Division II. Administrative division of the empire in the 18th century

7. We also mentioned the provincials: in 1711, about the provinces of Yaroslavl *), in 1718, Stary Oskolskaya and Blozerskaya °), etc. The final division of the governor into the provinces, and the guilty into the utzdy, was established by decree on May 29, 1719. The need for the division of the provinces naturally flowed from the enormous size of each province. t ntoinitintke ANNO t st her rrntuuzn The division of the ego was made on the same basis as the division of the country into governors. Just as the Near Chancellery divided the province into 8 provinces, not paying attention to any vengeful features and paying attention only to the differences in the location - similarly, the provinces were divided into a certain number of provinces, in accordance with their geographical size, and as a basis it was also customary to distribute them. However, here there is already a hint of another basis - the population, which served as the ruler of the land here during the destruction of the land by Catherine II: in each province the number of shares of households is indicated. But this is only a hint, because the population was distributed according to provinces in the most uneven way: 15,461 households were assigned to the Tver province, for example, and 36,279 to the Yaroslavl province; in the Ryazan province, where there were 7 districts, we find 26,855 households, and in Pereyaslavl, with only two districts, 28,554 households, etc. the whole Oryol province, Dalfe: not all provinces were divided into provinces - in the Astrakhan province, for example, we don’t find a province at all, while there were 12 districts in it, and by the way, it’s not uncommon for a province to consist of 4 or 5; 3 ep SZ.M 2615. 2666, 2749 and so on - 9 ShS. 3.M 2362. 3429. 2650.— 9) P.S. 3. No. 3234. and even one district. We make this criticism of the division of the governorate into provinces not because we particularly sympathize with the monotonous and symmetrical administrative division of the country. On the contrary, such a division will always seem unnatural and artificial to us. Decomposing organically into separate characteristic areas, imprinted with a unique geographical and ethograchic type, the country will always disintegrate into diverse and asymmetrical parts. From these parts local unions will be formed, the members of which will be closely connected with each other by the consciousness of a solidary local interest; Administrative districts, with such a correct and organic approach, will coincide with this natural division of the country. An example is England with its unequal counties, which form powerful zemstvo unions - the country's self-government bodies. Primfrom can also serve as an asymmetrical form of the old Franchise, which disappeared due to the departmental leveling of the country. But they will probably tell us that the very nature of Russia - the monotonous steppe plain - could not contribute to the development of provincialism and stuttering mercenary alliances. We allow ourselves to doubt - we allow ourselves to think that even now the elements of pro-vivalism can be falsified. We are not talking about such significant, immediately striking distinctions as Little Russia, Byelorussia or Siberia represent to us - but in the Great Russian provinces it can often be noted that the territorial district does not coincide with the administrative district: Povetluzhye, for example, Nizhny Novgorod province, by the nature of its population is closer to Kostroma province, almost to Makaryevsk district; the inhabitants of some parts of two different districts - Gorbatovsky and Muromsky - have so much in common that they bear the same name - 6068. These features are significant: a volost made up of parts whose population is imprinted with the same character, the penalized totan Viden early, the ufza adjacent to the province to which it is more suitable in its geographical and ethnographic type - to present us with more organic administrative units. But when the administration is organized from above, but when the country is divided into artificial regions by means of an administrative compass, then, it seems to us, a more rational basis for division of the population can serve as a distribution of administrative institutions, proportional to the number of inhabitants of these municipalities. This was the basis and served as the guiding principle for the expansion of the country by Catherine III; its complete absence is noticeable. in two years of Peter: 1108, when the country was divided into governors and 1749, when the governors were divided into provinces.. Be that as it may, the division of provinces into provinces is the dominant one in the time we are looking at: one can even say that the province serves as a more effective administrative center than the province. The provinces disappeared only at the end of the 18th century, following the gradual establishment of regional administration, on the basis of the new establishment of provinces, which directly turned some provinces (Vladishra, Vyatka, Tver, Kaluga and many others) into provinces, and from combining others formed new provinces. But how the new provincial administration was introduced in 20 years - first of all, it was introduced by General Governor Glfbov in the Smolensk governorship on December 23, 1715 and by Governor General Sivers on January 28: 1176 in Tver and December 40, 17796 in the Novgorod governorship and only in 1796 it spread to the Vilna province - then in other regions of Russia, provincial government existed - along with the new governorate even in the 18th century, from negotiations between Catherine P. and gr. Sivers regarding the new establishment of the provinces shows that initially, even under the new administrative duty, the empress. I was thinking of leaving the provinces, but the governor’s office decreed that if need required, then divide the governorships into regions or provinces. By dividing the provinces into provinces, the government tried to correct the inconveniences that arose from the enormous size of our first provinces. We stated above that the provinces could be established even before the decree of May 29, 1719, when governors appeared everywhere, with the exception of the governors of Revel and Astrakhan. By this decree, the provinces were divided into the following provinces: