Eremin letter

The letter said that Joseph Stalin after being administratively exiled to the Turukhansky District, because of having been arrested in 1906, gave valuable intelligence information to the head of the Tiflis Provincial Directorate.

The claim that Stalin worked for the Okhrana has been made multiple times, but the Eremin letter is the only document that corroborates it.

Even among emigrants with anti-Soviet attitude, this “document” caused a sceptical reaction:“And finally, one cannot ignore the noisy publication in the New York magazine Life (issue dated April 23) of a false document attempting to prove that Stalin was an agent of the Okhrana under tsarism.

[1] Stephen Kotkin, an acclaimed biographer of Stalin, said that it was normal for the Okhrana to cast doubts over genuine revolutionaries, by saying they were police agents.

[7] Kotkin remarked that in a certain occasion, one former Okhrana chief boasted, triumphant, that the revolutionaries started to suspect each other, so that in the end none of them could trust each other.

The alleged original Letter
From top to bottom: “Eremin’s signature” under a false document, a signature engraved on a silver jug, Eremin’s signature on a letter dated May 8, 1913, Eremin’s signatures on documents from the Finnish archives.