The author, an FSB officer, talks about the activities and structure of the special services of pre-revolutionary Russia, relying on documents and memoirs of security officers. The analysis of these documents reveals a hitherto unknown circumstance: the secret police could not stand the collision with the operational-search apparatus of the Bolshevik party, headed by V.I. Lenin, who created an extensive network of his agents in the power structures of the empire to decompose them from within.