#239: False Flag - Tagantsev Conspiracy

Soviet secret police create
fake disloyalist organizations
to flush out and falsely charge
potential dissidents | 1920s

“On December 5, 1920, all departments of the Soviet secret police Cheka received a top secret order from Feliks Dzerzhinsky to start creating false flag White Army organizations, "underground and terrorist groups" to facilitate finding "foreign agents on our territory". This was planned partially as a provocation, in order to identify potentially disloyal citizens who might wish to join the Bolsheviks' enemies. ...

“The Tagantsev conspiracy (or the case of the Petrograd Military Organization) was a non-existent monarchist conspiracy fabricated by the Soviet secret police in 1921 to terrorize intellectuals who might be in a potential opposition to the ruling Bolshevik regime.[1] As its result, more than 800 people, mostly from scientific and artistic communities in Petrograd (modern-day Saint Petersburg), were arrested on false terrorism charges, out of which 98 were executed and many were sent to concentration camps. ...

“The affair was named after Vladimir Nikolaevich Tagantsev, a geographer and member of the Russian Academy of Sciences, who was arrested, tortured, and tricked into disclosing hundreds of names of people who did not like the Bolshevik regime. Among the security officers that manufactured the case was Yakov Agranov, who later became one of the chief organizers of Stalinist show trials and the Great Purge in the 1930s. The case was officially declared fabricated and its victims rehabilitated by Russian authorities in 1992.”*

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*https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tagantsev_conspiracy (Bold emphasis added in 1st paragraph.)