Okhrana

The Okhrana, Russia’s police institution, is named in Simone de Beauvoir’s account of women students who entered revolutionary politics at the end of the nineteenth century. It appears not as an organization described in its own right, but as the authority against which these women used clandestine and nihilistic methods.

The Okhrana and Revolutionary Resistance

Women students from the intelligentsia were drawn less to feminism as a cause limited to their own rights than to revolutionary action more broadly. They went among the people and employed nihilistic methods against the Okhrana, making resistance to state policing part of their political activity.

The episode of 1878 gives that opposition a specific form: Vera Zasulich shot police chief Trepov. The account places this act within the women’s struggle against the Okhrana, linking individual violence to a wider revolutionary current rather than presenting it as an isolated personal conflict.

Place in the Account of Women’s Political Action

The Okhrana’s role is brief but consequential in the narrative’s progression. The organization marks an early setting of confrontation, before women’s political participation widened through work, demands for equal rights, mass strikes, and demonstrations. Its presence helps show how women’s emancipation in Russia developed alongside revolutionary struggle, not only through campaigns explicitly organized around women’s status.