Fontanka 16: The Tsars' Secret Police.

Fontanka 16: The Tsars' Secret Police, by Charles A. Ruud and Sergei A. Stepanov. Montreal, Quebec, McGill-Queen's University Press, 1999. ix. 394 pp: $39.95 Cdn (cloth).

In late nineteenth-century St. Petersburg, the address "Fontanka 16" became a shorthand for "secret police." From the 1830s until 1917, the tsarist secret political police, the Okhranka, was headquartered there. In co-operation with the military police -- the Corps of Gendarmes -- the Okhranka worked to detect and counteract subversion against the Russian state. By the time of the collapse of the Russian autocracy in February 1917, Okhranka informants kept watch virtually everywhere.

This wide-ranging study, a revised version of the authors' 1994 Russian-language work, focuses on the activities of the Okhranka and the Gendarmes from the 1880s to 1917. Charles A. Ruud and …