Pyotr Rachkovsky

Pyotr Ivanovich Rachkovsky (Пётр Иванович Рачковский; 1853 – 1 November 1910) was chief of Okhrana, the secret service in Imperial Russia. He was based in Paris from 1885 to 1902. After the assassination of Alexander II of Russia in 1881, the government moved against various revolutionary factions operated by émigrées or hiding out in Russia. Rachkovsky's principal mission was to compromise Russia's growing revolutionary movement. The list of penetration agents hired by Rachkovsky included: Landesen (Abraham Hackelman), among the Narodnaya Volya terrorists in France and Switzerland Ignaty Kornfeld, among the Anarcho-Communists Prodeus, a well-known revolutionary, reporting on various revolutionary centers Ilya Drezhner, among the Social Democrats in Germany, Switzerland, and France Boleslaw Malankiewicz, among the Polish anarchists and terrorists in London Casimir Pilenas, a spotter for Scotland Yard recruited to work among the Latvian terrorists Zinaida Zhuchenko, among the Socialist Revolutionaries and their terrorist Fighting Unit Aleksandr Evalenko, assigned to New York City for work among the Jewish Bundists and terrorists According to journalist Brian Doherty: "Rachkovsky started as a possibly sincere, possibly duplicitous mover in St. Petersburg's radical underground in the late 1870s, after having been dismissed (for leniency toward political exiles) from a job as a prosecutor for the czar's government. He ended up running the show for the Okhrana, the Russian secret police, in Paris, where so many radicals considered dangerous to the czarist regime had immigrated. From 1885 until 1902, Rachkovsky was responsible for keeping anarchists under surveillance and on the run—and also, in many cases, financed and supplied with ideas... "[P]rominent among his early initiatives were provocations designed to lure credulous émigrés into the most heinous crimes of which they may never have otherwise conceived". Rachkovsky’s aim was to entrap his targets into committing acts that would help ensure that his job seemed of vital importance to the czar.