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The article examines arrest protocols drawn up from the mid-1870s to the mid-1880s by local policemen investigating thousands of individuals denounced to the authorities for having voiced criticisms of the monarchy and approval of the campaign of terror in the reign of Alexander II. The discussion proceeds in two stages. It first argues that the arrest protocols constitute grounds for a revisionist challenge to the existing historiography which charts enduring, if gradually declining, popular support for the monarchy in the final decades of tsarism. It then argues for a reappraisal of the efforts by revolutionaries in the reign of Alexander II to destroy the sanctity of the autocracy through the use of “propaganda by the deed.” The campaign to assassinate the tsar emerges in the arrest protocols as an effective form of political messaging that gained real purchase in the popular imagination. It prompted lower-class Russians to articulate their own local grievances in terms of popular sovereignty, natural justice and political accountability.

In May 1828 the authorities in eastern Siberia uncovered plans, hatched by the Decembrist Ivan Sukhinov, to stage an armed rebellion among the penal laborers of the Nerchinsk mines. Sukhinov was planning to march on Chita in order to liberate his fellow Decembrists from captivity. Found guilty of the charges, the ringleaders were executed and Sukhinov committed suicide. Yet the conspiracy was a fantasy, conjured into being by the chaotic conditions of penal labor and official fears of exiled revolutionaries directing insurgencies in Siberia. The state's destruction of Sukhinov and his alleged co-conspirators created the fictional memory of a revolutionary hero and a noble, if doomed, rebellion. In their memoirs published in the postreform era, the Decembrists offered contemporaries an inspiring tale of insurgency and martyrdom in Siberia. The “Zerentui conspiracy” articulated new possibilities of revolutionary protest in exile

Drawing on the writings of criminologists and psychiatrists in the late imperial and early Soviet periods, the article argues that Soviet biopsychological constructions of the socially deviant have their origins in the efforts of tsarist liberals to identify and contain the crime and social disorder that accompanied Russia’s modernization. While the historiography has traditionally portrayed the Bolshevik Revolution as a tragic overthrow of liberal ideas and values, the article points to important continuities that span the 1917 divide. In the late imperial period, the human sciences began to categorize individuals who posed a biopsychological threat, a “social danger,” to the social order. In the wake of the revolution, these ideas became radicalized under the impact of Soviet Marxism to generate indictments of entire social groups and classes.