Study of the activities of provincial and district institutions of the Ministry of the interior before the February Revolution of 1917 (on the example of the Tver province)

The purpose of the article is to study the work of provincial and district institutions of the Ministry of Internal Affairs in the Tver province before the February Revolution of 1917. The resource base of this study may be divided into two groups. The first group includes published sources, which contain of the provincial Memorial Books and Address Calendars. The published province reviews are annexes to the governor’s reports and contain statistical information about the province. The second group are sources from the funds of the Russian State Historical Archive unpublished earlier and not entered scientific circulation. The most significant are the reports of the governors from the fund of the Office of the Minister of the Interior, the opinions of the governors on the draft of administrative reform, the opinion of the Tver Extraordinary Provincial Zemstvo Assembly on the need for reform of local institutions. Archival material of the provincial level was studied in the State Archive of the Tver Region (SATR). A significant part of the documents is introduced into scientific circulation for the first time, among them correspondence for the central government and information on the activities of the provincial administration during the First World War. Documents of the funds of the Office of the Governor and the Tver Provincial Government; funds of the district police officers were also studied. The methodological basis of the study is the principle of historicism in a comprehensive study of the local administrative institutions of the Tver province, the principles of objectivity and scientificity in the study of documents, as well as historical determinism, the result of which is the establishment of a sequence of development of cause-effect relationships of events. The article considers the administrative-territorial division of the province as a factor that influenced the work of local institutions. As other factors that influenced the work of the institutions of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, the problems associated with seasonal work and the exile of political supervised persons to the Tver province were studied. It analyzes the actual changes in the structure of the Ministry of Internal Affairs at the county level, reviews of them by the local authorities, as well as proposals for further reform. An attempt was revealed by Tver Zemstvo to abolish the institution of police officers by contacting the governor and juggling the facts, which was proved in this article. Based on previously unpublished sources, the problem of poor division of counties into sections of zemstvo chiefs and the fact of incorrect decision-making by the provincial government is considered. Presumably, it was the reform of local institutions and the change in the administrative-territorial division, as well as the satisfaction of the petitions of local institutions and officials by the central and provincial authorities, that could create the prerequisites for ending the unrest and conflict that led to the events of February 1917.

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