POLICE OFFICIALS AND PENITENTIARY SYSTEM IN THE LATE 19TH – EARLY 20TH CENTURY: ON MATERIALS OF THE PERM GUBERNIA

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УДК 94(47).08

RYAZANOV S.M., Perm, Russian Federation

POLICE OFFICIALS AND PENITENTIARY SYSTEM IN THE LATE 19TH – EARLY 20TH CENTURY: ON MATERIALS OF THE PERM GUBERNIA

Abstract

For the first time in the national historiography drawing on previously unknown documents stored in the State Archive of the Perm Krai and the State Archive of the Russian Federation, the article addresses the issue of transfusion of law enforcement and penitentiary system officials in the Russian empire in a case-study of the Perm gubernia. The article also mentions some shortcomings of the statements of history as historical source, such as lack of clear information on ancestry and place origin of the officials and also inaccurate data entries, particularly on the family composition. In the first part of the article there is a brief overview of the institutions, in which future police officers used to begin their careers, and an outline of police interactions with the “Prisons guardian society” and of the procedure for apprehending escaped prisoners. In the following part, the author focuses on the circumstances of the police personnel working in police and prison structures and uses prosopographic method of collective biography. Drawing on the analysis of the statements of history, the article identifies class origin of the officials, their place of birth, affiliation, family composition, education, and reasons for leaving service. The article offers a close-up on two heads of police of the Perm gubernia, who had also worked in penitentiary institutions: G.V. Kadomtsev, the last head of district police in the Perm uezd, and A.R. Holtzman, the head of mountain police. G.V. Kadomtsev had shown himself to advantage in the prison department, having discovered an attempted escape from the Ekaterinburg prison in 1908. Later, at the police service, he was well respected by his superiors and the locals. A.R. Holtzman had committed a number of minor offenses in former duty stations and later gained a reputation of a lazy and inefficient official in the Perm police. The author concludes that, although the study of police documents mostly allows bring into sharper focus circumstances of law enforcement personnel, some facts are also of importance for studying penitentiary system.

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Keywords

Archive, archive, penitentiary system, police, Perm gubernia, personnel, statement of history, State Archive of the Perm Krai

References

1. Galkina N.I. Institut tyuremnogo popechitel'stva v Rossijskoj imperii i ego osobennosti na Kubani : avtoref. diss… kand. yur. nauk [Institute of prison guardianship in the Russian Empire and its peculiar features in the Kuban: Cand. leg. sci. diss.]. Krasnodar, 2009, 24 p.

2. Pertli L.A. Profilaktika pobegov zaklyuchennyh v dorevolyucionnoj Rossii [Prevention of prisoners escapes in pre-revolutionary Russia] Monitoring provoprimineniya, 2014, no. 4, pp. 43–46.

3. Sukhorukov S. Istoriya Ekaterinburgskoj tyur'my [History of the Yekaterinburg prison]. Ural, 2007, no. 12, pp. 148–224.

About author

Ryazanov Sergey Michaylovich, PhD in History, senior lecturer at the Perm Institute of the Federal Penitentiary Service of Russia, Perm, Russian Federation, +7-909-111-09-23, This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it

You can read completely article in the russian historic-archival magazine “The Herald of an Archivist”. Read more about terms of subscription here.

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