Official badge of the rank of the Russian police, XVIII century

An extremely interesting find of our store is the official (?) a policeman's badge (?) rank 2 parts (apparently, the police) of the Russian Empire. Unfortunately, the history of the Russian police of this period has been studied rather incompletely and has many white spots, one of which, apparently, is this sign. There is no doubt about the authenticity of the item, it is made of a thin sheet of brass, with an embossed inscription "2 parts". It should be noted that the font and the style of the inscription do not leave any doubt about the dating of the subject in the second half of the XVIII — first third of the XIX centuries. We will be grateful for help in the exact attribution of the item. Size 81*95 mm. Brass, remnants of gilding. Guarantee of authenticity.

The booth (obsolete. budoshnik), from the first half of the XVIII century, was the lowest official (lower rank, servant) of the city police in the Russian Empire, a police watchman (sentry) standing guard at a guardhouse. The guard supervised the order in the city territory entrusted to him, was obliged to stop crimes and offenses, as well as violations of the cleanliness of the streets of the city and violations of fire safety by residents and visitors. The immediate superior of the guards was a city non-commissioned officer. These police officers had unofficial names: "butari", "khozhaly"; Muscovites also called them "bufeli" and "makarki". During the reform of the internal affairs bodies in the 1860s, the guards were replaced by policemen. The guard served at the intersections of streets, at the most important administrative institutions, stood at his booth and observed the deanery and cleanliness on the streets of the city — within the limits assigned to his leadership, as a rule, there were two people. There was a weather shelter booth in the area under the jurisdiction of the boarder, which gave the name to this position. The guards, like the firefighters, were recruited from soldiers who had lost their ability, or who initially showed inability to perform combat duty. In addition to the booths, in the cities of pre-reform Russia there were also so-called disabled teams, staffed according to the same principle. Since the second half of the 19th century, a new official name for the representative of this service has appeared — policeman, although in many provincial cities of Russia, during the imperial period, both police booths and the name budochnik were preserved, sometimes replaced in many southern cities of the empire by the name foreman.