The beginning of 1915 was crowned with a secret meeting of the leaders of the Young Turks. Their leaders were Ismail Enver Pasha, Mehmed Talaat Pasha, Ahmed Jemal Pasha, ideological inspirers and instigators of the Armenian genocide, obsessed first with the idea of ​​pan-Islamism - the whole world is only for Muslims, and then - pan-Turkism: in the hashish frenzy they already saw the Great Turkey, extending over a significant part of Europe and almost all of Asia.

Totally misanthropic, like Sultan Abdul Hamid II, they intended to put an end to the “Armenian question” once and for all, by uprooting the entire Armenian people.

The exponent of this delusional dream at that secret meeting was Dr. Nazim Bey, one of the leaders of the Young Turks - the Ittihad ve Teraki party, which translated means “Unity and Progress”:

“The Armenian people must be completely destroyed so that not a single Armenian remains on our land (that is, in the Ottoman Empire. - M. and G.M.) and this very name is forgotten. Now there is a war, there will be no such opportunity again. The intervention of the great powers and the noisy protests of the world press will go unnoticed, and if they find out, they will be presented with a fait accompli, and thus the issue will be settled.

This time our actions must take on the character of total extermination of the Armenians; it is necessary to destroy every single one... I want the Turks and only the Turks to live and reign supreme on this land. Let all non-Turkish elements disappear, no matter what nationality or religion they belong to.”

This is how the machine of mass extermination of Armenians was launched.

On the night of April 24, 1915, arrests swept across Constantinople. The Turkish executors tried to carry out the arrests, on orders from above, without unnecessary noise. The plainclothes police officers kindly asked the owner of the house to go with them to the station - literally for five minutes to answer a few questions. They lifted people out of bed, right in their pajamas and slippers, and took them to the city’s central prison.

Oddly enough, those whom the police did not find at home turned up to the police themselves, wondering why the authorities needed them.

Armenian doctor Tigran Allahverdi, an active member of the Young Turk party, who was arrested that night, was completely at a loss: was it a mistake?! He couldn’t wrap his head around how it was that he, the organizer of repeated fundraising events for the party’s coffers, was suddenly detained. He could not even suspect that his whole fault was that he was born an Armenian.

Approximately the same fate befell the law-abiding professor Tigran Keledzhyan, publisher of the pro-Turkish newspaper Sabah. He recognized his former student in the head of the internment camp. Out of respect for his beloved mentor, he whispered in his ear that he had received an order signed by Talaat Pasha to exterminate the prisoners, and even tried to help him get out of the camp. Deciding that his arrest was nothing more than a misunderstanding, the naive professor did not lift a finger to save himself. Keledjyan was killed on the road to Sivas. Of the 291 prisoners of that camp, only 40 survived.

From that fateful night and over the course of several weeks, about 800 prominent Armenians were taken into custody in Constantinople alone. The victims of the machinations of the Young Turks were poets and writers Yerukhan (Ervand Srmakeshkhanyan), Ruben Zardaryan, Tigran Chekuryan, Tlkatintsi, Levon Shant, actor Enovk Shaen, artist Hrant Astvatsatryan, Bishop Smbat Saadetyan, archimandrites Anania Azarapetyan, Mkrtich Chlkhatyan...

It is impossible to write about everyone who fell as a result of the monstrous atrocity of the Turks. We decided to tell you a little more about those whose names are on almost everyone’s lips.

Daniel Varuzhan - Favorite of the pagan gods

In 1908, in a letter to the journalist Teodik, Daniel Varuzhan complained: “My biography fits on one page, because I have not yet lived a fruitful life...”? He further writes that “I was born in 1884 near the city of Sebastia, in the village of Brgnik.” , where he spent his childhood “in dreams under the shadow of sad willow trees.” His father, as he remembers, went to work in Constantinople, while his mother, sitting at the tonir, occupied his mind on long winter evenings with “stories about wolves and Janissaries.” He admits that, as soon as he started reading church books, he was taken by his father to Constantinople: “those were the terrible days of the pogroms of 1896...”

1902 brings Varuzhan to Venice, to the school of Mekhitarists Murad Rafaelyan. On one of his days off from work, he goes to the island of San Lazar to venerate the ashes of Ghevond Alishan, an outstanding Armenian scientist and poet. In memory of Alishan, Varuzhan will publish his first book of poems, written by him in Venice.

In 1906, after graduating from the Rafaelian school, Varuzhan continued his studies at the University of Cannes. He left a note in the student notebook: “Here I am calm, I attend the departments of philosophy and literature... The teachers fell in love with me, it seems because I am an Armenian.” Innate modesty did not allow the poet to admit that he owed this favor first of all to himself - his success in his studies.

Upon completion of his education, Varuzhan returns to his homeland - “to improve his homeland.” At school, Svaza teaches, earning the love and respect of students and their parents. His extraordinary talent and power of poetic imagination arouses the envy and hatred of teachers from Catholic monks. Addressing them, Varuzhan exclaims: “Oh, papacy! We don’t need salvation from you, stop the evil you’ve done.”

Varuzhan finds consolation from everyday hardships in the chaste provincial girl Araksia, who became his muse and wife. Kneeling, he confesses to the lady of his heart: “Now you have the right to expect new songs from me. I promise to give them to you, because now, my muse, you have given me wings.” He pours out his fatherly feeling for his daughter Veronica in the poem “Varuzhnakis” - a piece of his soul.

Having published his best poetry collection “Pagan Chants” in 1912, Varuzhan and his family moved to Constantinople...

Having seen off his friends who had come to see him, Varuzhan was about to go to bed by midnight. Then there was a knock on the door. Years later, the poet’s widow recalls: “Varuzhan was half dressed, I went to open the door... Opening it slightly, I saw three people. Pushing the door open, they entered with the words: “Where is the effendi?” Having gone into the husband’s room, they searched it and, seizing the poet’s manuscripts, took him away with them.”

One of the uninvited guests, turning to Araksia, said: “Effendi must come with us to confirm that these papers belong to him.”

This happened on the night of April 24th. Afterwards she never saw him alive. Varuzhan was thirty-one years old.

Ruben Seva - Martyr by calling

Ruben Sevak (Chilinkiryan) came into the world on February 15, 1885 in the village of Silivri near Constantinople in the family of an artisan-trader. He graduated from a local school and later from the Berberian Seminary in Constantinople. Then he went to Lausanne, Switzerland, to study at the university to become a doctor.

His first attempts at writing date back to 1905, but his only lifetime collection of poems, “The Red Book,” was published in 1910. The book is a chronicle from the first to the last page about the innumerable troubles of the native people: the poems “The Madman of the Pogroms”, “Turkish Woman”, “Song of Man” formed the backbone of the collection. In periodicals, individual poems from the collections “Book of Love”, “The Last Armenians”, “Chaos” have been preserved, and remained in manuscript.

He also proved himself to be a brilliant prose writer and publicist. This is guaranteed by the pages of his writings about the life and struggle of European workers for the right to a decent existence, as well as the cycle of stories “Pages torn from a doctor’s diary. 1913 – 1914". These things were written during night shifts during his work at the Lausanne hospital.

The personal life of Ruben Sevak was more or less successful. In 1910, he was enchanted by the golden-haired fairy Yanni Apel, the daughter of an aristocratic Prussian colonel. She gave her husband a son, Levon, and a daughter, Shamir.

The “Red Book,” published in the year of his marriage, was a response to the massacre in Adana, already committed by the Young Turks. In just two weeks, 30 thousand innocent victims. The author of the book seemed to have foreseen the apocalypse of the Armenians of Ottoman Turkey.

A loving wife, lovely children, a prestigious job in clinics in Switzerland, a villa on the shores of Lake Lemak... It would seem, what more could you want? He, a brilliant doctor and gentleman, a handsome man, was willingly accepted in the best poetry salons in Europe... It would seem... But he chose for himself a path as martyr as was destined for his intelligent, long-suffering people: in 1914, leaving all this behind, Ruben Sevak goes to Constantinople to disappear into oblivion...

His chilling lines touch the soul:

“Here we come! - They scream. –
And the wheel
of our suffering
we push forward.
And our voices make us tremble.
We walk among the living and repeat:

“Here we go!”
The roads cannot be closed
Before the mighty rage
our strength.
Let's go to make you talk
Countless common graves."

In the dead of night on April 24, 1915, when they came for Ruben Sevak, his wife in a panic rushed to the German Ambassador Wagenheim, begging him to save her husband’s life. The cold answer sobered her: “You unworthy German, despising your nation, married a stranger, an Armenian, and now you tearfully ask me to save him?!”

He shouldn't come back. He left to die." “I have a son, now I will raise him so that someday he will take revenge on the Germans for his father,” Yanni Apel answered contemptuously and threw the German passport in the ambassador’s face.

Years will pass, and the dignified German woman, having seen enough of the suffering of the people abandoned by Germany to be torn to pieces by the Turks, will renounce German citizenship, even stop speaking German and, having studied the Armenian language, will give her children an Armenian education. In December 1967, when Yanni Apel passed away, the children, following the will of their mother, saw her off on her last journey according to the Armenian rite.

At dawn on August 26, 1915, a group of five people were put into a cart and taken away by Turkish gendarmes, under the pretext of transferring them to another place. Among them were Ruben Sevak and Daniel Varuzhan. The “crew”’s path was blocked by unknown persons on the road. They dragged out the bound Armenians, tied them to trees and began to calmly and without haste stab and cut their victims with daggers.

How much longer? Were there similar dramatizations? History has not preserved the names of the executioners. But the words of Ruben Sevak remained incorruptible: “Before the final return to my homeland, I would like to go to Venice and spend at least one spring there, one of the few springs of my life. I want to live, to feel like I’m living... in anticipation of death.”

Opening the Ruben Sevak Museum in the Holy See on the eve of the 100th anniversary of the Armenian genocide in the Ottoman Empire, Catholicos of All Armenians Karekin II said:

“The museum is a tribute of respect and admiration both to Ruben Sevak, and to Grigor Zohrab, Siamanto, Varuzhan, Komitas, and our other great figures, to the memory of one and a half million of our innocent victims who did not renounce their faith and homeland and accepted the crown of thorns.

They died, keeping in their hearts the belief that the Armenian people are alive and will live in eternity. The museum is dedicated to the 100th anniversary of the Armenian genocide and has special significance. Through its visitors, it will become an unceasing bell tower whose voice will be heard throughout the world, contributing to the efforts being made for international recognition of the genocide.”

Vine of Wrath Siamanto

Atom Yarjanyan, known to the world as the poet Siamanto, was born in 1878 into an educated merchant family in the city of Akn, on the right bank of the Euphrates. Having received primary education in his native Akne, at the insistence of his parents he left for Constantinople. He will never return to the city of his childhood.

The Vine of Wrath, which began to gain strength in his youth on the banks of the deep Euphrates, had its roots in thousands of years of Armenian history. The fruits and leaves of his Vine, having absorbed the spiritual chronicle of one of the most ancient cultures of the world, brought into his work the experience of the people's contemplation, inseparable from their destiny. Through the poet's dreamy sadness and sorrow the thorns of genocide sprouted.

The very first destructive steps of the genocide, the flywheel of which was launched in 1894 - 1896 by the bloody Abdul Hamid II, prompted the father of the aspiring poet to take him from Constantinople, engulfed in pogroms and massacres, to Egypt to save his son. In a foreign land, the eyes of the easily wounded Atom revealed a terrifying picture of disasters: endless crowds of refugees, their incredible suffering sank into the soul of the young poet like the ghost of death.

Wasn’t it then that the juices of life rustled with renewed vigor in his Vine of Wrath?!

