Agents and provocateurs of the Vladivostok fortress security department (1907 - 1908)

After the Russo-Japanese War ended and the 1905 Russian Revolution was suppressed in the European part of Russia, Vladivostok witnessed growing anti-government activities of revolutionary parties and groups that would resort to violent methods of struggle for power. In this situation in 1906 the Police Department of the Ministry of Internal Affairs set up a Security Department in the Vladivostok Fortress. This institution of the Russian Empire's political police was aimed at fighting against revolutionary movement, primarily by infiltrating secret agents into underground organizations, and their elimination by means of provocation. The article using previously unpublished archival documents describes the biographies and professional activities of two secret agents from the Security Department of the Vladivostok Fortress in 1907-1908. The author reveals their active participation in successful and unsuccessful operations initiated by the Security Department, including the ones on the territory of Japan. The focus is made on the role they played in operations aimed to spot and eliminate the terrorist groups of the Socialist Revolutionaries on the eve and after the Vladivostok revolt which occurred in October 1907 in land-based units and on the ships of the Russian Pacific Fleet. These operations ended in a big scandal involving not only the secret agents themselves, but also the head of the Security Department of the Vladivostok Fortress Lieutenant-Colonel A.D. Zavaritsky. The author argues that it was due to the provocateurs' actions that people who had no connection with the revolutionary underground were subjected to repressions. Fearing exposure, they accused their head of the provocation, but it was in vain: they found themselves in the dock together with LieutenantColonel A.D. Zavaritsky. Moreover, Zavaritsky's case revealed a low level of professional qualification and exploiting of secret agents in operations against terrorist underground organizations.