Okhrana

Anti-Semitism is a big thing in Russia.

Lest we forget that the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the forged document claiming a massive Jewish conspiracy, that comes out of Russia in 1903, and it was almost certainly penned by the Tsar's secret police, the Okhrana.

So the state is sponsoring this kind of terrorist violence.

And generally speaking, those loyal to the Tsar, these sort of right-wing monarchist terrorist groups, they tend to be violently anti-Semitic.

So he launches a police investigation to prove that this guy was basically a charlatan.

And as such, Rasputin is one of the most heavily monitored people in Russia at this time.

He is followed night and day by the Okhrana, the Tsar's secret police.

And they're the ones who file these stories about him hiring out train cars that move around and he has orgies in them.

On the Patreon, we'll be discussing Beria in full detail.

But yeah, he's the head of the NKVD, which was the Cheka, which was the Okrana.

Beria is the Mengele of this story, really.

He's sort of like, you know, he's gone on an alt direction, but sort of, you know, focused.

The organization that was behind the beginning of the 1905 revolution, led by Father Capone, was actually started by the Tsarist regime itself.

The idea came from Sergei Zubitov, chief of the Moscow Okhrana, which was the secret police of the time.

Zubatov, with the blessing of Grand Duke Sergei, who was the governor general of Moscow, began to organize trade unions in order to help control what was going on within them.

The reasoning is that the trade unions were the breeding grounds for radical thinking, revolution, and the increased numbers of workers' strikes all over Russia.

And to say that because we cannot win, we should not stage an insurrection, that is simply the talk of cowards.

What would set the protesters off in Moscow was the arrest of the St. Petersburg Soviet on December 3rd.

A general strike was called on to begin on the 7th, and it would remain peaceful until the 11th, when the socialist revolutionaries bombed the Moscow headquarters for the Okhrana.

It would set off a chain of events that would force the Tsar to call on the Semenovsky Regiment to move to Moscow from St. Petersburg to squash the rebellion.

Yeah.

Uh, but the tsar is still in charge with his Okhrana-

Yeah

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We don't really have a comparable model, but active measures...

And it goes, it goes all the way back even to the Czarist days, the Okhrana, the Czarist intelligence service, and it goes all the way up to, to today.

The Russian model is, I think, very much grounded in a deep sense of geographic insecurity that, that the Russians feel.

Active measures is basically this idea that we want our adversaries to be weak and internally divided, so how do we as an intelligence service go out and create the information and cultural and political realities or amplify division inside our adversaries so that they are weak and less able to confront us on international stage? And, I mean, the Russians did this throughout the Cold War with things like spreading, um, they spread misinformation that the CIA was responsible for creating the AIDS virus.