Metadata: Municipality of Kiev
Collection
- Country:
- Ukraine
- Holding institution:
- State Archive of the City of Kyiv
- Holding institution (official language):
- Державний архів міста Киева
- Postal address:
- вул. Олени Телiги, 23, м. Київ, 04060
- Phone number:
- 380 (44) 440 6350
- Web address:
- http://kiev-arhiv.gov.ua/en/
- Email:
- info@kiev-arhiv.gov.ua
- Reference number:
- F. 1
- Title:
- Municipality of Kiev
- Title (official language):
- Киевский городовой магистрат
- Creator/accumulator:
- Municipality of Kiev
- Date(s):
- 1645/1866
- Language:
- Russian
- Yiddish
- Extent:
- 4,154 files
- Type of material:
- Textual material
- Scope and content:
- Included in the fond are files on the legal and property status of the city’s residents, including Jewish ones; orders of the civil governor stipulating the issuance of passports [pashporty] to Jews from provinces that were part of the Pale of Settlement, with a list of these provinces; edicts of Tsar Nicholas I and the Senate forbidding the registration of Jews in the merchant or townsperson estate [meshchanskoe soslovie] in Kiev, and expelling Jews from Kiev and stipulating Jews’ resettlement from villages and rural areas to towns; a decree barring Jews from doing business at the second-hand market, and correspondence on registering Jewish converts to Christianity as Kiev townspeople; information on the election of kahal parnasim [wardens or board-members], and on the distribution (by kahal) of Jews omitted from poll tax censuses and impoverished Jewish townspeople (so that kahals could be made to pay these persons’ taxes); edicts of the Kiev Revenue Chamber on the assignment of townspeople to the Kiev kahal; files on the fining of the Kiev Rabbi D. Slutskii as punishment for his complaint to the Synod against Kievan Metropolitan Serapion in connection with the abduction and baptism of the rabbi’s underage daughter; on a note in Yiddish left in a Jewish school calling upon people to refrain from buying or drinking vodka; and on the lashing and banishment of the townsperson V. Orlov for converting from Russian Orthodoxy to Judaism; etc.
- Administrative/biographical history:
-
Kiev was the capital of Kievan Rus’ in the ninth-twelfth centuries, and then of an appanage principality [udel’noe kniazhestvo]; from 1470 on, it was the main city of the Kiev Voivodeship of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania (from 1569, part of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth). It became part of the Russian state in the latter half of the seventeenth century. The Kiev Municipality (from 1724 on, the Kiev City Municipality) was a city self-government body established after Kiev was granted the Magdeburg Rights in the fifteenth century. Within the system of city municipalities it occupied a particular place in the sense that it enjoyed these rights until 1835, significantly longer than other city municipalities; and also in connection with Kiev’s status as a border city, which lent its administrative-legal status particular features, this status being, as a result, distinct from the Magdeburg Rights of Right-Bank as well as Left-Bank Ukrainian cities.
In accordance with the Magdeburg Rights, the municipality was an elective body consisting of two collegia, a rada and a ława headed by a wójt, and held administrative, economic, and judicial power in the city. The leading role in it was played by the prosperous elite of the city population. The organisation of the Kiev Municipality as it developed over time was ratified by a charter of Tsar Aleksei Mikhailovich on 16 July 1654 and lasted until 1782, when it lost its autonomy and became a judicial body. In 1798, its autonomy was restored, then somewhat curtailed, and in 1835, finally liquidated.
One of the most important aspects of the Kiev Municipality’s activities was defending the interests of the townspeople [meshchane] under the municipality’s jurisdiction; defending these rights meant doing battle with administrations representing the interests of Kiev residents coming under other jurisdictions – those of the castellan (wojewoda), bishop, monastery, and nobility. Toward this end, too, the municipality monitored the city’s economy and regulated relations, often fraught with conflict, with merchants from out of town, including Jews, as is reflected in the fond’s materials. These materials make reference to the presence of Jews in Kiev, as well as to constant attempts to expel them from the city. The Kiev Municipality was dissolved in 1866 in connection with the judicial reform pursuant to the Rules on the Abolition of Municipalities and City Halls.
- Access points: persons/families:
- Mikhailovich, Aleksei
- Nicholas I
- Orlov, V.
- Slutskii, D.
- System of arrangement:
- The fond includes six inventories systematised chronologically.
- Finding aids:
- Inventories are available.
- Yerusha Network member:
- Jewish Theological Seminary
