TEXTBOOK ON THE HISTORY OF REVOLUTIONARY MOVEMENT FOR GENDARMS

Abstract

In the early XX century, there were training courses at the Headquarters of a Separate corps of gendarmes to prepare officers for service in the organs of political investigation. A number of textbooks on the history of the revolutionary movement were written for those courses: "The Questionnaire" about the history of the revolutionary movement, the author of which is unknown, books by General A. I. Spiridovich about the parties of the Socialist-Revolutionaries and Social Democrats, and a textbook, written by Lieutenant Colonel Feofil Rozhanov, which contained an overview of the history of the revolutionary movement from the end of the 18th century to 1913. Attention was paid to the history of current radical political trends, since gendarme officers had to deal with their representatives. "The Questionnaire" focused on the social-democratic movement, while Rozhanov considered in more detail the line of inheritance the Narodniks – the Narodovoltsy – the Socialist Revolutionaries. The article discusses Rozhanov’s textbook, written by order of the gendarmerie office. Rozhanov was not a historian and did not have a university degree. He was an experienced practitioner, and he successively served in several provincial gendarmerie offices, later in St. Petersburg. His book is of interest as a look from inside the police department. Although the historical part of his text was compilation, the analysis of how he assessed the initial phases of the revolutionary movement, especially the Decembrists, allows us to make some observations about what ideological positions were recommended to gendarme officers of the pre-revolutionary years. It is symptomatic that in the story about the Decembrist movement, Rozhanov referred to the recently released liberal gymnasium textbook of Sergey Platonov, not to the older and conservative textbook of Nicholas Ustryalov.