Use of Bulletproof Clothing in the Shooting of February 11, 1879 in Kyiv

Abstract

The armed confrontation that took place in Kyiv on February 11, 1879, was considered for the first time as a very important event in the history of bulletproof vests. Based on the analysis of archival documents of Kyiv Gubernial Gendarmerie Directorate and other sources, with the help of an interdisciplinary approach, Kyiv’s leading position in the use of effective bulletproof armor in the late 19th century is researched. At the end of the 1870s Gendarmerie of the Russian Empire needed an individual protection against powerful weapons of revolutionaries. This turnpoint was caused predominantly by the activity of Kyiv radicals. The officer of Kyiv Gubernial Gendarmerie Directorate Georgy Sudeikin, along with the others subordinate to him, used body armour called chain mail. In the shooting on February 11, 1879, for the first time in history, effective means of protective clothing from any army handguns of the 1940s was successfully used at a distance of several meters. Some facts found in this research made us consider that Kyiv body armors were Circassian high-quality body armour of the 18th or early 19th century, and they were modified by an unknown Kyiv master in the 1870s. It was possible that in 1905–1906s, the manufacturers of Avenir Chemerzin’s bulletproof vests used an idea or some technologies of Kyiv body armour. The analysis of the archives of the Kyiv Gubernial Gendarmerie and some other sources could help to confirm or refuse these hypothesises.