The first aftertaste from the bitter impressions of what he saw in Egypt was the poem “Exiled Freedom,” published in 1898 in the magazine “Tomorrow’s Voice,” published in Armenian in Manchester, England. The pictures of the refugees' destinies are superimposed on the image of their homeland, Akna, devastated in 1896 by the atrocities of the Turkish authorities.

By the time this journalistic outburst of emotions appeared, Atom Yardzhanyan had already studied in Europe - at the universities of Geneva and Paris. Pain and compassion pulsate in his temples.

Poverty and illness completely undermined Atom's poor health. Despite all the deaths, he receives an excellent education. Living in European capitals, he becomes imbued with the art, history and literature of these countries and peoples.

In addition to the troubles that befell his people, personal troubles cling to him: he is treated for consumption in the mountains of Switzerland, meets love there and experiences the bitterness of betrayal. But the news of the suicide of his father, who could not stand the humiliation, finishes him off.

Having recovered from the shock, he establishes contact with the Union of Armenian Students of Europe, closely communicates with scholar-monks from the congregation of Catholic Armenians in Vienna and the island of St. Lazarus near Venice. His circle of friends is expanding. The natives of Akn - he, the publicist, literary critic Arshak Chopanyan, the short story writer Grigor Zohrab - find each other and never part. Notebooks of his poems pass from hand to hand. Poets Daniel Varuzhan, Vahan Tekeyan, Avetik Isahakyan, tragic actor Vahram Papazyan, playwright Alexander Shirvanzade speak warmly about the lyrics of Atom Yarjanyan, now known to everyone as Siamanto...

Clutching the thin book of his first collection of poetry, “The Heroic,” to his skinny chest, Siamanto thoughtfully wanders through midnight Geneva, where it was published in 1901. Reading aloud his own poems, permeated with pain for the suffering of his people, he seems to hear cries for help from Armenian women raped in Ottoman Turkey, sees portable gallows on which their sons, husbands and brothers perish, sees ruined churches and desecrated altars of the Armenian faith...

Siamanto catches himself thinking that he involuntarily became a continuer of the quest of his spiritual father from the 10th century - Grigor Narekatsi, the author of the “Book of Sorrowful Songs”, as if he was finishing its pages. But between Narekatsi and Siamanto there have already been nine centuries of questions to the Lord: “What is the guilt of the people who believed in You?!”

In 1909, a year after the Young Turks came to power in the Ottoman Empire, another collection of Siamanto’s poems, “Bloody News from a Friend,” was published in Constantinople. In it, he speaks openly, loudly, about the deceitful nature of these so-called revolutionaries.

The Statue of Liberty, as a longed-for image of the aspirations of its people, calls them to America. There, in Boston, in 1910, he published a whole volume of his sorrowful songs. Siamanto also managed to visit the Caucasus and Tiflis. In this city, populated predominantly by Armenians, the poet’s book “Saint Mesrop” was published. In 1913-1914 he had the opportunity to see Eastern Armenia. The return route to Europe for the “unique world literature,” as Avetik Isahakyan described him, lay through Constantinople. But there Siamanto was covered by the black April of 1915...

He found his death on the grueling path to the banks of the Euphrates, where he mentally planted the Vine of Wrath, which, as he believed, would one day turn into a symbol of the unity of the nation on the free land of his historical homeland.

Grigor Zohrab - Road to Hell of the Desert Der - Es - Zor

Having received his higher education in Constantinople, Grigor Zohrab immediately began practicing law and lectured on law at the local university. Standing on a civil position, in 1895-1896 he was not afraid to defend the rights of political defendants in the Abdul Hamid courts.

His human rights activities infuriated the authorities, and he was forced to leave the country and settle in France. The Young Turks' coup in 1908 allowed him to return to Turkey. And again he is at the crest of events. Having become a deputy of the Armenian National Assembly, he was also elected to the Ottoman parliament - the Majlis, where he ardently defended the national rights of all peoples and nationalities of the country, advocated for reforms in legislation and education, and for equal rights for Turkish women with men. In his field of vision there were also issues related to the creation of conditions for the development of industry, agriculture, science, and art.

In 1909, at the height of the massacre of Armenians in Adana, Zohrab publicly denounced the pogromists, now the Young Turks, calling them the direct heirs of Sultan Abdul Hamid II. The protest he presented to the Turkish government received wide resonance.

The Armenian question, which boiled down to the demand to create Armenian autonomy within the Ottoman Empire, occupied his mind and time: in 1912 - 1914 he conducted active negotiations with the ambassadors of the great powers in Constantinople, sincerely hoping most of all for Russia's help. His work “The Armenian Question in the Light of Documents,” published in 1913 in Paris in French and signed “Marcel Léard,” was addressed mostly to the rulers of European countries.

Komitas - Prisoner of Ville Juif

In 1881, the son of shoemaker Gevorg Soghomonyan from Kutina, lost in endless Anatolia, appeared in Holy Etchmiadzin before the eyes of the Catholicos of All Armenians Gevorg IV. The local priest brought the vocal orphan boy at the request of the Patriarch. The boy answered his first question in Turkish: “I don’t speak Armenian, if you want, I’ll sing.”

Not understanding the meaning of the words, he performed the Armenian sharakan - a spiritual hymn. The soulful, rich voice melted the Patriarch’s soul. He is enrolled in the Gevorgyan Theological Seminary.

In 1890, Soghomon, who had perfectly mastered his native language, was ordained as a monk. And three years later, he completed his studies at the seminary, was ordained a priest and took the name Komitas, in memory of the outstanding poet-Catholicos of the 7th century, the author of sharakans.

Conducting music lessons at his native seminary, he creates a choir, an orchestra of folk instruments, and begins to process folk songs, clearing them of the layers of melodicism of the conquerors - the Persians and Turks. The first works on Armenian church music were born.

In 1895, having received the rank of archimandrite, he went to Tiflis to study at a music school, where the composition course was taught by the already famous composer Makar Ekmalyan. Then he goes to Berlin - to the private conservatory of Professor Richard Schmidt. At the same time, he visits the Imperial University of Berlin, listening to lectures there on philosophy, aesthetics, general history and the history of music.

Returning to Holy Etchmiadzin, he teaches classes in native music at the seminary. He immerses himself in the study of sacred music, deciphering the ancient Armenian notation - Khazov. Finding himself in front of a wall of misunderstanding and indifference, Komitas leaves Etchmiadzin and goes to Constantinople.

An event that took place in Tiflis also pushed him to take this step. Publicist and literary critic Arshak Chopanyan describes the personal drama of his friend Komitas:

“I saw Komitas at the end of 1909 in Etchmiadzin, when I took part in the elections of the Catholicos. I would like, as if by the way, to tell you about what the witness witnessed in Tiflis. At a dinner given by the local Armenian community in honor of the Turkish Armenian deputies, they had the honor of hearing Ashug Jivani, who was already in his old age. In a tired, slightly hoarse voice, he sang several of his wonderful songs to the accompaniment of his saz, touching our hearts. Komitas performed next, amazing us with his soulful songs.”

Hoping to arrange a solo concert of Komitas in Tiflis, Chopanyan tried to persuade the community's financial leaders to chip in at least to rent the concert hall. In response I heard: “Let him organize the concert himself, and we will help him distribute tickets.” Chopanyan writes with sorrow: “Komitas did not have such funds, which saddened him greatly. He abandoned this idea and returned to Etchmiadzin.”

In Constantinople, Komitas continues to work hard. His masterpiece “Patarag” (“Liturgy”) for male choir has entered the treasury of world music. Having visited Komitas in 1914, the Russian composer Mikhail Gnessin assured him that by deciphering the khazs, in which the true sound of church melodies is hidden, he not only sheds light on ancient Armenian music, but also gives an interpretation of the music of other peoples of the East.

Komitas experienced his triumph in Paris, when in the same 1914 he was applauded by all educated Europe. Frederic Makler, a professor at the Sorbonne, wrote that the lectures and concerts of the Armenian composer aroused a storm of enthusiasm and general admiration.

The premonition of impending disaster did not deceive Komitas. His anxiety grew. Events, one frightening the other, rolled in, tormenting the soul. April 1915 did not spare him either. Exile into the depths of Anatolia, accompanied by violence, showed him horrifying pictures: before his eyes, children, old people, and women were tortured and tormented. The psyche of a sophisticated man could not stand it. Thanks solely to the intercession of influential friends and admirers of his talent, Komitas was returned to Constantinople.

By 1916, his health was completely undermined, and he was placed in a clinic for the mentally ill in Ville-Jouif, a suburb of Paris.

A close friend of the prisoner Ville-Jouif, artist Fanos Terlemezyan, recalls:

“One March day in 1921, I decided to spend the morning with Komitas. I entered his room accompanied by an orderly. I found him lying down. He jumped up, I threw myself on his neck and began to kiss, kiss... Holding my face in my hands, he gently spanked my cheeks and edifyingly said: “Let me spank you, spank you!” Then he said: “Sit down,” he remained standing, and the conversation flowed.

“Komitas,” I began, “I know that you are angry at the world, and you have the right.” And I’m not delighted with him, but you can’t sulk forever. We are all looking forward to seeing you.

In response, he launched into discussions about the semantics and philosophy of my words. I noticed how his face began to harden. He spoke about painting: “You don’t need to paint anything except light and nature.”

I invited him to go with me to Sevan.

– What should I do there?

When I started talking about Etchmiadzin, not a muscle moved on his face.

- Let's go out and take a walk.

“I feel good here too,” he replied.

When the conversation turned to life and death, he exhaled: “There is no death as such.” Pulling open the door of the room, he cried out: “What is it, my cell, if not a grave?!” Wanting to reassure his friend, he said softly: “I’ll probably go, so as not to tire you.” “What are you doing?! If you have come, sit with me.”

I allowed myself to say that I was going to bring to him one of his friends, who came to Paris specifically to study as an actor. “What does he need this craft for?!” And he cited several sayings of Agathangelos. However, realizing that the meaning of what he said at the horse grab had not reached me, he explained: “The pigs, lying in the dirty puddles, thought they were having a nice bath.”

He started talking about his students. I was incredibly glad that they came to Paris to study. I asked whose music is better, ours, Armenian, or European? “Brother (angry), haven’t you decided to suck the taste of peach out of an apricot?? Everyone has their own taste.”

“You wouldn’t sing to me,” he managed. “I’ll sing,” he nodded in response. “If you don’t feel sorry, Komitas-jan, then sing something for me.” “No, now I sing only for myself, and only within myself.”

We chatted about this and that for another half hour, and suddenly, turning gloomy, he opened the door, went to the window and pressed his face to the glass. And froze. He got dressed, said, “Happy to stay,” and, without receiving an answer, left.”

Eight years passed, and again Fanos Terlemezyan wanted to see his friend. He only has a couple of lines about this last meeting:

“In 1928, I visited Komitas again. He lay in the garden of the hospital and dreamily looked at the sky. He finally turned grey. I came up and asked him all sorts of questions for about thirty minutes, but he never responded to any of them. So we parted with him.”

On October 22, 1935, the life of the great Komitas was cut short. In the spring of 1936, his ashes were transported to Armenia and interred in Yerevan. This is how the Pantheon of cultural figures arose.

Paramaz: “Where we rest, Sunday will begin

On June 15, 1915, in Constantinople, twenty members of the Hunchak party, led by Paramaz, their famous tribune, were brought to Sultan Bayezid Square. They ascended the scaffold, driven by the dream of an independent Armenia. They were accused of attempting a coup. Captured on July 12, 1914, following the denunciation of a traitor among their own, they were brought before a Turkish military court as terrorists.

They were arrested before a planned assassination attempt on Talaat Pasha, who posed as the “best of friends” of the Armenian people, but was already hatching an ominous plan of genocide with his comrades in the Young Turk party.

