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Primary sourceDocument1910

Yakov Sverdlov Police Record Card, 1910

1910

A 1910 tsarist police record card from St Petersburg documenting Sverdlov's repeated arrests as a revolutionary.

This police card documents Sverdlov's arrests, evidence of the tsarist state's efforts to track him as a revolutionary.

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Scanned black-and-white police record card with two mugshot photographs of a man, one in profile and one facing forward, a printed form with handwritten entries, and handwritten notes at the top right.
Tsarist police record card for Yakov Sverdlov, St Petersburg, 1910.

About this source

What it is

This is a record card created by the tsarist secret police in St Petersburg in 1910, bearing two mugshot photographs of Yakov Sverdlov along with printed and handwritten police notes.

Why it matters

The card is a bureaucratic trace of the surveillance state that Sverdlov lived under before the revolution. It documents how repeatedly he was arrested as a professional revolutionary, showing the risks he and other underground organizers took, and the methods the regime used to catalogue and control political opponents.

Look closer

  • What do the two different mugshot angles suggest about how police identification worked at the time?
  • What handwritten details can you spot, and what might they record?
  • What does this document not tell you about why Sverdlov was arrested?

This document is part of the curated material that grounds the AI version of Yakov Sverdlov on Humy.ai — when students ask about related events, the AI can quote it and cite it.

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