“Imperial policy in Finland is conducted on the basis of information from a gang of worthless blackmailers": on the secret service of the Finnish Gendarme Department at the beginning of the 20th century

In the article for the first time in Russian historical science, using history reconstruction, the author evaluates the experience of the secret service work of employees of the Finnish Gendarme Department on the territory of The Grand Duchy of Finland. The source base of the study was previously unknown documents of the Police Department of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of the Russian Empire, the Headquarters of the Separate Gendarme Corps and the Finnish Gendarme Department, which are stored in the State Archives of the Russian Federation. Particular attention is paid to the previously unknown activities of provisional political investigative institutions established on the territory of the Grand Duchy of Finland - the Vyborg Security Department and the Finnish Investigative Agency. The number and quality of the secret agents of the Finnish Gendarme Department, the content of the reports of the heads of the Finnish Gendarme Department to the Police Department and the reaction of the directors of the Police Department to the information provided by the former about the revolutionary movement in Finland are analyzed. The intradepartmental claims and accusations against the Finnish Gendarme Department of unprofessionalism, forgery and falsification of intelligence data are evaluated. It is concluded that at the beginning of the 20th century, the activities of the heads of the Finnish Gendarme department led, with rare exceptions, to the complete collapse of intelligence work and caused the formation of a falsification industry of secret employees’ messages. In the context of planning government events in Finland, the information coming from the gendarmes serving on the Finnish territory was not only useless, it was even harmful, since it was based on fictitious data.