Already with a noose around his neck, Paramaz threw in the judges’ faces:

“You lived for centuries as bloodsuckers of our life force and, at the same time, did not want the source of this force - the Armenian people - to have the right to exist. Among the peoples inhabiting this country, the Armenians were the most important creative force and the most persecuted. Persecuted? For just the dream of an independent Armenia, you, her sons, are going to send us to the gallows??

We are not separatists in this country, gentlemen, judges. On the contrary, it is she who wants to separate from us, her native inhabitants, wanting to destroy us just because we are Armenians. But I forgive her without asking for mercy. You hang us, twenty people, and tomorrow twenty thousand will come after us.

And where we end our journey in life, there Freedom will rise. Where we rest, the Resurrection will begin!”

In turn, all twenty condemned people kissed the cross, secretly given to them by one of the guards. The symbol of the Armenian faith gave them spirit at an hour when they had neither weapons nor battle flags in their hands. The cross became the only link connecting them with their native people, for whose sake they accepted martyrdom.

In the museum at Holy Etchmiadzin, this treasured cross does not immediately catch the eye of everyone. But its attractive power is great. It has already become a shrine.

Time has brought to us the names, alas, not of all twenty sufferers. On the day of commemoration of the deceased, the Church in prayers honors them by a letter: a paramase from Zangezursky village of Megry, Murad Zakaryan from the village of CROK Mush, Akopa Basmadjyan and Tovmasan from Kilis, Grant Ekavyan and Arama Achgapasyan from Arakir, Yeremia Mananyan from Konstantinopol, Peterosa Kana from Harberd (known as the Arabist Dr. Penne), Yervand Topuzyan from the village of Partizak, Gegham Vanikyan (known under the pseudonym Vanik, editor of the Kaitz magazine published before the outbreak of the First World War in Constantinople).

Paramaz, aka Matevos Sargsyan-Paramazyan, was born in 1863 in the village of Meghri, Erivan province (now in the Syunik region of the Republic of Armenia). He received his primary education in his native village, after which he entered the Echmiadzin Gevorgyan Seminary, from where he was expelled for disobedience. He was engaged in self-education and taught in Nakhichevan and Ardabil. Then he became involved in the national liberation struggle, becoming a member of the Hunchak party.

Having put together his own detachment of fidayeen, in 1897 he tried to break into Van, in Western Armenia, but was captured by the Turks and put on trial. At the trial, Paramaz openly accused the authorities of the Ottoman Empire of deliberate pogroms carried out in cities and villages populated predominantly by Armenians. The Russian vice-consul in Van rescued Paramaz, sentenced to death, from the clutches of the executioners. He was sent to the Caucasus, where he was soon released.

In October 1903, Paramaz prepared and carried out an assassination attempt on the Commander-in-Chief of the Caucasus, Prince Grigory Sergeevich Golitsyn, an evil Armenophobe. The prince was promoted to infantry general in May 1896 and in December of the same year was appointed Commander-in-Chief of the Caucasian Administration and commander of the troops of the Caucasian Military District. Already in the rank of adjutant general, he initiated the adoption of a law on the confiscation of the property of the Armenian Apostolic Church and the closure of parish schools.

Such actions of a spiteful prince could not go unpunished. The Tiflis organization of the Hunchak party sentenced him to death. When rumors about this reached high-born ears, the prince became depressed, withdrew into himself and began to leave the palace less and less often. In case of emergency, he surrounded himself with a dense ring of stalwart Cossacks. Well aware of the moral rules of the Armenian revolutionaries, who never allowed themselves to use weapons against women and especially children, the frightened Golitsyn, leaving the palace, always seated his wife in the carriage next to him.

The Hunchak party entrusted Paramaz with carrying out Golitsyn’s death sentence.

In the autobiographical essay “The Last Governors of the Caucasus. 1902 – 1917” (Prague, 1928) Ossetian Nikolai Bigaev, who served in the Commander-in-Chief’s convoy, paints a picture of the assassination attempt:

“My arrival in Tiflis was marked by the well-known attempt on the life of the Commander-in-Chief in the Caucasus, Prince. Golitsyn.

As far as I remember, some characteristic features of this assassination attempt remained completely unknown. No one wrote about them and no one could write about them. Therefore, I will try to restore them in general terms.

Prince Golitsyn and his wife were returning from a regular walk from the botanical garden. On the Kojori Highway, near Tiflis, the Commander-in-Chief’s crew was stopped by three “petitioners” with an outstretched petition in their hands.

The petitioners, dressed in modest peasant clothes, did not inspire suspicion. Golitsyn accepted the petition. Meanwhile, one of the attackers stood in front of the horses, and the other two jumped in on either side of the carriage. The Cossack orderly, sitting on the box, and the coachman realized something was wrong. The first jumped off the box, but fell, and the second gave the whip.

During this period of time, two intruders standing at the steps of the carriage began to inflict wounds on the prince’s head with sharp daggers. Golitsyn and his wife were not at a loss. They deftly fought off the blows with a stick and an umbrella. Before the Cossack had time to recover and the coachman to give full speed, the attackers, however, managed to inflict a serious wound on their victim in the head.

The attackers began to run, and the prince, bleeding profusely, galloped into the palace. An hour later, the attackers were captured by the guards and Cossacks of the convoy, who jumped out on alarm...

The guards, having captured the intruders alive, killed them, despite the fact that one of them begged to be given the opportunity to say goodbye to his old mother.

Rumor persistently said that their task was to remove the head from the book. Golitsyn and erect it on Erivan Square... After the failure in the open “battle”, the Armenians, as rumor said, wanted to blow up the Tiflis Palace and in this way put an end to the prince. Golitsyn. The engineering department had to build underground passages around the palace and constantly monitor them in order to prevent mines from being brought under the palace.

The attempt on Golitsyn’s life was caused, as is known, by “the latter’s short-sighted policy in the Caucasus in general and towards the Armenian people in particular and in particular.”

Manic fears tormented Golitsyn so much that even the noise of the printing presses in the basement of his palace seemed to him an attempt to lay a mine.

The fidayeen, nicknamed Shant, Kaytsak and Paylak, to whom Paramaz entrusted the execution of Golitsyn, in order to avoid inflicting wounds on the princess, only managed to hit the prince several times with a dagger on the head. Shant and Kaytsak were hacked to death by the guards, while Pailak managed to escape and flee to Persia. The real names of Shant and Kaytsak remained unknown, as for Paylak, his name was Mher Manukyan.

In 1906, during the Armenian-Tatar clashes, Paramaz called on the Armenians and local Tatar-Turks to lay down their arms and stop exterminating each other, explaining that this enmity only benefits tsarist officials.

After the overthrow of Sultan Abdul Hamid II by the Young Turks in 1908, Paramaz traveled to Western Armenia, carrying the idea of ​​unity of all non-Muslims living in the Ottoman Empire. In 1914, accused of inciting rebellion, Meghri resident Paramaz, also known as Matevos Sargsyan-Paramazyan, was arrested and put on trial.

Ambassador Morgenthau: "Turkish authorities imposed a death sentence on an entire nation"

In order to give a civilized appearance to the bacchanalia of atrocities, the Young Turks resorted to their usual cunning. On May 26, 1915 (note that general arrests followed by deportations began on April 24), the Minister of Internal Affairs Talaat Pasha presented the “Deportation Law” (on the fight against speeches against the government in wartime) to the Majlis. And already on May 28, the Turkish parliament approved and accepted it. The then US Ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, Henry Morgenthau, would later write:

“The true purpose of the deportation was robbery and destruction; this is indeed a new method of massacre. When the Turkish authorities gave the order for these expulsions, they were actually pronouncing the death sentence on an entire nation, they understood this very well and in conversations with me they did not make any special attempts to hide this fact...

I had a conversation with one responsible Turkish official who told me about the torture used. He did not hide the fact that the government approved of them, and, like all Turks from the ruling class, he himself warmly approved of such treatment of the nation he hated. This official said that all these details of torture were discussed at a night meeting at the headquarters of Unity and Progress.

Each new method of inflicting pain was regarded as a superb discovery, and officials were constantly racking their brains to invent some new torture. He told me that they even consulted the records of the Spanish Inquisition... and adopted everything they found there.”

Marina and Hamlet Mirzoyan. Photo: noev-kovcheg.ru

UDC 341.741

N. I. Svechnikov, A. S. Kadomtseva

SOME FEATURES OF THE ACTIVITIES OF SECURITY DEPARTMENTS OF THE RUSSIAN EMPIRE

Annotation. The article presents the results of studies of the activities of security departments in Russia at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries. A brief analysis of the reasons that gave rise to the need for political investigation bodies and the legal acts that regulated their organization and functioning is presented. The validity and correctness of the abolition of security departments is assessed.

Key words: law and order, security department, political investigation, gendarmerie corps, police department, search department, spy, agent, informant, supervisor, revolutionary community, secret surveillance.

Maintaining law and order and security in the country is one of the most important functions of the state. The problem of legal regulation of the activities of law enforcement agencies, especially bodies called upon to carry out operational investigative activities, has always been relevant. Knowledge of the historical roots and traditions of legal regulation of the activities of the political investigation system of the Russian Empire can be used in the development of a modern law enforcement system and will help avoid mistakes made in the past. To this end, it is necessary to analyze the ways in which the Russian state sought to legitimize the activities of security departments; study not only the essence of regulations, but also the effectiveness of their application. In order for the activities of law enforcement agencies in general and internal affairs agencies in particular to be high-quality and effective, it is necessary, based on historical experience, to identify what activities may be useful.

In the 19th century The revolutionary movement in Russia intensified, in connection with this there was a need to create a special body that would deal with the timely detection of “harmful” persons, collecting information about them and sending them to the gendarmerie corps. The existing Gendarmerie Directorates were not sufficiently adapted to conduct political investigation among the revolutionary-minded intelligentsia. This was the reason for the establishment by order of the Minister of Internal Affairs of the first in Russia St. Petersburg (under the mayor) “Department for maintaining order and tranquility in the capital” in 1867. Its staff consisted of only 21 employees - chiefs, 4 officials for assignments, 12 police supervisors, a clerk, his assistants and a secretary. In December 1883, the Regulations “On the structure of the secret police in the Empire” were adopted, which determined the status and tasks of “special search units” - secret police bodies in charge of “preserving public order and tranquility.” The security department was subordinate directly to the Police Department of the Ministry of Internal Affairs and was guided by the Instruction of May 23, 1887, “The department for the protection of public safety and order in the capital under the management of the St. Petersburg mayor.” Later, search branches appeared in Moscow and Warsaw, but the scope of activity of revolutionary organizations had already gone beyond the boundaries of these cities.

The Moscow Security Department was created in 1880. At first it was small in number; its staff, for example, in 1889 was only six people. But the creature

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Val and other unofficial staff, consisting of “external security service”, i.e. spies and informant agents “working” in the ranks of revolutionary groups (internal agents). According to the estimate of the Moscow Security Department of 50 thousand rubles. 60% were the costs of surveillance, searches and maintenance of agents. In 1897, “to monitor persons placed under police supervision for political unreliability...” the position of a police supervisor was established at the Department for the Protection of Public Safety and Order in Moscow and Instructions were developed for police supervisors at the Department for the Protection of Public Safety and Order in Moscow. Moscow.

In the structure of security departments, in addition to the office, as a rule, secret office work, there were two departments: external surveillance and intelligence (internal surveillance department). The intelligence departments developed data obtained from informants and by examining letters in the so-called “black offices” at post offices. Analysis of the information received was the essence of the work of each security department. All other units were auxiliary. All the efforts of the head of the department and his employees - gendarmerie officers - were directed towards the proper organization and functioning of the agency. Secret agents were the subject of constant concern and care of the entire Police Department. The agents were mentioned in Department circulars addressed to the heads of security departments and provincial gendarmerie departments.

