Yekaterina I. Shcherbakova «A Little Bird Told Me»

Abstract

One of the principal tasks of the political police of the Russian Empire was to collect information on the attitudes and sentiments of different social groups. Researchers now have access to an extensive body of documents preserved in the collections of the Third Section and the Police Department of the State Archive of the Russian Federation, in which rumors constitute one of the most important sources of information. In nineteenth-century official documents, the term publika (“the public”) most closely corresponds to the modern concept of “society,” and its views are reflected in numerous reports of the political police, primarily concerning urban life, especially in the capital. However, the overwhelming majority of the country’s population consisted of the narod (“the people”), namely the peasantry. By carefully recording rumors circulating among peasants and attempting to identify the sources of those considered dangerous, political police officials frequently attributed unsettling popular gossip to the propaganda or agitation of malicious actors, although such an interpretation was by no means always justified. The rumors that spread among the peasantry can be reduced to several fundamental issues of rural life, chiefly those connected with land, land scarcity, and the enduring hope for a “general redistribution of land” (chernyi peredel). Virtually all developments in the country’s domestic and foreign policy were interpreted by peasants through the prism of their expectation of the sovereign’s “grace regarding land.” The analytical and informational materials of the political police that recorded popular rumors constitute an invaluable historical source, one that “opens a window for the historian onto the collective mentality of society.” At the same time, interpreting these materials when they concern the peasantry posed considerable challenges both for the political police analysts who compiled them and for modern historians.

Keywords:

Rumors; Gossip; Peasants; Political police; Intelligence and analytical activities; Public opinion; Third Section; Police Department

For сitation:

Yekaterina I. Shcherbakova. «A Little Bird Told Me». The Historical Reporter. 2026. Vol. 59. P. 40–71. DOI: 10.35549/HR.2026.2026.59.002

Received 02.03.2026. Revised 02.04.2026. Accepted 04.05.2026.

Yekaterina I. Shcherbakova

С.Sc. (History), Associate Professor, Social and Political Sciences Department Deputy Head, Moscow School of Economics Lomonosov Moscow State University. Moscow, Russian Federation.
E-mail: igorfom63@gmail.com
AuthorID: 485769

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