Vladimir Putin’s Hall of Mirrors

Vladimir Putin likes to associate today’s Russian Federation with the old Russian empire, and in one sense he is right. The Russian empire was the most repressive state of its era, with the most refined state police: the Okhrana. Russian revolutionaries, the men and women who would establish the Soviet state, were educated by its methods. It did not simply hunt them down; it ensnared them, often without their knowledge, in a complicated dance of incriminating their comrades. It specialized in provocations. It knew how to make its enemies do the work for it.

Intelligence work means finding things out. Counterintelligence means making this difficult for others. At the far fringe of counterintelligence are operations designed not just to confuse the world but to change it: in Russian, or . The Cheka, as the Bolshevik state-security apparatus was known, took over and extended these methods of the Okhrana. Communist ideology