In August 1902, the Regulations “On the heads of investigative departments” were adopted for some localities of the empire: “...where particularly intensified development of the revolutionary movement is noticed, investigative departments are established, the heads of which are entrusted with the management of political investigation, i.e. external surveillance and secret agents, in a known specific area."

In October 1902, an Instruction was issued for the spies of the Flying Squad and the spies of the search and security branches with clear instructions for their actions. For example, in paragraph 21 it is recommended: “When making observations, you must always act in such a way as not to draw attention to yourself, do not walk noticeably quietly and do not stay in one place for a long time.”

The purpose of creating security departments is clearly defined in the regulatory documents that regulated their activities. An important guarantee of efficiency in the activities of security departments and other detective agencies was the possibility of their direct interaction. The norms of the Regulations on security departments indicated that “14. Heads of departments communicate directly with the Police Department, heads of district security departments, gendarmerie departments and their assistants, as well as provincial and district institutions and among themselves.” If the gendarmerie departments determined the need to carry out investigative actions in cases of a political nature, it was necessary to obtain the consent of the head of the security department. This agreement was consolidated from the moment the security departments were established. Thus, in § 19 of the Temporary Regulations on Security Departments of June 27, 1904, it was stated that “without prior notification to the head of the security department, no searches or arrests can be carried out by the gendarmerie corps in the area of ​​his supervision.” Thus, it is clear that security departments are gradually beginning to perform some of the functions that were characteristic of gendarmerie departments, which could not but cause certain contradictions in the work of these bodies in charge of political investigation.

Throughout the entire period of existence of security departments, their structure has been reformed. To unite and direct the activities of local organizations

District security departments were established for the gans in charge of political investigation in the Empire. On December 14, 1906, the Regulations on district security departments were approved. They were created in such large cities as St. Petersburg, Moscow, Samara, Kharkov, Kyiv, Odessa, Vilna, Riga. To bring management closer to the grassroots bodies, eight security districts were formed. The security district included district security departments of several provinces. The regulations established that “§ 7. One of the most important tasks of the heads of district security departments is the establishment of a central internal agency that can cover the activities of the revolutionary communities entrusted to his supervision of the region...”.

The regulation on security departments dated February 9, 1907 clarified the activities of security departments, for example in § 24: “In the activities of security departments, the following should be distinguished: a) investigations in the form of preventing and detecting criminal acts of the state. and b) research into the political trustworthiness of individuals.”, and the methods for its implementation were specified in § 25: “... the collection of information about a planned or committed crime of a political nature is carried out in the ways specified in Art. 251. Est. Corner. Court, that is, through searches (secret agents), verbal questioning and secret surveillance (through secret employees and spies).”

The main goal and essence of the activities carried out by employees of security departments were presented in the Instructions to the heads of security departments on the organization of external surveillance in 1907. Thus, in Art. 2 explained that “...the greatest benefit from external surveillance can be obtained only if it is strictly consistent with the instructions of internal agents on the significance of the observed persons and the events planned by the spies.” In addition, Art. 10 defined one of the functions of the chiefs: “By the 5th day of each month, the chiefs of security departments submit to the District Security Departments and the Police Department lists of persons who were under surveillance, for each organization separately, with a full identification of acquaintances, last name, first name, patronymic, title, occupation, nickname for observation and organization and a brief indication of the reasons for observation."

Analysis of the research materials allows us to conclude that security departments most actively interacted with gendarmerie departments. This circumstance was due to the similarity of the functions assigned to them, since the gendarmerie departments also carried out arrests, inquiries and conducted investigations in cases of state crimes. Thus, security departments and gendarmerie departments carried out a political search and collected the necessary information.

The main purpose of the political search was “...to identify and identify both individuals and entire organizations seeking to change the existing political system in the country, and to suppress their activities.” All political investigation in Russia, as researchers note, was based on “three pillars”: internal agents, external surveillance and the inspection of correspondence.

As already noted, the security department was headed by a chief subordinate to the Police Department or the head of the district security department. The Regulations on security departments dated February 9, 1907 stated: “§ 5 Interference by other institutions and persons, except the Police Department and the heads of district security departments, in the activities of local security departments cannot take place.”

Initially, security departments were created as bodies whose main function was surveillance and prevention of crimes based on the information received. The main role in the political investigation (directly conducting the investigation, including the implementation of investigative actions) was assigned to the gendarmerie departments. The right to independently conduct a search or arrest of security departments is primarily

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It was initially provided only in an exceptional situation, when it was impossible to obtain the consent of the head of the gendarmerie department and ensure the participation of his officials. As a general rule, when time and the situation made it possible to more thoroughly understand and report proposed measures to the head of the provincial gendarmerie department, the independence of the security departments was limited by his consent. Moreover, after the announcement of the planned investigative actions, they were carried out by the gendarmerie department. Gradually (in particular, since 1907 in connection with the adoption of the Regulations on Security Departments), the powers of security departments are expanding. Now, without interaction with security departments, not a single investigative action takes place on the part of the provincial gendarmerie departments in cases of a politically significant nature. With the adoption of the Regulations on security departments on February 9, 1907, the consent of the head of the provincial gendarmerie department was not required. The head of the security department had to take all measures to concentrate the entire investigative matter in his hands. Officials of the gendarme corps and the general police, receiving information related to the political investigation from an unofficial source, were obliged to report it to the head of the security department. Assessing the information received on cases of political investigation, he made decisions about conducting searches, seizures and arrests.

In addition, there was a rule that information on political affairs should be concentrated in security departments. Officials of the gendarme corps and general police were required to transmit all information received on such cases to the security departments. For these purposes, the heads of security departments had to take all possible measures to establish “correct” relations with the heads of gendarmerie departments, officers of the gendarme corps, as well as with prosecutorial supervision and judicial investigators. It should be especially noted that if security departments recorded information that had significance beyond the boundaries of the assigned area, then it was subject to reporting directly to the Police Department, as well as to the district security department.

Security departments interacted with local provincial authorities and provincial gendarmerie departments when submitting information for issuing certificates of political reliability of individuals. These certificates were requested from local provincial authorities by various government and public institutions regarding the political reliability of persons applying for entry into the state or public service.

Thus, in the system of authorities of the early twentieth century. security departments occupied a special place. The authorities sought to completely conceal their true purpose, which was due to the secret nature of their activities and the importance of the tasks they performed. Security departments were an important link in the system of state security bodies of the Russian state. A wide range of powers granted to security departments, due to the need and importance of political investigation, the possibility of interaction on this basis with almost any government body or official, duplication of some functions of other state bodies (gendarmerie departments) characterize security departments as state security bodies that have a special legal status .

Another interesting fact is that among the employees of the security departments there was an unwritten rule, when liquidating identified revolutionary organizations, to always leave a few Narodnaya Volya members at large: “If there are no revolutionaries in the country, then the gendarmes will not be needed, that is, you and me, Mr. Rachkovsky1, because there is no one

1 Pyotr Ivanovich Rachkovsky (1851-1910) - Russian police administrator. Acting State Councilor, head of the foreign agents of the Police Department in Paris, vice-director of the Police Department in 1905-1906.

Bulletin of Penza State University No. 2 (10), 2015

will track down, imprison, execute... We must arrange the work of the security departments in such a way as to necessarily create the impression on the sovereign emperor that the danger from terrorists for him is extremely great and only our dedicated work saves him and his loved ones from death. And, believe me, we will be showered with all kinds of favors.”

On April 25, 1913, V.F. Dzhunkovsky1 assumed the post of Comrade Minister of Internal Affairs and began work on eliminating security departments and combating the growing network of secret agents, which, in his opinion, no longer fit within the framework of expediency and legality. So, two months after his appointment, V.F. Dzhunkovsky ordered the abolition of all security departments, with the exception of the main ones (they remained in St. Petersburg, Moscow and Warsaw, and in some remote provinces their status was downgraded to search departments). The decision was made by the fact that the district security departments moved away from the work of “living management of the search on the ground and, delving mainly into clerical work, only slowed down the flow of information about the revolutionary movement. reducing awareness. about the situation at every immediate moment of the search case." In addition, by 1913-1914. The system of gendarmerie departments became stronger and their methods of work were sufficiently streamlined. According to some researchers, security departments were abolished “as an unnecessary intermediate link in the cumbersome apparatus of political investigation in Russia.”

Analyzing the reasons for the liquidation of security departments, we can conclude that the emergence of new political investigation institutions was justified solely by the increase in political activity of the population dissatisfied with the autocracy. The effective counteraction of security departments to the political opposition (revolutionary forces) led to a decrease in revolutionary tension, as a consequence, to the functional lack of demand and economic inexpediency of their maintenance. One of the reasons for the abolition of security departments is the specific leadership of the Police Department, which had a negative attitude towards “upstarts from the secret police”, a situation in which the provincial gendarmerie departments faded into the background.

The abolition of security departments during a period when they were one of the key law enforcement agencies guarding the state raises many questions that require further study.

References

1. Russian Police: Documents and materials. 1718-1917 / compiled by: A. Ya. Malygin, R. S. Mulukaev, B. V. Chernyshev, A. V. Lobanov. - Saratov: SuiuI MIA of Russia, 2002. - 400 p.

2. Zavarzin, P. P. Gendarmes and revolutionaries / P. P. Zavarzin. - Paris: Ed. author, 1930. -256 p.

3. Koshel, P. A. History of detective work in Russia / P. A. Koshel. - URL: http://www.Gumer.info/bibliotek_Buks/History/koshel/15.php

4. Kalinin, N.V. Activities of security departments (late XIX - early XX centuries) / N.V. Kalinin // News of universities. Jurisprudence. - 2008. - No. 2. - P. 203-210.

5. Instructions to the spies of the Flying Squad and the spies of the search and security departments, 10/31/1902. - URL: http://www.regiment.ru/Doc/B/I/3.htm

6. Regulations on security departments of February 9, 1907 - URL: www.hrono.ru/dokum/190_dok/19070209polic.html

1 Vladimir Fedorovich Dzhunkovsky (1865-1938) - Russian political, statesman and military leader, comrade of the Minister of Internal Affairs and commander of the Separate Corps of Gendarmes (1913-1915).

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http://www.regiment.ru/Doc/C/I/4.htm

http://www.regiment.ru/Doc/B/I/7.htm

9. Instructions for heads of security departments on organizing external surveillance, 1907 - URL: http://www.regiment.rU/Doc/B/I/15.htm

10. Kolpakidi, A. Special services of the Russian Empire / A. Kolpakidi, A. Sever. - M.: Eksmo, 2010. - 768 p.

11. Zhukhrai, V. Secrets of the Tsarist secret police: adventurers and provocateurs / V. Zhukhrai. - M.: Politizdat, 1991. - 337 p.

12. Reent, Yu. A. General and political police of Russia (1900-1917): monograph. / Yu. A. Reent. -Ryazan: Uzoroche, 2001.

13. Zernov, I. V. The fight against terrorism in the Russian Empire at the end of the twentieth - beginning of the twentieth century: Historical and legal aspects of domestic policy / I. V. Zernov, V. Yu. Karnishin // Bulletin of PSU. - 2014. - No. 4. - P. 2-7.

14. Kolemasov, V. N. Activities of the bodies of the united state political administration of the Middle Volga region to combat crime in the first half of the 1930s. / V. N. Kolemasov // News of higher educational institutions. Volga region. Social science. - 2012. - No. 4. - P. 34-40.

