This essay is called ”The hunt for anarchists- a study about the police in Stockholm's collection of bandit portrait during the turn of the century 1900” and it is about the criminal category ”Anarchists” who the police in Stockholm used at the turn of the century 1900.  In the archive from the police in Stockholm during the essays time perspective, 1899-1909,  there are about one hundred photographs in the category ”Anarchists”, about half of these pictures have no information besides the names of the people, but the other half, 48 persons, have some information about age, work title and where the person come from. The information showed that the people in the pictures where not from Sweden, and after controlling them in all different kinds of archives I found only ten of them have left any traces in Stockholm. What I realized then was that the people on the pictures are anarchists from different countries in Europe, mostly from Italy, and that the police in Stockholm had these pictures because different police stations around Europe had sent them to the police in Stockholm. The police in Stockholm where on the lookout for fugitive anarchists.

The literature about the anarchist movement in Italy during this time describe the hard situation for Italian anarchists. The police had persecuted, arrested and executed manyof them so many anarchists had fled abroad. The same was for Russian anarchists after the unsuccessful revolution in 1905. Eight of the ten anarchists of the police photographs who had been in Stockholm where Russians. They were a group who was accused of trying to kill the Russian czar visiting Stockholm in 1909.

None of the anarchists on the pictures have ever in Stockholm committed a political crime so to find out what a anarchist crime is have not been possible. But the general picture of the anarchists in the photographs is of a man in his 30’s with a working class job, in short: an everyday man.