For some time now I have been a student of the decades long secret war between Russian revolutionaries and the tsarist police. (Attentive readers of this website will be aware that my research culminated a decade ago in a book about the possibility that Stalin had been a tsarist polie agent.) From time to time, new books come out about the Okhrana, though these are usually aimed at academic audiences. Not so Richard Pipes’ 2003 volume, The Degaev Affair: Terror and Treason in Tsarist Russia.

From its very cover, you can tell that Pipes (or his publisher) was aiming a larger audience. The text on the back cover is what enticed me to pick this one up yesterday.
“Those who knew and admired Alexander Pell at the University of South Dakota never guessed that he was actually [Sergei] Degaev, a revolutionary who had reinvented himself as a quiet mathematics professor.”
Pipes, the author of several dozen books, in this short volume aimed to look at the two personalities — the danger Russian double agent who eventually murdered his police controller and the quiet mathematics professor — but really, the book is almost entirely about the former and about the underground war that raged in Russia in the late 1870s and early 1880s between the Party of the People’s Will (these guys had great imagination in their names) and the tsarist regime.
Pipes makes one or two guarded references to terrorism in general and considers the People’s Will to be the first terrorist organization ever. But any hint that there is some kind of historic link between the Russian revolutionaries of that time and Islamic terrorism today should be dismissed at once. The forerunners of Al Qaeda are not to be found in the secular and idealistic fighters against tsarist oppression but, perhaps, in earlier times, among fanatics who gave the world the term “assassins”.
That having been said, Pipes writes clearly and his research is comprehensive. (He even photographed the toilet in the apartment Degaev used to murder his police boss in 1883.)
What struck me was how old was the tsarist police strategy of “provocation” really was. We tend to associate this strategy — which involved “turning” genuine revolutionaries not only into informers, but actually to use them to gain control over revolutionary organizations — with a later period, during the struggle against the SRs and Bolsheviks.
But apparently as early as a quarter century before the notorious cases of Azef and Malinovsky, the police were already playing a dangerous game. Pipes seems convinced that with all its danger, the game actually worked. The Party of the People’s Will, its very cool name notwithstanding, couldn’t stand up the onslaught and withered away.
In some senses, it makes one question whether such a strategy would work today. Following Pipes’ own assertion that there is some kind of continuity in terrorism, should the West be infiltrating groups like Al Qaeda, “turning” its members into informers, and seeking to sow mistrust within its ranks? Is this something that is already taking place?
It is also a warning that this is indeed a dangerous game. Lt. Col. Sudeikin, Degaev’s victim, had himself hatched an incredible scheme that involved making himself indispensable to the tsar by arranging the murder by terrorists of key tsarist officials. A generation later, the Okhrana would be doing this as a matter of course, and its super-moles like Azef would play a double and triple game of informing while simultaneously carrying out a terrorist campaign against the regime.
A very readable volume (I love short books) and a real contribution to our understanding of the decades-long war in the shadows between the tsarist regime and its opponents.