Svechnikov Nikolay Ivanovich

Candidate of Technical Sciences, Candidate of Legal Sciences, Associate Professor, Head of the Department of Law Enforcement,

Penza State University E-mail: [email protected]

Kadomtseva Alina Sergeevna

student,

Penza State University E-mail: [email protected]

UDC 341.741 Svechnikov, N. I.

Some features of the activities of security departments of the Russian Empire / N. I. Svechnikov, A. S. Kadomtseva // Bulletin of the Penza State University. - 2015. - No. 2 (10). - pp. 64-69.

Svechnikov Nikolay Ivanovich

candidate of technical sciences, candidate of juridical sciences, associate professor, head of sub-department of law enforcement, Penza State University

Kadomtseva Alina Sergeevna

R Yepin "Arrest of the propagandist"

The security department is a police agency in charge of political investigation. Created in 1866 as the Department for the Protection of Order and Public Safety under the St. Petersburg mayor after the assassination attempt on Alexander II . Its staff consisted of only 12 people. Since 1880, the Security Department has been subordinate directly to the Police Department of the Ministry of Internal Affairs.

At the end of the nineteenth century, alarmed by workers' protests, which began to be led by Social Democracy, the government hastily strengthened the St. Petersburg secret police. Its repressions caused significant damage to Lenin’s “Union of Struggle for the Liberation of the Working Class.” The arrests of V.I. Lenin's students and associates led to the fact that a single Social Democratic organization ceased to exist in the capital.

A.V. Gerasimov, general, head of the St. Petersburg security department, “curator” of E.F. Azef. After emigrating from Soviet Russia, he assisted the white emigration in their fight against NKVD agents

The Moscow Security Department was created in 1880. In the first years it was small in number. Its staff in 1889 was only 6 people. But there was also a somewhat larger unofficial staff. It consisted of “external security service,” that is, spies, as well as several informants in the ranks of revolutionary groups. According to the Moscow Security Department's estimate of 50 thousand rubles, 60 percent of this was the cost of external surveillance, searches and maintenance of agents.

In the capital's secret police, in addition to the office, there were two departments: external surveillance and intelligence (internal surveillance department). Secret office work was adjacent to them. The intelligence departments developed data obtained from informants and by examining letters in the so-called “black offices” at post offices. The intelligence department was the essence of the work of each secret police. All information received from agents was analyzed here. All other units were auxiliary. All the thoughts of the head of the department and his employees - gendarmerie officers - were directed towards the correct organization and functioning of the agents. Secret agents were the subject of constant concern and care of the entire Police Department. The agents are constantly mentioned in his circulars to the heads of security departments and provincial gendarmerie departments.

After the revolution of 1905-1907, there were 60 security departments in the country. In 1914, when the provincial gendarme departments and the gendarme-police departments of the railways became stronger, and also due to the weakening of the revolutionary movement, security departments were left only in the largest cities, which were centers of the worker and student movement.

See also:

• Instructions for heads of security departments on organizing external surveillance
• The great provocateur / Dossier on secret police chief Sergei Zubatov

Sources:

• By faith and truth
• Districts of gendarmes

The history of the royal secret police...

His Majesty's Gendarmes

Gendarmerie officers 1860-1870

When the people are given freedom, albeit gradually, the state, that is, those same people, needs a special body that will protect them from themselves. When in Russia the people were granted the most serious freedom in its entire difficult history, a body appeared that today is considered almost the first serious intelligence service of the country. "Agents" already contacted to the history of the Third Department of the Imperial Chancellery. Today we returned to this topic in more detail, paying special attention to the gendarme corps, the favorite brainchild of the most interesting and mysterious character of that era, Alexander Benckendorff.

The reign of Nicholas I (1825-1855) was a period when the serfdom system was increasingly becoming obsolete. The number of enterprises based on civilian labor grew. More and more landowners, feeling the unprofitability of forced labor, transferred peasants from corvée to quitrent. Otkhodnichestvo grew in such central provinces as Yaroslavl, Kostroma, and Vladimir. Literacy spread more and more widely among the people.

The ruling circles, seeing the gradual disintegration of the old orders and traditions, were forced to take measures to strengthen the position of the state. This affected the growth of control of the personal office under Nicholas I over ministries and departments, the creation of a new institution represented by the Ministry of State Property, which was in charge of guardianship over state peasants.

The word "gendarmerie" or "gendarme" was first used in Russia in 1772. Then, as part of the Gatchina troops of Tsarevich Pavel Petrovich, a cavalry was established, called the gendarmerie regiment (sometimes the cuirassier regiment). When the Tsarevich became Emperor Paul I, this cavalry became part of the Life Guards Cavalry Regiment. After this, the word “gendarme” was not remembered in Russia until 1815, when the gendarmerie life guard half-squadron was formed (it existed until 1876), and the Borisoglebsk dragoon regiment was renamed into the gendarme regiment. And the former dragoons were distributed to other army regiments to monitor order. In 1817, posts of gendarmes of the internal guard were established, and these guards formed gendarmerie divisions in the capitals. And the gendarmes, with whom this word is associated today, appeared in the country in 1827, when a special gendarmerie corps was established, the first chief of which was Count Alexander Khristoforovich Benkendorf, manager of the 3rd department of His Majesty’s own Chancellery.

The Decembrists who woke up not only Herzen

It is possible that the last straw was the Decembrist uprising. And not only because the tsarist police realized that they had overlooked the rebellion under the very nose of the tsar. But also because even these revolutionaries recognized the need to keep an eye on the great Russian people. And the toughest measures against rioters.

Evidence of this is the articles “Russian Truth” by Pestel and “The Constitution” by Muravyov, in which fiery revolutionaries from the nobility described how they saw the ideal state in Russia. This was supposed to be a rigid vertical, in which the rule would be carried out by a temporary (10-15 years) government (and the Decembrists, for the sake of the fatherland, so be it, would take the trouble to sit in it). Actually, the provisional government itself is the three most important rulers who are part of some kind of secret society. And all the key positions in ministries and departments would be occupied by their faithful associates from the same society. Well, the protection of society itself and state peace as a whole would be carried out by a special gendarmerie corps. The number of gendarmes that the Decembrists planned to plant throughout Russia was enormous. This number was specially calculated back in 1823, that is, two years before the uprising - 112,900 people. That is, every four hundredth resident of the then empire would have been an employee of the Russian secret service. And all because, as Pestel believed, “secret searches for spies are not only permissible and legal, but even the most reliable and almost, one might say, the only means by which the Supreme Decency is able” to protect the state. After the uprising was suppressed, the empire listened to its best sons, who had already been executed or exiled. The secret police were created.

His Majesty's spies

The organizer of the new secret police was General A.H. Benckendorff.

Count Alexander Khristoforovich Benkendorf

Benkendorf Alexander Khristoforovich (1783-1844). A hereditary military man who began his service at the age of fifteen, Alexander Khristoforovich participated in all wars with Napoleon - from the bloody battle of Preussisch-Eylau (1806) to the “Battle of the Nations” near Leipzig (1813). Benckendorff was awarded for courage and skillful leadership of the units entrusted to him not only by Russians, but also by foreign military orders. Benckendorff shared the skeptical attitude of Emperor Nicholas towards public and some bureaucratic structures. Benckendorff was very close to the emperor and gave him the opportunity to constantly interfere in the affairs of the secret police. Finally, it was Benckendorff who worked on the project to create the Russian secret service. It was he who God himself ordered to head this department.

The project for creating a secret police was presented by Benckendorff to Nicholas I in January 1826. It recommended that when creating a special department, two important points that were not observed in the previous secret services should be given priority: firstly, to establish a system of strict centralization and, secondly, to create such an organization that would inspire not only fear, but also respect

The methods of operation of this institution were also outlined: the introduction of intelligence agents into various segments of the population and the opening of correspondence at the post office, i.e., the illustration of letters, as a system which, according to Benckendorff, “constitutes one of the means of the secret police and, at the same time, the best, i.e. . because it operates constantly and embraces all points of the empire." He recommended creating illustration offices in St. Petersburg, Moscow, Kyiv, Vilna, Riga, Kharkov, Kazan and Tobolsk, that is, in the largest and busiest commercial, industrial and administrative centers.

A reward system for officers and secret agents was also proposed. According to Benckendorf, “ranks, crosses, and gratitude serve as better encouragement for officers than monetary awards,” but for secret agents they “do not have such meaning, and they often serve as spies for and against the government.” Realizing that the detective system he proposed could not be popular, Benckendorff noted: “This police must use all possible efforts to acquire moral strength, which, in any case, serves as the best guarantee of success.” The first and most important impression made by it, he believed, would depend on the choice of the minister and on the organization of the ministry itself. To this chief, he continued, information would flow from all the gendarmerie officers scattered in all cities of Russia and in all units of the troops. “This would make it possible to replace these places with honest and capable people who disdain the role of such spies, but, wearing a uniform, as government officials, consider it their duty to zealously fulfill this duty.”
The project was received favorably. On July 3, 1826, Nicholas I established the Third Department of his own chancellery under the command of A.H. Benckendorff, which significantly increased the status of the department being created. The Third Department was in charge of: all orders and notifications on all cases of the higher police; information about the number of different sects and schisms existing in the state; news of discoveries of counterfeit banknotes, coins, stamps, etc.; detailed information about all people under police supervision; expulsion and placement of suspicious and harmful people; management of the supervisory and economic life of all places of detention in which state criminals are imprisoned; all decrees and orders regarding foreigners arriving in and leaving the state; statistical information relevant to the police. As can be seen from this list, the responsibilities of the Third Department were extensive and therefore not very clear.

The armed force of the Third Department, necessary for carrying out its activities during arrests and performing the duties of the “surveillance police,” was the corps of gendarmes. It was created by Nicholas I by decree of April 28, 1827. Its commander had the rights of an army commander.

The number of gendarme corps of the Empire was 4278 people, that is, one gendarme per 10.5 thousand inhabitants of Russia. By that time, the number of officials in the third department of the emperor's office ranged from 16 to 40 officials in the entire history of its existence. So the reality of the “tsarist repressive regime” is mere flowers in comparison with what the “harbingers of the revolution” the Decembrists offered the people.

So, initially the gendarmerie units subordinate to the Third Department included 4278 ranks. Among them are 3 generals, 41 staff officers, 160 chief officers, 3,617 privates and 457 non-combatant ranks. In subsequent years, the number of generals increased by 4 times, officers and lower ranks by 1.5 times.
A.H. Benckendorff developed the first regulations on the gendarme corps. Each of its districts was headed by a general. He was called the district commander and had the authority of the division commander. The district included from 8 to 11 provinces. Yaroslavl province was included in the 2nd Moscow district. In the first years it was headed by Lieutenant General A. A. Volkov, one of the former Moscow police chiefs, then this position was occupied by generals S. I. Lisovsky and S. V. Perfilyev under Nicholas I.

The districts were divided into departments, which included from two to three provinces. They were led, as a rule, by colonels. A staff officer of the gendarme corps was appointed to each province with the rank of major to colonel. If necessary, the headquarters officer could resort to the help of the provincial gendarmerie team of up to 34 people. It was usually headed by a lieutenant or staff captain.

A few more important dates. In 1832, the District in the Kingdom of Poland was established (the materials of the Warsaw Gendarme District became part of the fund of the Headquarters of a separate corps of gendarmes). It was given the name of the 3rd District, and the 3rd, 4th and 5th Districts were renamed the 4th, 5th and 6th. In 1836 the 7th District was formed. The location of the district heads was determined in the following points: 1st District in St. Petersburg, 2nd in Moscow, 3rd in Warsaw, 4th in Vilna, 5th in Poltava, 6th in Kazan and 7th -th in Tobolsk. At the same time, the positions of gendarmerie staff officers were established in each province.

