Stephen Kotkin

So you have a small police that's dedicated to surveillance and infiltration.

You're reading their mail, which, by the way, is something that's invented in France.

The black cabinets are a French invention that the Tsarist secret police borrow.

So you're following them, and a lot of them get deported to Siberian exile, like happened to Stalin.

Some get forced into European exile, like happened to Lenin.

Lenin, for 15 of the 17 years between 1900 and 1917, is in European exile.

He's not even in Russia.

And in fact, the Paris branch of the Tsarist secret police, the Ochranka, the Paris branch, which conducted the surveillance and infiltration in Europe, we have that entire archive right here at the Hoover Institution.

It was supposed to be destroyed.

The order went to destroy it in Paris after the revolution.

And instead, the guy put it on a boat and secretly had it shipped here to the United States.

And so now we have the Tsarist Russian archive secret police for the revolutionaries in foreign exile.

So you have surveillance and infiltration on a lower level.

The main force of repression in Tsarist Russia is the army, not the secret police.

You don't have a gigantic armed secret police.

The secret police are kind of intellectuals.

They're reading Lenin's tracks and they're writing summaries like AI would do now about what they contain and how to combat it and why the idea is wrong.

They're sort of like pseudo intellectuals or in some cases intellectuals with degrees.

They're not the thugs, the torturers and the thugs that we would associate with secret police.

That's built under Stalin in order to enact the reinservment, the enslavement of the 100 million peasants.