalin and Boris Pasternak. He won the James Tait Black Award for his 1976 biography A New Life of Anton Chekhov. He also translated several works of Russian literature, among them Alexander Solzhenitsyn's classic One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich which Hingley co-translated with Max Hayward. He was a Governing Body Fellow of St Antony's College, Oxford from 1961 to 1987 and an Emeritus Fellow from 1987 onwards. The history of the Russian secret police from 1565 (when Ivan the Terrible established the Oprichnina) to 1970. This book is a reprint of the edition originally published in 1970. This book, first published in 1970, is an important study of Russia's security services from their earliest years to the mid-twentieth century. Ronald Hingley demonstrates how the secret police acted, both under the Tsars and under Soviet rule, as a key instrument of control exercised over all fields of Russian life by an outstandingly authoritarian state. He analyses the Tsarist Third Section and Okhrana and their role in countering Russian revolutionary groups, and examines the Soviet agencies as they assumed the roles of policeman, judge and executioner. This masterly evaluation of Russian and Soviet secret police makes extensive use of hard-to-find Russian documentary sources, and is the first such research that studies Russian political security (Muscovite, Imperial and Soviet) as a whole. Ivan the Terrible implemented Oprichnina in Russia between 1565 and 1572. In the Russian Empire, the secret police forces were the Third Section of the Imperial Chancery and then the Okhrana. Agents of the Okhrana were vital in identifying and suppressing opponents of the Tsar. The Okhrana engaged in torture and infiltration of opponents.[22] They infiltrated labor unions, political parties, and newspapers.[23] After the Russian Revolution, the Soviet Union established the Cheka, OGPU, NKVD, NKGB, and MVD.[24] Cheka, as an authorized secret police force under the rule of the Bolsheviks, suppressed political opponents during the Red Terror. It also enacted counterintelligence operations such as Operation Trust, in which it set up a fake anti-Bolshevik organization to identify opponents. It was the temporary forerunner to the KGB, a later secret police agency used for similar purposes.[25] The NKVD participated in the Great Purge under Stalin.