Политическая полиция конца XIX – начала ХХ вв. и «революция»: игра понятием или реальная угроза?

Abstract

This article is concerned with the interpretation of the concept of revolution by various structures of the political police of the Russian Empire of the late 19th – early 20th centuries (Department of police, security departments, provincial gendarmerie management) — the union of state institutions which had to fight the revolution. In the frames of the history of concepts developed by R. Kozellek, attention is drawn to the fact that the revolution alike the concepts of troubles, revolt, uprising, and civil war is aiming at changing of the state system, on fundamental transformations in the political system of the country. The theoretical framework for the explication of this approach to the records of political investigation is the concept of evidence paradigm proposed by K. Ginzburg to describe the process of the formation of state control over society in the European countries of the period of becoming Modern. According to the officials of the political police of the Russian Empire, revolutionaries were those who aimed to overthrow the existing system; those who belonged to the underground resistance. But they were not those who did the most for the benefit of the revolution on an all-Russian scale — not compared to the socio-political groups that existed in the legal space and had access to the publicity. At the same time, gendarmes regarded everyone, who did not consider himself an ohranitel (Russian for conservator) as a representative of revolutionary legal socio-political forces. The Police Department of Russia regarded not only underground revolutionaries themselves to be a revolutionary threat, but also the radicals, the opposition members, and the radical liberals; liberals in general, though, were not considered to be the agents of the revolution. Two images of revolution, which were formed within the system of the political police, in general correspond with the two concepts of revolution, described by R. Kozellek. In the first, which is chronologically younger, revolution is considered to be an exclusively political phenomenon concerned with the change of the bases of a state system (which actually occurred in 1905). The second image of the revolution, which originated in Europe in the middle of the 19th century, suggested the distinction of political revolution (i.e. one that is concerned with the state-civil, constitutional and legal side) and social revolution (concerned with the society). Analysis of the correspondence of the political investigation forces of the Russian Empire at the turn of the 19th-20th centuries shows that this image of the revolution resonated with the leadership of the political police (i.e. the officials of the Department of police) by the beginning of the 20th century. In this sense, the events of the revolutionary 1905 year had primary importance for them not so much in terms of changes in the state system (as it was for the gendarmes), but as an inevitable reflection of the transformational processes that took place in the Russian society.