Introduction. The relevance of the chosen research topic is of lasting importance, since the place, role and importance of the political police is always of paramount importance in order to ensure the security of the state and its power structures. Theoretical analysis. During the second half of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th centuries, the gendarmerie bodies underwent gradual reform and serious intradepartmental and interregional reorganization. As a result, by the beginning of the last century, two main, interconnected and interacting structures of the political police operated in the Russian Empire – a separate corps of gendarmes (with a network of provincial gendarmerie departments and gendarmerie police departments of railways) and Security (search) departments (points). Empirical analysis. It was revealed that the political police bodies operating in the early twentieth century on the territory of the Saratov province (Saratov Provincial Gendarmerie Department, Tambov-Ural Gendarmerie Police Department of Railways, Saratov Security Department and Volga Region Security Department), which underwent organizational and structural changes in accordance with the directive acts of the authorities, purposefully performed their functions of search, covert supervision and surveillance of unreliable elements, inquiry and political investigation, as well as the execution of court sentences in political cases. Results. The process of reorganization and restructuring of political police bodies at the local level, in particular, in the Saratov province, testifies to the contradictory and ambiguous nature of the ongoing transformations. The empirical material studied shows that the authorities of late imperial Russia failed, to the necessary extent, to create an effective system of political investigation, which was supposed to resist the rapidly developing revolutionary movement at the beginning of the 20th century.