Russia is the largest and most powerful of the states to emerge from the former Soviet Union. As the seat of the Soviet empire that existed for over 70 years, the Russians wielded tremendous power both within the U.S.S.R. and in the international sphere. Almost from their emergence as a separate people, the Russians have extended the boundaries of their country to include a wide variety of non-Russian people. Both the Russian Czars and the Bolsheviks who came to power in 1917 have a long history of expansionist policies, which explains why, even today, an important part of the Russian national identity is that of leader of a large empire.

General
Pringle, Robert W. Historical Dictionary of Russian and Soviet Intelligence. Historical Dictionaries of Intelligence and Counterintelligence, No. 5. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow, 2006.

Peake, Studies 51.1 (Mar. 2007), finds this to be "a valuable reference work, especially for students, analysts and readers unfamiliar with the role intelligence services played in Russian history." Nevertheless, the "book omits too many important cases and intelligence organizations, especially those occurring after the Russsian Revolution."

Tsarist Russia

Smith, Edward Ellis, with the collaboration of Rudolf Lednicky. The Okhrana: The Russian Department of Police -- A Bibliography. Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution, 1967.

Therkelsen, Studies 13.1 (Winter 1969), comments that "the literature about the Okhrana has remained ... essentially one-sided, all contra, with only an occasional morsel of pro and, therefore, hardly anything objective in-between." (italics in original) Smith's bibliography has not avoided this problem. Over two-thirds of the 909 entries refer to newspaper articles and editorials which "are almost exclusively from the revolutionary and post-revolutionary Communist and other leftist press." The reviewer is also bothered by the absence of materials on the Okhrana's counterintelligence activities against Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Turkey in World War I. And there are "still other materials, some well-known," that would have been appropriate to include in the bibliography. "With [a] few exceptions, the book is properly and well indexed..., but more consistency in transliterating proper names would normally be expected in an academic publication."

Nice information about my country.