It concentrated on monitoring the activities of Russian revolutionaries abroad, including in Paris, where Okhrana agent Pyotr Rachkovsky (1853–1910) was based 1884–1902 before he returned to service in Saint Petersburg 1905–1906.

The Okhrana deployed multiple methods, including covert operations, undercover agents, and "perlustration"—the reading of private correspondence.

[3] The Okhrana became notorious for its agents provocateurs, including Jacob Zhitomirsky (born 1880, a leading Bolshevik and close associate of Vladimir Lenin), Yevno Azef (1869–1918), Roman Malinovsky (1876–1918) and Dmitry Bogrov (1887–1911).

The Communists blamed the Okhrana in part for the Bloody Sunday event of January 1905,[citation needed] when Tsarist troops[4] killed hundreds of unarmed protesters who were marching during a demonstration organized by Father Gapon.

After another failed assassination attempt, on August 6, 1880, the Emperor, acting on proposals made by Count Loris-Melikov, established the Department of State Police under Ministry of the Interior (MVD) and transferred part of the Special Corps of Gendarmes and the Third Section of the Imperial Chancellery to the new body.

The Emperor also established the Special Conference under the MVD (1881), which had the right to declare a State of Emergency Security in various parts of the Empire (which was actively used in the time of 1905 Revolution) and subordinated all of the imperial police forces to the Commander of the Gendarmes (1882).

From 1898 the Special Section (Особый отдел) of the Department of Police succeeded the Gendarmes in the role of gaining information from domestic and foreign agents and "perlustration".

[15] This focus on infiltrating and influencing revolutionary groups, rather than merely identifying and arresting their members, intensified with the innovations of one Okhrana bureau chief, Sergey Zubatov.

[18] However, Zubatov, if not police socialism, became discredited in the summer of 1903 after the Okhrana officer in charge of the Odessa union allowed a strike to get out of hand, causing a mass movement which paralyzed the region.

[20] The Okhrana complemented police socialism and other projects to prevent the conditions in which revolutionary movements could take hold by pursuing initiatives to curtail the activities of existing organizations.

This policy led to numerous dubious acts on the part of police spies, who needed to participate in revolutionary activities to avoid suspicion, as when Yevno Azef, as head of the SRFO, ordered the assassination of V. K. Plehve on July 15, 1904.

Since these attempts at repression never reached fruition, they only served to aggravate the already enraged Russian populace and to deepen their distrust of the Imperial government.

Among these factors was the ban on police spies within the military promulgated by the Deputy Minister of the Interior Vladimir Dzhunkovsky, who found the practice dishonorable and damaging to morale.

Indeed, the Okhrana's persistent focus on revolutionary groups may have resulted in the secret police not fully appreciating the deep-seated popular unrest brewing in Russia.

Revelations of the Okhrana's earlier abuses heightened public hostility towards the secret police after the 1917 February Revolution and made it very dangerous to be a political policeman.

[32] After the 1917 October Revolution, the government of the RSFSR under Vladimir Lenin replaced the Okhrana with a Soviet security organisation – the much larger and more efficient Cheka in December 1917, supplemented by the GRU (military intelligence) from October–November 1918.

The Cheka and its successor organizations (notably the GPU and the OGPU) eventually became the KGB (1954–1991) after the death of the Soviet leader Joseph Stalin in March 1953.