--Vladimir Nabokov has written that Russian history can be considered from two viewpoints: 'First as the evolution of the police... and second, as the development of a marvelous culture.' In this important new study of Russia's security services from the sixteenth century to the present day, Ronald Hingley reveals how intimately these two strands are linked. As he shows, the secret police has acted, both under the Tsars and under Soviet rule, as a key instrument of control exercised over all fields of Russian life by an outstandingly authoritarian state.-The Tsarist sec police is prominent in the demonology of modern Soviet historians. But Dr. Hingley shows that police repression was seldom rigorously applied by later standards, and certainly never involved the entire Russian people in terror, unless Ivan the Terrible's Oprichnina (which committed excesses unmatched in pre-Leninist Russia) can be considered a police organization. Under the Third Section (1826-80) and the Okhrana (1880-1917), revolutionary groups were penetrated by police spies-and answer this penetration bycounter-penetration-to such an extent that both lost momentum and became utterly bewildered. Some of the double, triple and yet more multiple agents played off the police against the revolutionaries and vice versa: often with results fatal to themselves. For a time Stalin Sly an Okhrana agent in effect, and Lenin see revolutionary Bolsheviks were heavily saturated by police agents. But although the Okhrana indulged in 'provocation', and its techniques became increasingly sophisticated, its spokesmen's claim that it was an essentially investigatory body was not wildly exaggerated. Soviet security agencies, on the other hand, soon assumed the duties of policeman, judge and executioner. Within five years the Cheka was responsible for more political arrests and executions than had occurred during the entire sway of the Third Section and the Okhrana.The Cheka's successor, the GPU/OGPU, collaborated with Stalin in the liquidation of the kulaks, and it was partly through the help of Dzerzhinsky, the security chief, that Stalin had begun to assert his ascendancy over the Party in the first place. Stalin's Great Terror of1937-38, with its notorious show-trials (during which both prosecutor and accused fought for their lives) and its multi-million arrests, was organised by the NKVD under three notorious police chiefs: Yagoda, Yezhov and Beria. In his masterly discussion of Stalin's terror apparatus, Dr. Hingley has made extensive use of evidence recently forthcoming from Russia herself, including that bearing on the deportation of nationalities. His book ends with a portrait of the modern KGB and its place in the Soviet power-structure, and an evaluation of Soviet political security from 1945 to the present day.This is, so far as is known, the first work in which Russian political police methods (Muscovite, Imperial and Soviet) have been studied as a whole.