The Eremin letter was a letter supposedly written by Colonel A. Eremin, a high-ranking member of the

Okhrana The Department for Protecting the Public Security and Order (russian: Отделение по охранению общественной безопасности и порядка), usually called Guard Department ( rus, Охранное отд ...

, the secret police of the

Russian Empire The Russian Empire was an empire and the final period of the Russian monarchy from 1721 to 1917, ruling across large parts of Eurasia. It succeeded the Tsardom of Russia following the Treaty of Nystad, which ended the Great Northern War. ...

. It said that Joseph Stalin was an Okhrana agent that infiltrated the RSDLP and was providing information to the Tsar's police. It also said that when Stalin was elected to the Central committee of the Bolshevik party in 1910, he completely ceased to cooperate with the Okhrana. The claim that Stalin worked for the Okhrana has been made multiple times, but the Eremin letter is the only document that corroborates it.

Orlov's Life Magazine article

In 1956, Soviet defector Alexander Orlov wrote an article for ''

Life Magazine ''Life'' was an American magazine published weekly from 1883 to 1972, as an intermittent "special" until 1978, and as a monthly from 1978 until 2000. During its golden age from 1936 to 1972, ''Life'' was a wide-ranging weekly general-interest ma ...

'', "The Sensational Secret Behind the Damnation of Stalin", and according to him, the reason Stalin had purged Marshal Tukhachevsky and other members of the soviet military was because they discovered some documents which showed that Stalin had been a member of the Okhrana that infiltrated the bolshevik movement. The first appearance of the letter was in this article, which later appeared in various other works, such as in ''Stalin's great secret'' by Isaac Don Levine.

Authenticity

The predominant view of historians in the west and in the countries of the former Soviet Union, is that the letter is most likely a forgery. Stephen Kotkin, an acclaimed biographer of Stalin, said that it was normal for the Okhrana to cast doubts over genuine revolutionaries, by saying they were police agents. Both

Leon Trotsky Lev Davidovich Bronstein. ( – 21 August 1940), better known as Leon Trotsky; uk, link= no, Лев Давидович Троцький; also transliterated ''Lyev'', ''Trotski'', ''Trotskij'', ''Trockij'' and ''Trotzky''. (), was a Russian ...

and Stalin came under suspicion of police collaboration, those rumours always followed Stalin, but they were accusations his enemies failed to prove. In a certain occasion, one former Okhrana chief boasted, triumphant, that the revolutionaries started to suspect each other, so that in the end none of them could trust each other.

References

{{reflist History of Russia Joseph Stalin