摘要：The study reveals the history, conditions, statistics and characteristic features of escapes of prisoners of penitentiary institutions of Russia at the turn of the XIX-XX centuries from a historical and legal standpoint, and presents the practice of prison departments to combat them. The authors have established a direct dependence of escapes on the prevailing socio-political conditions in the Russian Empire, the development of the revolutionary situation in the country. The paper presents the influence of the revolutionary events of 1905–1907 on the activity of escapes from prison institutions. It is shown that the escapes of prisoners and their forced release have turned into one of the forms of revolutionary struggle. Therefore, despite the harsh punishments applied to fugitive prisoners, the flight from places of detention not only did not stop, but also had a steady tendency to expand. The article was prepared on the basis of extensive literature, as well as departmental regulations and archival materials, many of which were introduced into scientific circulation for the first time. The article uses both general scientific (historical, logical, dialectical methods, method of system-functional analysis and synthesis) and special historical (historical-comparative and statistical) methods of cognition. The study processed quantitative data available in various reports, references, correspondence and other documentary sources. Among them are data on losses among prisoners, on the number of escapes from places of deprivation of liberty, on cases of violence against guards and guards. The authors come to the conclusion about the significant scale and great public danger of escapes from Russian pre-revolutionary penitentiary institutions, the activity of which was directly related to the growth of the revolutionary movement, the state of places of detention and prison service.
