Abstract

This paper examines Tsarist surveillance of Armenian revolutionary networks in the late nineteenth-century Caucasus. Drawing on police and gendarmerie archives, it analyzes how imperial authorities monitored Russian Armenians along the empire’s southern frontier and constructed political dissent through expanding practices of observation and classification. Rather than relying primarily on informants, investigators employed forensic and bureaucratic techniques, including handwriting comparison to attribute anonymous correspondence, inspection of printed materials, interception of postal communications, and systematic tracking of suspects’ movements. Through the analysis of documents, travel records, and physical surveillance, officials sought to reconstruct clandestine networks operating across the frontier. Revolutionary texts—such as clandestine poems and songs—were also treated as evidentiary objects within investigative procedures. In some cases, revolutionary activity was interpreted through medicalized and psychiatric frameworks that framed dissent as deviance. The paper argues that surveillance functioned as a key instrument of imperial governance in the Caucasus borderlands, embedding Armenian political activism within a dense regime of scrutiny shaped by mobility, ethnicity, and frontier security concerns.