Historia provinciae: журнал региональной истории (Sep 2023)
“. . . Otherwise. . . Hastily Recruited Teams. . . Will Turn into Hooligans”: Proposal of Baron G.P. von Medem to Transform the Police Guard of the Russian Empire, introductory article, publication, commentary
Abstract
The publication reproduces a document from the fonds of the headquarters of the Separate Corps of Gendarmes. The document reveals the views of Lieutenant General Baron G.P. von Medem on the police guard and contains his proposal to reform the new government agency. In the first part of the document, G. von Medem describes the police guards of Vyatka Governorate, Kazan Governorate, and Perm Governorate, which he inspected in February–March 1906. The author of the report is very skeptical about the prospects for the development of the revolutionary movement in the Volga region and the Urals and considers the police guard organized on a new basis and the troops stationed in the governorate as a key measure to contain it. The second part of the document deals with the measures that must be taken to improve the situation of the guards, in the opinion of the gendarme. These proposals go far beyond simple instructions to the governors to eliminate the shortcomings identified during the inspections. The implementation of such measures would require a radical revision of the legislation on the police guard and its transfer from the control of the general police and the governor to the governorate gendarme department. In the published document, G. von Medem pays much attention to the proposals on changes in the organization of the police cavalry. However, the initiatives expressed in the report did not interest the Minister of Internal Affairs, who focused only on the specific issue of insufficient supply of the police guards with forage. The introductory part highlights the historiographical aspects of the topic, the life of Baron G. von Medem, the introduction of the police guard in the Russian Empire, the characteristics of the corpus of sources to which the published document belongs, and specific features of the reproduction of the text of the document.
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