There's also this bizarre new trend with Russian anticommunists where they say "Yeah sure things weren't great under the Tsar, but people werent lying awake at night in fear that they might be disappeared by evil secret police!"

And like. (???) серьёзно? every single tactic of deceit and brutalization and infiltration and torture and lies and falsifications and frameups and false flag terror and provocateurs that intelligence and secret police use worldwide were inspired in awe by the expertise of the Okhrana. They were so deep in every aspect of society they reached the point where you would literally have Okhrana agents in every lead position of labor movements and religious movements and everything; and they'd direct protests into just sufficient enough resistance to make the protests feel like they struggled and sacrificed and accomplished something without ever really making a difference --- while disappearing and torturing those who had other ideas; kinda like Darren Seals and BLM corporate in the US today. Even father whats-his-name who led bloody sunday was a goddamn Okhranki.

And they weren't even uniquely a new thing -- The Oprichniki before them were also things of nightmares (though afaik it was mostly boyars who were afraid of them and fuck those guys). There was that famous (and very cool) painting named after them based off the event where they staged a mock-coronation for some boyar lord to murder him. Like where do they think the Chekists and Red Terror came from and were necessary for the Bolsheviks? It was just for fun? had nothing to do with the pre-existing state and security forces? White terror was fake? One of Lenin's closest allies in the revolution turned out to be an Okhrana agent and they couldn't believe it for the longest time until it became proven enough to shoot the prick.

Not to mention all of the pogroms. I couldn't believe the first time I heard someone assert 'at least there was no terror under the tsar'