Gorodovaya is an honest guardian of order

"City" - this word appeared in the lexicon of the inhabitants of the Russian Empire in 1862. The definition was in force until 1917. It meant a lower police rank.

How did the policemen

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 have a liberal mood.

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 his form

The city was given summer and winter uniforms. In the summer it included:

• White linen tunic without pockets;
• White tunic;
• belt;
• trousers;
• cap.

Winter working clothes consisted of:

• Cloth tunic;
• Warm pants;
• A merulushovutoy round winter hat.

A citizen is usually a retired military man. On their shoulders they wore cross straps. On them there were skits, which spoke about the deserved military rank. About what police rank belongs to the guard of order, spoke an orange cord with engraved rings. They were called gambos.

The policeman, who had a minimum salary, wore one ring, the middle one - two, and the senior - three. The Treasury allocated for the outfit of each guard about 25 rubles a year.

Location of posts of policemen

In those days there were no pagers, mobile phones or even walkie-talkies. And in order to keep in touch, the points where the policemen were stationed should have been at a distance of line of sight.

Three persons were on duty at each post. And all the guards in the city were three times more than the population demanded. Each of the four policemen was commanded by one elder.

The usual day of a policeman in pre-revolutionary Russia

The morning began with the fact that in the "drive table" were drawn up those who were detained at night. 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 enter 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 into the police station, a dossier was drawn up.

Since the policeman is a person who at any time could engage in a fight with a criminal, special methods of hand-to-hand fighting were developed for him. Violators of order did not know the counter-measures and could not offer resistance.

Bertiglionge

Alfon Bertillon in 1883 introduced a procedure such as Bertillonage. This is an anthropometric description of the detainee, which was conducted at the police station. The method perfectly helped in the search for recidivists and runaway convicts. The Soviet militia flatly tried to use the imperial bourgeois methods, and the whole file was burned in 1917.

Bertillonage included the removal of fingerprints and measurement of the volume of the head, height, length of the foot, hands, fingers. Bertillon proved that the dimensions of individual parts of the body in humans can coincide, but the overall picture will always be different.

How the guards disappeared

The city is the policeman's rank, which disappeared with the arrival of the Bolsheviks. Lenin, in preparation for the revolution, called on young people, students to gather in groups and catch guards, considering them servants of the bourgeoisie. During the riots in 1917, an angry mob rushed first to beat policemen.

The police came to replace the police in the USSR. From those times in everyday life the expression "a Japanese policeman" took root.

Who is a Japanese policeman?

"Japanese policeman" is an expression conveying the extreme degree of surprise that arose thanks to writer Nikolai Leikin. In 1905 he published the story "The Case in Kyoto" allegedly about the Japanese guard of order, who saw how the kid was choking in the river and did not help him, because he did not have orders from his superiors. Since then there was the Russo-Japanese War, the sarcastic works were the norm, but the description of the Japanese guards was very much in line with the image of the Russian policeman, because of which the work was later forbidden by censorship.

Although a policeman in tsarist Russia is a former military man, tall and handsome, necessarily married, preferably large families. He is a highly moral person who, with dignity, could make a remark as a drunken company, initiating a fight, as well as a rich gentleman who threw a cigarette butt past the urn.