@volodyuka
You're contradicting your own posts, and also common sense. First off, why are you claiming it wasn't a state service when it officially was a part of the Ministry of Internal Affairs? Next, there is no suffix -
ka in the word 'okhranka'. If -
a were part of the suffix it would be inflexible (so it wouldn't change regardless of the grammatical case, which is clearly not the case), so it cannot
possibly be anything other than its
ending. Also, I would love to know your reasoning as to why the suffix -
k- in this case is a diminutive. You know the language, the culture and the history, so you should be able to provide a solid, non-anecdotal evidence, right?
Just earlier you said 'Tsarskaya Okhranka' (1) was the name of the service (which it wasn't, but w/e), and now you're saying the revolutionaries did not know of any name other than 'okhranka' (2), which is allegedly a diminutive of 'okhrana' (3) (all of these are your claims), which means it should have appeared in the vocabulary of those people already
after its non-diminutive form. There's no way a diminutive would instantly and completely replace its parent noun in the community's lexicon; that just doesn't work. That makes at least three possible short forms (1, 3 and their combination) unaccounted for, and it appears that your chief argument for why they were allegedly
totally never used is that you're Russian and a diligent scholar, but at this point I'm not inclined to take your word for it. Please cite your sources.