Rick Spence

probably the Soviets would come somewhat ahead of that.

Well, there's an interesting question for me. I mean, there are all kinds of questions about this. I mean, one of the questions is whether or not Lenin was an Okhrana agent. Okay, I've just said heresy. I'll do that quite often because I am a heretic and proud of it. Great. Why would you possibly say that Lenin could have been an Okhrana agent? Well, let's look what he managed to do.

So you had, coming into the 20th century, nominally a single Marxist movement, the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party. And Bolsheviks and Mensheviks, majorityites and minorityites, are merely factions of that party. And they always agreed that they were all Marxists and We all believe in dialectical materialism and the rise of... We're all socialists, comrade.

The difference was the tactical means by which one would attain this. And what Lenin wanted was a militant, small-scale vanguard party. He wanted a revolution. He wanted to seize power, seize control of the state. And once you have the state, then you induce socialism from above.

Whereas the majority of the people, the so-called Mensheviks, the minorityites, who are, oddly enough, the vast majority of the party, that's one of the first things. How do you lose that argument? How does the minority get to grab the name majorityites? But Lenin did that.

So what Lenin wanted was a conspiratorial party of committed revolutionaries that would plot and scheme and undermine and eventually seize control of the state and induce socialism from above. There were other Russian Marxists who thought that that sounded vaguely totalitarian and not really democratic and not even terribly socialist. And they opposed that, ineffectively, from the beginning.

Outmaneuvered every step of the way. The Mensheviks are a case study in failure of a political organization. That, too, will be heresy to some people. But look, they lost. Now, so what Lenin managed to do, starting around 1903, continuing on to this, is he managed to divide Russia. to take what had been a single Marxist party and split it into angry, contending factions.

Because he and his Bolsheviks were on one side, advocating a much more militant conspiratorial policy. The discombobulated Mensheviks were over on the other, and in between were a lot of people who really didn't know where they stood on this. I mean, sometimes they kind of agree, and he seems to be making sense today. No, no, I don't think he's making sense in that day.

But he managed to completely disunify this organization. Now, who could possibly have seen benefit in that? The Ograna. Now, whether or not they put him up to it, whether or not in some way they...

helped move him into a position of leadership, or encouraged it, or encouraged it through people around him, whether he was a witting or unwitting agent of the Zara secret police, he certainly accomplished exactly what it was that they had wanted. And I find that suspicious. It's one of those things that it's so convenient in a way is that I'm not necessarily sure that was an accident.

There's also this whole question to me as to what was going on within the Okrana itself. And this is one of these questions when I come to you later about how intelligence agencies interact or serve with the governments to which they are theoretically subordinate. They do tend to acquire a great deal of influence and power. After all, their main job is to collect information.

And that information could be about all kinds of things, including people within the government structure itself. And they also know how to leverage that information in a way to get people to do what you want them to do.

So an argument can be made, again, an argument, not a fact, merely an opinion, which is mostly what history is made out of, opinions, is that at some point, between about 1900 and 1917, people in the Ocrana were playing their own game. And that game took them in a direction which meant that continued loyalty to the emperor, specifically to Nicholas II, was no longer part of that.

To me, in a way, it seems almost during the events of 1917 that, one, you had an organization that was very effective when it did that suddenly just becomes ineffective. It doesn't really disappear. These things don't go away because it will reappear as the Ochaka basically fairly quickly.

But it raises the question to me as to what degree there were people within the organization who allowed events to take the course they wished.

Well, one of the key elements in any kind of intelligence organization or operation is compartmentalization. Need to know. So rarely do you have an occasion where everybody, everybody in an executive position are all brought into a big corporate meeting and we discuss all of the secret operations that are going on. No, no, you never do that.

Only a very limited number of people should know about that. If you have a person who is a case officer who's controlling agents, he's the only one who should know who those people are, possibly his immediate superiors. But in no way do you want that to be common knowledge. So information within the organization itself is compartmentalized. So you don't need everybody to be in on it.

You don't even need necessarily the people who are nominally at the top. For instance, the Ocrana, the real boss of the Ocrana was the Imperial Ministry of the Interior. The Minister of the Interior, in fact. But the Minister of the Interior had no real effective control over this at all.

I mean, to the point was that at one point early on, they actually organized the assassination of their own boss. They have their agents among the revolutionaries kill the minister of the interior. Because he'll just be replaced by another one. He's an imperial bureaucrat. He's not really part of their organization.

You know, it's like a director of an intelligence agency appointed by the president. Maybe he's part of the organization. Maybe he isn't. Maybe he is not one of us. So you've got... different levels, different compartments within it, and who's actually running the show, if anyone is. I don't know. That's never supposed to be apparent.