Talk:Ivan Razgildeev

Sources

There are quite substantial problems so far with the sourcing of this article. For a start, a number of general comments in sources about the prison regime of tsarist Russia are attributed personally to Razgildeev, by those who had experience of the prison regime years, even decades, after Razgildeev's tenure. They speak of the 'Razgildeev regime' or 'Razgildeev era', without stating what can be attributed to him personally (Kropotkin, Iakubovich, Doroshevich). The date of death is misread from a source that states Razgildeev's tenure as chief of the Galician Regiment. Iakubovich's work is fictional, though based on notes from his experience. The account of Razgildeev's death in his work is shown as a conversation between two characters, and is not a reliable source. Doroshevich's work is based on his journalistic work, but as a translation it is a primary source. Facts in the article are extrapolated from statements that have been misread or misunderstood - for example "Any prisoners who objected to the rule of Razgildeev were immediately sentenced to death at the worksite". From the sentance "the mare was always setup and the executioner always on duty". The "mare" is a reference to a bench for flogging, not a form of execution, the reference to "executioner" is that of an enforcer who executes punishments, mainly beatings.

More problematic, the Razgildeev of the katorga regime is not Pyotr Animpadistovich Razgildeev, but someone else entirely, Ivan Yefgrafovich Razgildeev. Pyotr Animpadistovich Razgildeev died in 1900, a decorated soldier of the Polish campaigns and the Russo-Turkish wars. Nothing in this article is actually about Pyotr Razgildeev, that which is about Ivan Razgildeev needs major rework. Pending comments here, I will look into this in the near future. Spokoyni (talk) 08:07, 20 November 2019 (UTC)

Thank you for looking into this with greater depth than I could. I had been suspecting that I was mistaking which Razgildeev I was dealing with, but neither had a wiki page and both lived relatively at the same time, and all text references I could find made no distinction. I am in complete agreement with the improvements you are suggesting, I wish I could've found enough sources on Razgildeev to have come to the same conclusion, so, thank you. Uprisingengineer (talk) 03:49, 6 December 2019 (UTC)

A small thought has occurred to me, that I think should be prudent to mention. Kropotkin's descriptions of Razgildeev stemmed from his work In Russian and French Prisons, which was mostly about Russian prisons, actually. Kropotkin's experience in the matter is from someone imprisoned at the St. Peter and Paul Fortress, who had been sentenced to solitary confinement for three months, and who had recounted numerous interviews with those imprisoned within the Russian prison system. The experiences he details in his book are as a native of his country and his country's prison system. If Kropotkin did not meet with Razgildeev personally, it is almost certain that he met with his victims, whom are given great description, but are never attributed to any personal governor. While I might somewhat doubt or question the other sources, Kropotkin appeared entirely within the times. Uprisingengineer (talk) 01:35, 7 December 2019 (UTC)

Yes, I think you are definitely right to say, and it is certainly noteworthy of mentioning, that by the time of these later writers, Razgildeev had become a byword for the harshness of the katorga system. Similar to how Aleksey Arakcheyev's policies led to the term Arakcheyevshchina, which came to be applied to harsh and arbitrary governance, and came to be used in later works, including Soviet, as a term for criticising Imperial Russia more generally. I'll make some edits and see how things look. Spokoyni (talk) 12:28, 11 December 2019 (UTC)