New materials about the secret supervision of A. I. Turgenev (reports of gendarmes and agents from the archive of the III Section)

Abstract

It has long been known in historical literature that the III Section conducted secret supervision of the statesman and public figure of the first half of the XIX century, historian, archaeographer and writer Alexander Ivanovich Turgenev (1784-1845), but researchers rarely turned to the surveillance materials themselves. The purpose of the article is to familiarize readers in more detail with the gendarmerie documents, highlighting the characteristic features of the supervision of A. I. Turgenev in Moscow and Simbirsk. This will allow us to raise questions again about the effectiveness of the supervision of the III Section for cultural figures of Pushkin's time and about the overall value of the reports. In the process of research, it is established how much information from the papers of the III Section correlates with real facts from the life of A. I. Turgenev, which is important for studying the biography of the historian and writer. The article uses a comparative method: the reliability of information from the documents of the III Section is checked by comparing them with information from the correspondence of A. I. Turgenev and his friends and from the formulary list of our hero. In addition, in order to better visualize the specifics of the content of supervision materials, the data are systematized, similar plots are grouped. As a result of the study, we come to the conclusion that A. I. Turgenev knew about the supervision of the III Section for himself. The supervision was not effective, did not lead to the adoption of specific measures against our hero, because there were no legitimate grounds for that. When reviewing the gendarmerie materials, the opinion of the different qualifications of the informants of the III Section, which has developed in historiography, is convincingly confirmed: high gendarmerie officials in their reports admit that Turgenev's speeches and actions were monitored by domestic servants. In general, the analyzed documents expand our understanding of the daily life of A. I. Turgenev in Moscow and Simbirsk, however, caution is required when working with them: the information contained in them is not always confirmed by other sources (this applies to a number of dates of the arrival / departure of our hero, his relationship with his brother and future plans for life).