Fontanka 16: The Tsar's Secret Police by Charles A. Ruud, Sergei A. Stepanov (review)

454 letters in canada 1999 women. Furthermore, government legislation (the Indian Act of 1869, extended to Manitoba in 1874) virtually erased the aboriginal woman's identity and excluded her from public service work, the subject of one of Kinnear's later chapters. This chapter on women's volunteer work and political activism provides some new material, particularly on electoral politics and the women who ran for office. Kinnear notes that pre-1939 women candidates`claimed common cause with other women,' while `after the war they seemed to consider that plea irrelevant, or unhelpful.' All the women candidates, including Margaret McWilliams, whose presence permeates A Female Economy, shared a background as community activists, a kind of female apprenticeship for electoral politics. Later feminists who mobilized around the 1970 Royal Commission on the Status of Women would return to some of the themes raised by the first generation, although in much changed circumstances. A Female Economy provides few surprises for readers familiar with the history of women's work; it does, however, conveniently and compactly synthesize recent scholarship as well as a century of women's work. (LINDA KEALEY) Charles A. Ruud and Sergei A. Stepanov. Fontanka 16: The Tsar's Secret Police McGill-Queen's University Press. xxviii, 394. $39.95 Fontanka 16 is a weak entry in a strong field of recent books on the tsarist secret police, the Okhranka. Although the authors' archival research and thorough reading of secondary sources occasionally provide valuable insights , their episodic and anecdotal approach is more often diverting than enlightening. Charles A. Ruud and Sergei A. Stepanov argue that a thread of continuity ran through tsarist secret policing from the sixteenth century to 1917, with the secret police `an essential buttress to tsarist power.' At the heart of the system was a network of agents who infiltrated various organizations hostile to the state. Such covert activity, with its reliance on informers and double agents, made the secret police an unwieldy instrument of state authority. Agents were subject to inadequate supervision and control and the Okhranka was consequently scandal-ridden and ineffective. Fontanka 16 is a revised and expanded English-language version of Stepanov's earlier book, Fontanka, 16: Politicheskii ssysk pri tsariakh (Moscow, 1994). The new version summarizes forbears of the Okhrankha before concentrating on secret police activities from 1880 to 1917. The subject is approached through case studies of episodes as varied as the assassination of P.A. Stolypin (chapter 9), the Mendel Beilis trial (chapter 12), and the Grigorii Rasputin scandal (chapter 14). humanities 455 Ruud and Stepanov are at their best in their chapter on Beilis, the Jewish worker infamously tried and acquitted in 1913 for the alleged ritual murder of a Christian boy. They argue persuasively that Beilis's arrest and trial, though clearly rooted in anti-Semitism, did not grow out of a deliberately anti-Semitic state policy. Rather, the arrest was a consequence of immediate security concerns, intended to quash threatened anti-Semitic protests on the eve of Tsar Nicholas I's visit to Kiev in 1911. The state proceeded with the trial, despite Beilis's almost certain acquittal, because it feared that failure to prosecute might lead to large-scale anti-Jewish demonstrations and even pogroms. Unfortunately, the authors often seem to choose subjects for their case studies that are more sensational than they are valuable in elucidating secret police functions. For example, they rehash the ever-popular story of Rasputin, the Siberian peasant who undermined tsarist legitimacy in its waning days through his influence over Tsarina Alexandra. Ruud and Stepanov offer little that is new about Rasputin, while overstating his role in the collapse of the tsarist government and implying that it was causal rather than simply a symptom of decline. By comparison, the important subject of secret police investigations of radicals, during the war years leading up to the Revolutions of 1917, is all but ignored. The stories that Ruud and Stepanov narrate are colourful and entertaining , but the supporting arguments are frequently thin and sometimes contradictory . Chapter 5, on the Foreign Service, focuses on the flamboyant P.I. Rachkovsky, head of the Okhranka's Foreign Agency from 1884 to 1902. They describe Rachkovsky as...