In 1837, the Gendarmerie District in the Caucasus was formed, which received the name of the 6th district, and the 6th and 7th received the following numbers in order. By the mid-1860s. such a structure of the Corps did not meet the requirement of observational activities. In 1867, those gendarmerie Districts were abolished, the maintenance of which was too expensive, and in terms of observation, they were essentially only transfer authorities between the Provincial Headquarters Officers and the Central Directorate. Only three districts were left: Warsaw, Siberian and Caucasian, but in 1870 the administration of the Caucasian gendarme district was also abolished.

The practical activity of the gendarmerie consisted of enforcing the execution of laws and court sentences. Its officials were sent to capture runaway peasants, detain persons without passports, pursue thieves and smugglers, “investigate gatherings prohibited by law,” and transport especially important criminals and prisoners. Gendarmes were present at fairs, markets, church and folk festivals, festivities, various kinds of conventions and parades. Generals and staff officers supervised the local government apparatus and reported to the Third Department about the mood in local society.
In Nikolaev's time, the gendarmes had few agents, but there was no particular need for them. In conditions of relative calm in the country, constantly being in local society, the headquarters officer knew all the news, gossip and intrigue. Analyzing popular rumors, he had an idea of ​​the mood of the peasants and workers. The headquarters officers reported everything they saw and heard to the headquarters of the gendarme corps.

Despite all the shortcomings, the Third Department and the gendarme corps under Nicholas I did a lot for Russia. In 1839, A.H. Benckendorf advocated the gradual abolition of serfdom in the country. He concluded that serfdom was “a powder keg under the state.” In the early 40s, he warmly supported the tsar at a meeting of a special committee, speaking out in favor of the construction of railways in Russia, which most ministers were against. At the same time, the chief of gendarmes proposed the idea of ​​​​creating free hospitals for unskilled workers in both capitals. A commission under the leadership of the gendarmerie general Buxhoeveden raised the issue of improving the living conditions of the workers of St. Petersburg. And from 1844 to 1856, the Third Department and the Corps of Gendarmes was headed by A.F. Orlov (1786-1868), a major statesman who repeatedly carried out complex diplomatic assignments for the tsar. A. S. Pushkin knew him well, who dedicated a poem to him, in which he noted his “courtesy, enlightened mind.”

Briefly about miscellaneous things

Mounted gendarmes

Here are some more interesting facts regarding the gendarmerie corps. Already at the very beginning of the 20th century, the gendarme corps was the first in Russia to begin studying martial arts. Namely, Jiu-Jitsu. Already in 1902-1903, recruits were trained in this fight in special courses.

The corps was armed with, for example, Browning pistols. Then these pistols were popular all over the world. Under the name "Model 07" they were put into service in Sweden, where they were produced by the Guskvarna company. And at the same time, Russian gendarmes began to be armed with them (on these pistols, on the right side of the casing and bolt, there was the inscription “MOSK. STOP. POLICE”). At the same time, the Turkish police enriched themselves with the same pistols. The Model 1903 was sometimes called Browning's second model or Browning No. 2, the Model 1900 - Browning No. 1. However, over time, a new division arose not only for Browning pistols, but also for other automatic pistols - the caliber division. All 6.35 mm caliber pistols were designated No. 1, 7.65 mm caliber and 9 mm caliber. None of these designations caught on and were soon forgotten.

The Gendarmerie Corps was also involved in the fight against corruption. For example, in Yaroslavl the trade in recruits was exposed. In his reports to Benkendorf, the head of the local office, Shubinsky, reveals the mechanics of the abuses that led to the trafficking of recruits throughout the province. Their essence was that the landowner sold his serf to state-owned peasants to be recruited. For this purpose, he was issued a letter of release, which was not given to the “free” person. By hook or by crook, such a sold person was assigned to the family of a villager who had to give one of his sons to the army. The “freedman” was forced to write a petition to become a recruit instead.

A note on the trade in recruits was sent by A.H. Benkendorf to the Yaroslavl governor M.I. Bravin to take action against lawbreakers. The Emperor ordered that gendarmerie officers participate in recruiting presences during the conscription period and restore order there. As is clear from the reports of gendarmerie officers from the provinces, the trade in recruits was typical for many regions. To some extent, Benckendorf's people managed to restore order in conscription.

In the 40s, the functions of the gendarmes became much more complicated, which was caused by increased tension in the country and the crisis of the serfdom. Corps officers not only sit on recruitment commissions and identify abuses by officials, but also participate in the control of ammunition produced for the army. Not a single investigation of peasant unrest or murders of their landowners by serfs was carried out without gendarmes.

Speaking about the gendarmerie investigation of the Nicholas era, it should be said that in most cases it was conducted objectively. Provocations were not allowed. On the contrary, they dealt strictly with provocateurs and false informers. In 1846, retired Guards Colonel Yakovlev was sent to Yaroslavl from St. Petersburg under supervision, reporting that he knew about the existence of an anti-government conspiracy.

Supervision over the local press and the cultural life of the provinces was also under the jurisdiction of the gendarmerie.

In the same year, the manager of the Third Department and the chief of staff of the corps, General L.V. Dubelt, sent the governor a list of plays prohibited from staging. Along with Griboyedov's "Woe from Wit" there was Schiller's "The Robber Brothers". In the late 40s and early 50s, it was forbidden to show Byron's Manfred, Moliere's The Captive Doctor, and Beaumarchais's The Marriage of Figaro as plays imbued with radicalism. Among them, the authorities included Gogol’s “Evenings on a Farm near Dikanka,” Koni’s “Petersburg Apartments” and a number of other theatrical works. The supervision of the vaudeville repertoire became more thorough. The posters had to put “With the permission of the authorities.” During the European revolutions of 1848, the activity of the gendarmerie increased significantly.

During these years, the scope of perlustration expanded significantly. Letters from many famous people were opened. The government suspected each and every member of the intelligentsia of sedition and unreliability.

In the early 50s, the situation in the country became even more tense. Peasant unrest became more frequent. Despite the repressions, the revolutionary-democratic trend in literature and journalism strengthened, and various religious sects began to emerge and spread their influence. The gendarmes and police intensified the fight against runaway peasants and detained vagabonds and dissenters.

The attitude towards the Third Department and the Corps of Gendarmes in the country was ambiguous. In general, the authority of these services gradually declined. Although formally their power has grown significantly. This was explained by the fact that the serf system, which was mainly defended by the department, had completely outlived its usefulness, and hopes for reforms and the establishment of legality in the country with the help of gendarmes were not justified. The gendarmes were unable to put an end to corruption, extortion, and the arbitrariness of officials and landowners. Hence the decline in the prestige of service in the “blue uniform” among officers of the army and navy, from where the command staff of the corps was recruited. In the 60-70s, a crisis of political investigation began, which was expressed in the inability of the Third Section to resist the revolutionary populist movement, their terrorist attacks, during which many dignitaries died, including gendarmerie generals, and later Alexander II himself.

End of the century

The second half of the 19th century is characterized by researchers as a time of emancipation of social life in Russia. During this period, serfdom was abolished, deep bourgeois reforms were carried out, and zemstvo self-government was introduced in rural areas and cities. During this period, students received greater freedom, and press legislation became more liberal. Military reform marked the beginning of a mass all-class army based on compulsory military service. Russia was becoming a capitalist country

At the same time, the most radical and opposition elements in the country were dissatisfied with the changes taking place. Due to the fact that a significant part of the land remained with the landowners, the absolute monarchy was preserved, and police arbitrariness was still great. There was no constitution. The common intelligentsia, which had grown in numbers and formed its own caste, created secret revolutionary circles and organizations. In the 80s, the first Marxist circles and groups began to be created, with the goal of overthrowing not only the autocracy, but also the capitalist system.
From the very beginning of the reign of Alexander II, political investigation in Russia was in a state of decline. The bodies of the Third Branch, both at the center and locally, were in a great crisis. Therefore, the new king was forced to take measures to strengthen it. This was caused by an urgent need. In 1857-1861 alone, 2,165 peasant unrest occurred in the country.

The place of the manager of the Third Department and the chief of the gendarme corps was taken by V. A. Dolgorukov. During this period, 40 officials served in the Third Department, not counting supernumerary and secret agents. The gendarme corps consisted of 4,253 generals, officers and lower ranks. In 1867, provincial gendarmerie departments were created. The main attention in the 60s was paid to “observing the direction of minds in the state,” which, after the “freezes” during the reign of Nicholas II, quickly changed towards liberalization.

During the abolition of serfdom, the gendarmes monitored the mood of the peasantry. In a note to the chief of gendarmes dated March 9, 1861, staff officer Colonel Lobanovsky wrote that “from the conversations of some landowner peasants, one could notice that the new position granted did not arouse sympathy in them, and they, expecting final liberation from the power of the landowners , are particularly dissatisfied with the temporary obligation to them and complete obedience in the continuation of the transition period." The gendarmerie continued to monitor the provincial administration.

Despite the strengthening of punitive policies, the revolutionary movement in the country was not completely suppressed. This created discontent in the government. It was decided to reform the existing system of state security agencies. By decree of February 12, 880, the Supreme Administrative Commission was established. It was headed by Count M. T. Loris-Melikov

The commission was temporarily subordinated to the Third Department with the corps of gendarmes. But it was a short transition period. By decree of August 6, 1880, the Third Department was completely abolished, and its affairs were transferred to the Special Department of the Police Department of the Ministry of Internal Affairs. Since 1880, the provincial gendarme departments (including Yaroslavl), which had previously been subordinate to the headquarters of the gendarme corps, became subordinate to the Police Department. This department became the central body of political supervision and investigation. Among other things, it was in charge of the general police. Now the Ministry of Internal Affairs functionally fulfilled the role of the leading and superior organization for state defense departments. Such a unification of state security police and law enforcement within one department was a completely natural phenomenon (this happened more than once in the history of the Russian state).

But changes in the state security system occurred during the period of greatest tension in the situation in the country; the time for change was clearly unfavorable. And, despite all the measures, it was not possible to defeat the revolutionary movement. Moreover, one of the branches of the populist movement, “People's Will,” organized the assassination of Emperor Alexander II in 1881.

The assassination of the Tsar became the high point of the populist movement, after which a decline began. The people of the intelligentsia did not support the hopes that the assassination attempt would lead to a revolution in the country or at least to the final demoralization of the ruling elite. This led to a certain demoralization of the revolutionaries themselves. Counter-reforms began in the country. At the same time, the security agencies managed to inflict heavy blows on the revolutionaries. Throughout the country they were wanted and persecuted for any anti-government statements.

But the fickle war with the revolutionaries first tired and then destroyed the gendarmerie in Russia, and buried the entire state administration under its rubble. Everything was much more cunning - the gendarmerie was defeated... by another gendarmerie, a rival secret police.

Beginning of the century

An important stage in ensuring state security was the deployment of the activities of bodies specializing in the fight against anti-state activities. In 1880, the “Department for the Protection of Public Security and Order in the City of Moscow” (secret police) arose. It was regional and covered 13 provinces with its activities (including Yaroslavl), being the largest in Russia. This event became a milestone, because the secret police put the fight against sedition on a scientific basis. The revolutionary movement, its various societies and their branches were studied, and all people who, for various reasons, came to the attention of the secret police were taken into account. As a result, huge files on citizens were formed, and collections of bombs and leaflets were collected. The data came from numerous and well-paid agents at home and abroad.

