Readers are presented with notes by the gendarme general Alexander Ivanovich Spiridovich (1873-1952), who is the author of a number of works on the history of the Russian revolutionary movement. The memoirs span a large time period from the youth years (1891) to the revolutionary events of 1905, making them a curious historical source. The reader will learn about how training took place in the cadet corps at the end of the 19th century, about the work of the Moscow secret police, about the development of the revolutionary movement in Kyiv. Drawing a historical canvas describing the growth of the revolutionary movement in the early 1900s, the author skillfully wove portraits of statesmen and politicians of the late XIX - early XX centuries, famous representatives of the "security world" and revolutionaries into his canvas.