Malcolm Craig

A Story Game of Espionage and Revolution ‘Okhrana’ takes place in the year 1899, in the City of Light: Paris.

Fleeing from persecution in their homeland, thousands of political emigres from Czarist Russia have ended up here. But they are not alone.

For over fifteen years now, the Czarist secret police, the Okhrana, have been watching the emigres, the revolutionaries, anarchists and assassins. They gather intelligence; they counter-plot, subvert, confuse and kill.

In Okhrana the players take the roles of both the revolutionaries and their shadowy tormentors, seeking to carry out their plans and execute their schemes, all the while avoiding the attentions of the men from the Motherland.

The Okhrana In Paris In response to the assassination of Alexander II of Russia in 1881, the Czarist state formed the Okhrana. In the early days, its remit was to protect the person of the Czar, the royal family and the very institution of autocracy in Russia. But gradually, then with increasing speed, its mission expanded out to involve the infiltration, subversion and suppression of revolutionary, anarchist, independence and other groups throughout the Empire and beyond.

The Paris office opened in 1883, in a modest residence at 97 Rue de Grenelle, proving a western European base for the activities of this shadowy organisation. The Okhrana was adept at intelligence gathering, at espionage and in the use of the most modern police methods to achieve its aims. It had close ties with the French Surete Generale, which was at the time regarded as one of the foremost police agencies in Europe, if not the world.

The Okhrana employed three main methods in their work against emigre Russians. The first was naruzhnoe nabludenie or ‘external surveillance’. In this they used teams of observers and informants, stakeouts, spy operations and the consultation of files held by the Surete. The second method was vnutrenniaia agentura or ‘internal agency’, where they cunningly planted their own men and women in subversive organisations or turned certain emigres to be double agents and traitors against their own fellows. The final method was the use of agents provocateurs, seeming revolutionaries and activitists sponsored by the Okhrana to carry out acts of political violence or unrest in order that the secret police or their allies in the Surete could swoop in and ‘resolve’ the situation.

The key targets of the Okhrana office in Paris can be summarised, thusly:

Emigre and revolutionary groups operating outside the borders of the Russian Empire.

Known centres of conspiratorial activity, such as meeting houses, cafes, literary groups and so forth.

Revolutionaries arriving in Paris from Russia.

Russians with ties to known European socialists and socialist organizations.

Underground publishers and forgers (of passports, false identities, and so forth).

Bomb-manufacturing “factories and those concerned with the smuggling of weapons and explosives.

‘Defenders of the Union’ sets the characters up as a Travelling Soviet of the Peoples Armed Investigative Committee, traveling across the State to root out enemies of the people. It’s set in a USSR that never quite was, perhaps in the past, perhaps in the future. A workers paradise of pristine white apartment blocks and gleaming monorails. Written for the November 25 ‘Ronnies’, using the words ‘Soviet’ and ‘Gun’.

?Defenders of the Union? is set sometime in the future or perhaps sin the past, in a Soviet Union that never existed. It is a Soviet Union as seen through the eyes of its dreamers, it?s poets, its writers and filmmakers. Where the masses live in clean, whitewashed apartment blocks, where they labour in modern factories, where the USSR is a shining light in a world of brutal capitalistic oppression.

But no paradise is perfect and rot has set in at the core of the USSR. Malcontents, traitors, speculators and enemies of the people seek to bring down the edifice of socialist perfection. They claim all is not well, they spread dissent and treachery. And they must be ruthlessly stamped out.

However, are the enemies of the people really the liars that the Supreme Soviet would have us believe? Are their tales of the camps where millions are killed through neglect, overwork and execution mere exaggerations of the truth, or do they represent something more sinister?

In amongst the white apartment blocks, there are bloodstains on the ground. Out in the wastes of Siberia, corpses litter the snow. On far off steppes, savage little wars are fought for freedom. From the Revolution, through the wars, the gun has always been emblematic of the USSR. Even in these peaceful, happy times, a man carrying a gun, alighting from the Moscow monorail can bring fear to the most loyal kolkhoz.

On to the scene step members of the Peoples Armed Investigatory Committee, the feared gunmen of the Supreme Soviet. Clad in their forbidding padded greatcoats, carrying the great pistols that are their badges of power and authority, they descend on communities to root out enemies and ensure correct thought.