Researcher Zhilinsky noted: “The leaders and inspirers of the security department were officers of a separate corps of gendarmes; they were in charge of various departments of the secret police. These are not ordinary gendarmerie officers - these are capable and intelligent inquisitors who have distinguished themselves in their service and have shown special zeal. These are people almost always with higher education, developed , these are police intellectuals and ... always liberals and radicals, which they themselves reported to every intelligent political prisoner, only they believed that Russia was not yet ripe for reform. They were “scientists”, they took special courses, the younger of them. listened to lectures and studied the history of the revolutionary movement and parties in Russia from sources accessible only to them. This is not enough, they themselves studied the revolutionary movement from special sources inaccessible even to the scientific world - these were printed books published by the Police Department, scientific works of gendarmerie generals and colonels. ". One of the most important requirements in their activities was secrecy. As the researcher emphasized, “everything that was done in the secret police, everything that came there and came from there, everything was “secret” or “top secret.” Their work was secret, and secrecy was their motto.”

The results of the activities of the Security Department became most clearly visible at the beginning of the 20th century. All revolutionary societies and organizations were under their vigilant supervision.

But at the same time, there was also a danger that the secret police officers themselves would be interested in maintaining tension in the country for the sake of solving their own narrowly selfish goals. To some extent, this was facilitated by the use of provocation methods and the complete closure of the institution, because this gave rise to a certain lack of control and abuse. As one of the historians wrote: “The task of the secret police was difficult, for it sought not only to suppress the revolutionary movement and remove unreliable people from circulation, but also to constantly take care that the movement, God forbid, would not die out, to maintain that tense state before a thunderstorm, which is so conducive to fishing in troubled waters and obtaining all kinds of ranks and distinctions.”

At the turn of the 19th - 20th centuries, Russia had an effective system of organs for the protection of state security. Thanks to the use of numerous secret agents in the country and abroad, and volunteer assistants, security agencies could be aware of everything that was happening. They introduced their agents into potentially dangerous circles, acted proactively, and studied possible opponents. The intelligence services had experience in major political processes and interaction with the press (which helped in discrediting possible opponents). The gendarmes carefully studied printed literature (the experience of interacting with censorship authorities came in handy), used denunciations and rumors (they assumed that there might be genuine information there too). Illustration of correspondence and external surveillance helped solve the problems at hand, methods for recruiting agents were developed, and police techniques were used in their work - arrests, searches, interrogations.

This is what helped the special services cope with the first Russian revolution.

From 1905 onwards the corps of gendarmes grew steadily in numbers. In mid-1913 it numbered 12,700 people. Of these, 912 were generals and officers, 30 were high-ranking officials. By the end of 1916, about 16 thousand gendarmes served in the corps. Of these, more than 940 are officers and generals, dozens of high-ranking officials. However, the bulk of the gendarmerie consisted of sergeants, non-commissioned officers and privates.

The corps consisted of the Main Directorate (headquarters), 75 provincial gendarme directorates, 30 district gendarme directorates of the Vistula region, 33 gendarme-police directorates of railways with 321 departments in cities and at large stations, 19 serf and 2 port gendarme teams, 3 divisions, one city ​​and 2 foot teams, 27 combat units.

The leading structural unit of political investigation was the provincial gendarmerie department, which was subordinate to the Police Department in the detective department. The departments were located in provincial cities; in large district centers they had branches or one officer responsible for political investigation in this area, who was considered an assistant to the head of the provincial gendarmerie department. The gendarmes were armed with a revolver and a saber. During the years of the first Russian revolution, gendarmerie divisions and rural mounted police guards subordinate to the gendarmerie were also equipped with rifles.
The main functions of the gendarmes were regulated by the law of May 19, 1871. The main thing in their activities under this act is the inquiry, as well as the political investigation transferred to the gendarmerie from the judicial investigators, whose institute was established in the 60s. The office of the gendarmerie department was divided into several parts (general management, investigative, investigative, political reliability and monetary parts). The gendarmerie units were under the jurisdiction of the gendarmerie departments. In some cities, city gendarmerie departments were created.

Special secret orders of the Minister of Internal Affairs strengthened the independence of the gendarmerie departments on the railways. The reasons for the arrest by the railway gendarmerie could be information about the unreliability of persons in the gauge exclusion zone, inspiring suspicions of committing political crimes, belonging to revolutionary organizations, information about preparations for a strike, uprising, printing of criminal publications in underground printing houses, meetings of members of revolutionary organizations and others. illegal actions.

The training of gendarmerie officers at the beginning of the twentieth century has improved significantly compared to previous decades. If in the first half of the 19th century those enrolled in the corps underwent only a two-month internship at its headquarters, now they were trained at special courses in St. Petersburg, where army and navy officers arrived who had passed a thorough selection and passed preliminary tests. Lecturers taught future gendarmes criminal law, a course on conducting inquiries and investigating political crimes, and railway regulations. Later, lectures on the programs of political parties and their history were added. Future gendarmes were introduced to the techniques of photography, fingerprinting and other skills that could be useful to a search officer. Attention was paid to practical courses on weapon handling and self-defense techniques. After the final exam, those who completed the courses were transferred to service in the corps by decree of the tsar and were assigned to various gendarmerie departments and army units. Army and navy officers entering the gendarmes were required to have hereditary nobility, graduate from a military or cadet school in the first category, not be a Catholic, have no debts, and be in service for at least six years

Even after passing the preliminary exams at the corps headquarters in St. Petersburg, the officer was not sent to gendarmerie courses. He had to return to his military unit and await a call. Sometimes up to two years. Meanwhile, the local gendarmerie was collecting the most detailed information about the candidate. Political reliability and monetary status were subjected to the greatest scrutiny. Officers who were financially dependent on anyone were not enrolled in the corps.
The motives for the transfer of officers to serve as gendarmes were very different. Among them there were ideological people, but most applied for vacancies in the corps because serving in it was much more profitable than in the army. The gendarme's salary significantly exceeded that of the army. The understanding that for good money one would have to perform morally and psychologically difficult service usually came later. But the choice was made, and the officers had to bear the difficult burden of gendarmerie work: conducting searches, arrests, inquiries. During the First World War, many gendarmerie officers submitted reports about their enlistment in the army. When their departure became widespread, the commander of the gendarme corps, fearing to be left without officers, ordered such transitions to be prohibited. Willy-nilly, the gendarmerie officers remained at their previous duty stations. At the beginning of the century, financial allocations for identifying political opponents of tsarism also grew. According to the estimate of the Ministry of Internal Affairs for 1900, the costs of maintaining and operating the Police Department alone exceeded 3.2 million rubles. In addition, many provincial gendarmerie departments were allocated additional money for “extraordinary expenses” from intradepartmental funds. The Police Department also had at its disposal amounts that were not subject to disclosure or audit and were not included in the budget items. Reporting on such “secret expenses” was submitted only to the king.

During the first Russian revolution and later, expenses “not subject to disclosure” and spent “unaccountably” were replenished from a special annual government fund of 10 million. 3.5 million rubles went through the secret cost estimate of the Ministry of Internal Affairs. Most of this money was used to cover intelligence and other expenses.

The main threads of the gendarme service in Russia in 1908-1912 were in the hands of S.E. Vissarionov, head of the Special Department and vice-director of the Police Department.

Decadence

But it soon became clear how things had actually changed. The constant struggle with each other distracted the gendarmes and secret police officers from government affairs. From the moment the security departments were organized, there was a continuous “undercover” struggle between their chiefs and the leadership of local gendarmerie departments for the leadership of the political investigation. While the revolution was on the rise, both structures, willy-nilly, had to put up with the opening of new security departments. Moreover, the leadership of the provincial gendarmerie benefited from the fact that secret investigation was concentrated in the hands of the secret police, and they conducted only formal inquiries into those cases that were opened based on intelligence data from another structure.

However, after some “calming” of the country, the conflict between the leadership of the two investigative agencies flared up with renewed vigor. In addition, the heads of security departments increasingly took provocative actions that alarmed the leaders of the Ministry of Internal Affairs.

By that time, the gendarme corps was too independent from its superiors. Not only the governors and the Senate, but even the prosecutor's office had no controlling power over the modified gendarmerie corps, connected through the police department with the Ministry of Internal Affairs. The former director of the police department, A. Lopukhin, noted the following: “... being placed in such conditions, this institution could bring nothing but arbitrariness and harm to the population and the interests of the state... The entire political worldview of the gendarme corps lies in the idea that there are people both state power and the latter are in constant danger from the former... and that all means are good to protect against such danger.”

Here is what the magazine “State Councilor” wrote at that time: “It would not be easy for a person not versed in the intricacies of the branches of the tree of Russian statehood to understand what the difference is between the Security Department and the Provincial Gendarmerie Directorate. Formally, the former was supposed to be involved in the search for political criminals, and the second - an inquiry, but since in secret investigations the search is inseparable from the inquiry, both departments did the same job: they exterminated the revolutionary plague in all ways provided and not provided for by law. Both the gendarmes and the “guards” were serious people, repeatedly tested, approved. to the innermost secrets, however, the Directorate was subordinate to the headquarters of the Separate Gendarmerie Corps, and the Department was subordinate to the Police Department. The confusion was further aggravated by the fact that the leading ranks of the Security Guard were often listed in the Gendarme Corps, and civil servants who had apparently left the Department served in the gendarme departments. someone wise, experienced, and holding a not too flattering opinion about human nature, decided that one supervising and watching eye was not enough for a restless empire. After all, it is not for nothing that the Lord allocated to people not one apple, but two. It’s easier to look out for sedition with two eyes, and there’s less risk that the lonely eye will think too much of itself.”

But perhaps it was not only objective reasons that forced His Imperial Majesty’s secret services to lose the fight against the revolution, and it was not only the fight against each other that distracted the gendarmes and secret police officers from fulfilling their direct duties. Or maybe the executed Muravyov and Pestel were right, and for the security of the state, to protect civilians from themselves, much more people were initially needed?

SECURITY, secret police, women. (colloquial). Colloquial name for the Security Branch; see security. Tsar's secret police. Security agent. Security officer. || trans. Similar institutions exist in other countries. Berlin secret police. Ushakov's explanatory dictionary. D.N.... ... Ushakov's Explanatory Dictionary

Joseph Iremashvili (Georgian: იოსებ ირემაშვილი, German: Iosseb Iremaschwili; 1878 (1878) 1944) Georgian politician and memoirist, famous for his book of memoirs about the childhood and youth of J.V. Stalin. Contents 1 Biography ... Wikipedia

And, well. decomposition Security department. Tsar's secret police. □ The Okhrana tried to defeat and disperse the Bolshevik organizations before the war. Sun. Ivanov, Parkhomenko... Small academic dictionary

One of the forms of national and religious intolerance, expressed in hostility towards Jews (See Jews). A. has taken various forms throughout history, from religious and psychological prejudice and segregation (See Segregation), ... ... Great Soviet Encyclopedia

Noah Nikolaevich (pseud. Kostrov, George, A. N.) (1870 1953) social democrat, leader of the load. Mensheviks. From the nobles. He graduated from the Tiflis Theological Seminary, then studied at the Warsaw veterinary school. in those In the 90s belonged to the Mesame Dasi group. Being arrested... Soviet historical encyclopedia

PROVOCATOR, provocateur, husband. (lat. provocator, stimulator). 1. A secret agent of a political investigation or, in general, of some enemy organization, using provocation. “The tsarist government used the defeat of the revolution to... ... Ushakov's Explanatory Dictionary

SPY, spy, spy, incompetent. Engage in espionage, detection, surveillance, tracking. “The vile Judas provocateurs, whom the tsarist secret police sent into workers’ and party organizations, spied from within and betrayed the revolutionaries.” History of the CPSU (b) ... Ushakov's Explanatory Dictionary

Perhaps this article or section needs to be shortened. Reduce the volume of text in accordance with the recommendations of the rules on the balance of presentation and the size of articles. More information may be on the talk page... Wikipedia

This term has other meanings, see Rose Luxemburg. Rosa Luxemburg Rosa Luxemburg ... Wikipedia

Sympathetic (invisible) ink is ink whose writing is initially invisible and becomes visible only under certain conditions (heat, lighting, chemical developer, etc.). One of the most... ... Wikipedia

Books

• Great Stolypin. Not great upheavals, but Great Russia (gift edition), Sergei Stepanov. Gift edition bound in leather with gold embossing, three-sided colored edge and silk ribbon. The book contains a certificate certifying that this book is...
• Revolution 2. Book 2. The Beginning, A Salnikov. 1916 The war-weary Russian Empire is on the verge of new upheavals. English Guardians and Petrograd Freemasons, British intelligence and the Tsarist secret police - the outcome of the war depends on these forces...

