"City" - this word appeared in the vocabulary of the inhabitants of the Russian Empire in 1862. The definition was valid until 1917. It meant the lowest police rank.
How did the urban
In 1862, significant changes began to take place in Russia. This is the time when serfdom was abolished. Everything began to grow and develop: cities, industry. People got liberal moods.
But the era of change required the protection of order, since such a time is rarely calm. There was a reform in the police. Now, her powers did not include litigation. The main function of this body was the protection of public order, and the police staff was greatly increased.
The new guardian of order and its form
Urban issued summer and winter uniforms. In the summer it included:
- white linen tunic without pockets;
- white tunic;
- belt;
- trousers;
- cap.
Winter work wear consisted of:
- cloth tunic;
- warm pants;
- naughty round winter hat.
Gorodovoy is, as a rule, a retired military man. On their shoulders flaunted transverse shoulder straps. On them were little lines that spoke of a well-deserved military rank. An orange cord with engraved rings spoke of the kind of police rank that the law enforcement officer belongs to. They were called gombochki.
The policeman, who had a minimal salary, wore one ring, the middle one - two, and the eldest - three. The Treasury allocated about 25 rubles a year for the uniform of each guard.
Location of city posts
In those days there were no pagers, mobile phones or even walkie-talkies. And in order to keep in touch, the points where the city was located should have been within direct line of sight.
Three people were on duty at each post. And there were three times as many guards in the city as the settlement demanded. Each four police officers was commanded by one senior.
A typical policeman day in pre-revolutionary Russia
The morning began with the fact that those who had been detained at night were drawn up in the “drive table”. A third of them usually turned out to be those who actually committed crimes. The rest were taken for begging and vagrancy. Any suspicious person without documents could also get into this company. If you believe the statistics of those years, then in 1917 71 thousand people passed through the “drive table”. And for everyone who got to the police station, a dossier was compiled.
Since the policeman is a person who at any moment could enter into a fight with the criminal, special methods of hand-to-hand combat were developed for him. Lawbreakers did not know the countermeasures and could not resist.
Bertillage
Alfon Bertillon in 1883 introduced such a procedure as bertillonage. This is an anthropometric description of a detainee held at a police station. The method perfectly helped in the search for repeat offenders and fugitive convicts. The Soviet police flatly turned out to use the tsarist bourgeois methods, and the entire file cabinet was burned in 1917.
Bertillage included fingerprinting and measurement of head volume, height, foot length, arms, fingers. Bertillon proved that the size of individual parts of the body in humans can be the same, but the overall picture will always be different.
How the guards disappeared
Gorodovoy is that police rank that disappeared with the arrival of the Bolsheviks. In preparation for the revolution, Lenin called on young people and students to gather in groups and catch guards, considering them to be minions of the bourgeoisie. During the riots in 1917, an angry mob first rushed to beat the police.
The police replaced the police in the USSR. From those times, the expression "Japanese city dweller" has taken root in everyday life.
Who is Japanese urban?
"Japanese City" is an expression that conveys the extreme degree of surprise that appeared thanks to the writer Nikolai Leikin. In 1905, he published the story “The Case in Kyoto”, allegedly about a Japanese law enforcement officer who saw a baby choking in the river and did not help him because he did not have orders from his superiors. Since the Russo-Japanese War was then going on, sarcastic works were the norm, but the description of the Japanese law enforcement officer coincided very strongly with the image of the Russian police officer, which is why the work was later prohibited by censorship.
Although the city officer in tsarist Russia is a former military man, tall and handsome, necessarily married, preferably large. This is a highly moral person who, with a sense of self-esteem, could make a remark both of a drunken company, starting a fight, and of a rich gentleman who threw a cigarette butt past the urn.