Territory before 1917: governorship, province and province of the Russian Empire

The division of the country into managed regions has always been one of the foundations of the state system of Russia. The borders within the country change regularly even in the 21st century, subject to administrative reforms. And at the stages of the Moscow kingdom and the Russian Empire, this happened much more often because of the accession of new lands, the change of political power or course.

The division of the country in the 15-17th centuries

At the stage of the Moscow State, the main territorial administrative unit was the counties. They were located within the boundaries of the once independent principalities and were governed by the governors, who had been seated by the tsar. It is noteworthy that in the European part of the country large cities (Tver, Vladimir, Rostov, Nizhny Novgorod, etc.) were independent administrative territories and did not belong to the district, although they were their capitals. In the 21st century in a similar situation was Moscow, which is the center of its region de facto, but de jure is a city of federal significance, that is a separate region.

Each county, in turn, was divided into volosts - districts, the center of which was a large village or a small town with adjoining lands. Also in the northern lands there was a division into mills, pogosts, villages or villages in various combinations.

The border or recently annexed territories did not have counties. For example, the lands from Onega Lake to the northern part of the Ural Mountains and up to the shores of the Arctic Ocean were called Pomorie. A Left-bank Ukraine, which was part of the Moscow kingdom in the late 16th century, due to its status as "troubled lands" and the main population (Cossacks) was divided into shelves - Kiev, Poltava, Chernigov, etc.

In general, the division of the Moscow state was very confusing, but it allowed us to work out the basic principles on which the management of the territories was based in the next centuries. And the most important of them is one-man management.

Division of the country in the 18th century

According to historians, the formation of the administrative division of the country took place in several stages-reforms, of which the main were in the 18th century. Provinces of the Russian Empire appeared after the Decree of Peter I in 1708, and at the beginning they were only 8 - Moscow, St. Petersburg, Smolensk, Arkhangelsk, Kiev, Azov, Kazan and Siberian. A few years later, the Riga and Astrakhan provinces were added to them . Each of them received not only land and a governor (governor), but also his coat of arms.

The educated regions were excessively large and therefore poorly managed. Therefore, the following reforms were aimed at reducing them and dividing them into subordinate units. The main milestones of this process are:

1. The second reform of Peter I from 1719, when the provinces of the Russian Empire were divided into provinces and districts. Subsequently, the latter were replaced by counties.
2. The reform of 1727, which continued the process of unbundling the territories. According to its results, there were 14 provinces and 250 counties in the country.
3. Reform of the beginning of the reign of Catherine I. During the years 1764-1766, the border and remote territories were formed in the province.
4. The Catherine Reform of 1775. The "Institution for the Governance of the Gubernias", signed by the Empress, marked the largest administrative and territorial changes in the country's history, which lasted 10 years.

At the end of the century, the country was divided into 38 governorates, 3 provinces and a region with a special status (Tavricheskaya). In all regions, 483 counties were allocated, which became a secondary territorial unit.

The governorship and the province of the Russian Empire in the 18th century did not last long in the boundaries approved by Catherine I. The process of administrative division continued in the next century.

Division of the country in the 19th century

The term "provinces of the Russian Empire" was returned during the reforms of Paul I, who made an unsuccessful attempt to reduce the number of regions from 51 to 42. But most of the transformations that he carried out were subsequently abolished.

In the 19th century, the process of administrative-territorial division focused on the formation of regions in the Asian part of the country and in the adjoining territories. Among the many changes particularly worth mentioning are the following:

• Under Alexander I in 1803, the Tomsk and Yenisei provinces appeared, and the Kamchatka Territory was identified from the Irkutsk region. In the same period, the Grand Duchy of Finland, the Kingdom of Poland, Ternopil, Bessarabia and Bialystok Province were formed.
• In 1822, the lands of Siberia were divided into two general-governorates - the Western with the center in Omsk and the Eastern, having the capital Irkutsk.
• Closer to the middle of the 19th century, the Tiflis, Shemakha (later the Baku), Dagestan, Erivan, Tersk, Batum and Kutais provinces were established on the annexed lands of the Caucasus. A special area of the Kuban Cossack army arose in the neighborhood with the lands of modern Dagestan.
• The Primorsky Region was formed in 1856 from the territories of the East-Siberian Governor-General having access to the sea. Soon the Amur region, which received the left bank of the river of the same name, was separated from it, and in 1884 Sakhalin Island received the status of a special department of Primorye.
• The lands of Central Asia and Kazakhstan were annexed in the 1860s and 1870s. Obtained territories were organized in the region - Akmola, Semipalatinsk, Ural, Turkestan, Transcaspian, etc.

In the regions of the European part of the country there were also a lot of changes - borders often changed, lands were redistributed, and renaming took place. In the course of peasant reforms, the counties of the province of the Russian Empire in the 19th century were divided into rural volosts for the convenience of distribution and accounting of land.

Division of the country in the 20 th century

In the last 17 years of the existence of the Russian Empire in the sphere of administrative-territorial division, there have been only two significant changes:

• The Sakhalin region was formed, which included the eponymous island and the adjacent small islands and archipelagos.
• On the adjoining lands of the south of Siberia (the modern Republic of Tuva), the Uryanghai region was established.

The provinces of the Russian Empire retained their borders and names for 6 years after the collapse of this country, that is until 1923, when the first reforms began in the USSR on zoning of territories.