The topic is, of course, well-known, but suddenly someone will be surprised by the scale of all this, as well as the actual effectiveness and result.

It is possible that one of the reasons for the Stalinist repressions of the 1930s was the search for some of the “enemies of the people” from among the provocateurs of the tsarist secret police. By 1917, the secret police had only about 10 thousand full-time agents among the revolutionary parties. Taking into account temporary, freelance agents (“pieces”) - more than 50 thousand. For example, among the Bolsheviks, including the top of the party, there were more than 2 thousand of them. Secret police agents permeated all the opposition movements of Tsarist Russia.

Under Soviet rule in the 1920s, some of them were tried, and then the scale of infiltration by opposition secret police agents was revealed.

Between 1880 and 1917, there were about 10 thousand secret employees in the archives of the Police Department. And this is not a complete list. Several times even before the Revolution, when the leadership of the department changed, some of the files on agents were destroyed. A significant part of the documents on them was destroyed in February-March 1917 during the pogrom of police archives. The total number of agents infiltrated among opposition parties could reach 20 thousand people. Those. those who received money for their activities. And this is not counting the so-called. “pieces” - secret employees of gendarmerie departments who supplied information sporadically, or broke with the secret police after completing a small number of cases. Together with them, the number of secret police agents in revolutionary parties could reach 50 thousand people.

This fact must be taken into account when we talk about the reasons for the repressions of the 1920-30s (and even the 1940-50s). Only after October 1917 was the scale of the infiltration of agents into the opposition, including the Bolsheviks, revealed. Paranoia overtook the top of the Bolsheviks, especially taking into account the fact that, as mentioned above, some of the files on the provocateurs were destroyed. Each could suspect the other that he was a secret agent of the secret police, especially since by that time - by the mid-1920s - it was already known about the case of the provocateur Malinovsky, who headed the Bolshevik faction in the State Duma, Lenin’s favorite, as well as about the affairs of dozens more provocateurs. Some Bolsheviks even suspected Stalin that he was a secret agent of the gendarmerie, and what can we say about less significant figures of the Bolshevik Party.

Moreover, many of the provocateurs were double agents - both the Russian secret police and foreign intelligence services. This is also in the future, in the 1920s and 30s it gave rise to the OGPU/NKVD to look for “spies under the beds.”

Vladimir Ignatov’s book “Informers in the history of Russia and the USSR” (Veche publishing house, 2014) talks about the establishment of a system of secret agents in the Russian Empire and the USSR. One of the chapters of the book tells how this system functioned in late tsarist times. We present a short excerpt from this chapter.

***
Contrary to popular belief, only a small part of them (secret agents) were discovered before the overthrow of the autocracy.
Social Democrats have encountered police provocations before. What was new and unexpected for many of them was the involvement of advanced workers who emerged during the first revolution in provocative activities. Just as the participants in the “going to the people” once idealized the peasantry, Marxist intellectuals did not escape the idealization of the workers. In 1909, Inessa Armand stated with bitterness and bewilderment: provocateurism was becoming widespread, it was spreading “among intelligent workers, who undoubtedly have a conscious class instinct as a counterbalance to personal interests.” “Some of the local comrades,” she wrote, referring to Moscow, “even argued that it is precisely among intelligent workers that this phenomenon is now most widespread.”

(Destruction of the police archive in Petrograd (Ekaterininsky Canal, 103) during the February Revolution)

In Moscow, the secret police recruited such well-known party workers in the revolutionary environment as A.A. Polyakov, A.S. Romanov, A.K. Marakushev. There were worker provocateurs in St. Petersburg, for example, V.M. Abrosimov, I.P. Sesitsky, V.E. Shurkanov, who actively worked in the metalworkers' union. The informants were registered with the Police Department, and a file was opened against each of them, containing information about his personality, profession, membership in revolutionary organizations, party nicknames, etc. A file with information about secret employees was kept in the Special Department of the Police Department.

I didn’t spare money for “information.” For example, the provocateur R.V. Malinovsky, a member of the Central Committee of the Bolshevik Party, had a salary of 700 rubles. per month (the governor's salary was 500 rubles). The writer M.A. Osorgin, who was sorting through the archives of the secret police after February, reports on a curious case: two underground Bolsheviks who belonged to different movements in the party accidentally met and argued. Both wrote a report to the secret police about the conversation and about the interlocutor - both were provocateurs. And the party only had 10 thousand people throughout Russia! (of these, as mentioned above, only 2,070 secret police agents were documented).

The activities of the secret employee Anna Egorovna Serebryakova are known, whose experience of cooperation with the Moscow Security Department totaled 24 years. Serebryakova (born in 1857) graduated from the Moscow Higher Women's Courses of Professor V.I. Gerye, led the political department on foreign literature in the newspaper “Russian Courier”. She participated in the work of the Red Cross Society for political prisoners. She supplied visitors to her club-salon with Marxist literature and provided an apartment for meetings. Bolsheviks A.V. Lunacharsky, N.E. Bauman, A.I. Elizarova (elder sister of V.I. Lenin), V.A. visited her apartment. Obukh, V.P. Nogin, legal Marxist P.B. Struve and many others. The Moscow Committee of the RSDLP met in her house in 1898. From 1885 to 1908 she was a secret employee of the Moscow Security Department. Agent pseudonyms “Mother”, “Ace”, “Subbotina” and others. After her husband’s arrest, the head of the Moscow Security Department, G.P. Sudeikin, under threat of arrest, forced her to agree to work as an agent for the Police Department.

She handed over to the secret police several revolutionary groups, the social democratic organization "Workers' Union", the governing bodies of the Bund, the social democratic organization "Southern Workers", the Moscow Committee of the RSDLP. Her “asset” includes the liquidation of the illegal printing house of “People’s Law” in Smolensk and many other “merits”, including the arrest in 1905 of the leaders of the committee for preparing the uprising in Moscow. Throughout her activities as an agent, Serebryakova received large monthly allowances from the Police Department.

The leaders of the Moscow Security Department, the Police Department and the Minister of Internal Affairs P. Stolypin highly valued Serebryakova’s activities as an agent in the fight against the revolutionary underground. On their initiative, she was paid one-time benefits. For example, in 1908, 5,000 rubles. In February 1911, at the request of the Minister of Internal Affairs, Emperor Nicholas II approved the appointment of Serebryakova with a lifelong pension of 100 rubles per month.

After the October Revolution, when the new government began searching for and prosecuting former agents of the Police Department, Serebryakova was exposed. Court hearings in her case took place in the building of the Moscow District Court from April 16 to April 27, 1926. Taking into account her advanced age and disability, the court sentenced Serebryakova to 7 years in prison with credit for the time served in a pre-trial detention center (1 year 7 months). “Mother” died in prison.

(Anna Serebryakova during the trial in 1926)

***
After the revolution, one of the Bolshevik informers wrote a letter of repentance to Gorky. There were these lines: “After all, there are many of us - all the best party workers.” Lenin's inner circle was literally filled with police agents. The director of the police department, already in exile, said that every step, every word of Lenin was known to him down to the smallest detail. In 1912, in Prague, in an atmosphere of great secrecy, Lenin held a party congress. Among the selected, “faithful” and verified 13 participants, four were police agents (Malinovsky, Romanov, Brandinsky and Shurkanov), three of whom submitted detailed police reports about the congress.

***
A Bolshevik recruited by Harting, a member of the Foreign Bureau of the Central Committee of the RSDLP, Yakov Abramovich Zhitomirsky (party pseudonym Fathers), worked for the Germans before starting to work for the Russian police. He was recruited by the German police in the early 1900s, while studying at the medical faculty of the University of Berlin, where he organized a Social Democratic circle. In 1902, Zhitomirsky occupied a prominent place in the Berlin Iskra group. That same year, he was recruited by Harting and became an agent of the Police Department's foreign agents. He informed the police about the activities of the Berlin group of the Iskra newspaper and at the same time carried out instructions from the editorial board of the newspaper and the Central Committee of the party, making trips to Russia on its instructions. Living in Paris from the end of 1908 to 1912, he was in Lenin’s inner circle. Informed the Police Department about the activities of Social Democrats, Socialist Revolutionaries and representatives of other leftist parties in exile. Based on information sent to the Police Department by Zhitomirsky, the famous Bolshevik S. Kamo and agents of the RSDLP, who were trying to sell banknotes expropriated from one of the Russian banks, were arrested.

Zhitomirsky took part in the work of the 5th Congress of the RSDLP (1907), in the plenary sessions of the Central Committee of the RSDLP in Geneva (August 1908) and in the work of the 5th All-Russian Conference of the RSDLP in Paris (December 1908). At the conference, he was elected to the Foreign Bureau of the Central Committee of the RSDLP, and later became a member of the foreign agents of the Central Committee of the RSDLP. During the First World War, Zhitomirsky remained in France, where he served as a doctor in the Russian expeditionary force. After the February Revolution, when the documents of the Parisian agents of the Police Department fell into the hands of the revolutionaries, he was exposed as a provocateur and hid from an inter-party court in one of the countries of South America.

***
The police recruited some revolutionaries to cooperate literally in “exchange for their lives.” Thus, shortly before his execution, Ivan Fedorovich Okladsky (1859-1925), a worker, Russian revolutionary, member of the Narodnaya Volya party, agreed to cooperate with the police. In the summer of 1880, Okladsky participated in an assassination attempt on Emperor Alexander II under the Stone Bridge in St. Petersburg. Arrested on July 4, 1880, and at the trial of 16 he was sentenced to death. At the trial he behaved with dignity, however, once on death row, he agreed to cooperate with the Police Department. In June 1881, Okladsky's indefinite penal servitude was replaced by exile to a settlement in Eastern Siberia, and on October 15, 1882, by exile to the Caucasus. Upon arrival in the Caucasus, he was enrolled as a secret employee in the Tiflis gendarmerie department.

(Ivan Okladsky during the trial in 1925)

In January 1889, Okladsky was sent to St. Petersburg and became an unofficial employee of the police department with a salary of 150 rubles. Having established connections with figures of the St. Petersburg underground, he betrayed the circle of Istomina, Feit and Rumyantsev, for which on September 11, 1891, according to the report of the Minister of Internal Affairs, he received a full pardon, with the renaming of Ivan Aleksandrovich Petrovsky and transfer to the class of hereditary honorary citizens. Okladsky served in the Police Department until the February Revolution. His betrayal was revealed in 1918.

In 1924, Okladsky was arrested and on January 14, 1925, the Supreme Court of the RSFSR was sentenced to death, commuted due to his advanced age to ten years in prison. He died in prison in 1925.

***
Judging by the number of provocateurs introduced into the revolutionary parties, the Bolsheviks were not the leaders in radicalism who aroused the main interest of the secret police. Of the 10 thousand uncovered agents, about 5 thousand were part of the Social Revolutionaries. The number of agents in the Jewish (Bund and Paolei Zion) and Polish left parties (2-2.2 thousand) was approximately the same as the Bolsheviks.

sources
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