“The local government does not correspond to the actual needs of the time...”: the imperial administration of the North-Western Territory of Russia amid growing social tension at the beginning of the 20th century
Authors:   Southern Scientific Center of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Krot Maxim N. ,   Southern Federal University
Published: December 2024

At the beginning of the 20th century, the Northwestern Territory of the Russian Empire, which included the Vilna, Kovno and Grodno provinces, was a tangled knot of ethno-confessional, socio-economic and political problems and contradictions caused by the challenges of the new era and requiring an adequate and prompt solution from the local
authorities. To the long-term and already familiar to the local administration problems associated with the need for
Russification and depolonization of the region, new questions were added, caused by the growing labor movement, which had a special ethnic specificity in the region.
The purpose of this article is to identify the main problem points in the activities of the administration of the North-West Territory, isolating from them the shortcomings inherent in the bureaucratic apparatus of the Russian Empire at the beginning of the 20th century as a whole and the problems characteristic of this particular region.
The study is based on archival and published historical sources of various types, some of which are introduced into
scientific circulation for the first time, allowing you to get an idea of various management practices in the region, conflict situations, many of which were due to the personal characteristics of local management personnel. An important source containing not only information about the state of the region, but also specific proposals to improve the efficiency of local authorities is the " All-Subject Report" of the Governor-General of Vilna, Prince P.D. Svyatopolk-Mirsky, some plots of which are still insufficiently researched.
The article examines the main problems of regional management of the north-western outskirts of Russia, which are characteristic of the empire as a whole, which include the lack of a legal framework that corresponded to the realities of the time, the short-term tenure of governors in their posts and the inconsistency of personnel policy in relation to the regional administration, the low level of competence of regional officials at various levels, refusal to cooperate with local public forces, to which the regional authorities experienced a steady distrust. The proposals put forward by P.D. Svyatopolk-Mirsky consisted in developing a modern legal framework for local administration activities, and also defined decentralization of the management system through the transfer of some powers from central departments to managing departments. Based on the material studied, it is concluded that at the beginning of the 20th century, the organization of the work of the imperial administration of the North-Western Territory did not correspond to the realities of the time and faced the need for a global reorganization, the degree of its effectiveness depended on the further stay of the region within the Russian Empire.