Metadata: On the Peoples of the European Part of Russia
Collection
- Country:
- Russia
- Holding institution:
- Russian Geographic Society
- Holding institution (official language):
- Русское географическое общество
- Postal address:
- 190000, Russia, St. Petersburg, per. Grivtsova, d. 10, litera A
- Phone number:
- (812) 315-62-82
- Web address:
- http://www.rgo.ru/ru
- Email:
- rgo@rgo.ru
- Reference number:
- Category 53
- Title:
- On the Peoples of the European Part of Russia
- Title (official language):
- О народностях европейской части России
- Creator/accumulator:
- Research Archive of the Russian Geographic Society
- Date(s):
- 1845/1915
- Language:
- Russian
- Extent:
- 148 storage units
- Type of material:
- Textual material
- Scope and content:
-
The category contains historical, statistical, and geographical information on the peoples inhabiting the Russian Empire; materials for the production of dictionaries of various languages (Lithuanian, Sami, Chuvash); ethnographic descriptions of everyday life and wedding rituals; collections of songs, sayings, fairy tales, legends, and traditions of the Bashkir, Kalmyk, Mordva (and separately, the Moksha), Cheremis (Mari), Nenets (“Samoyed”), Lithuanian, Latvian, and other peoples; travel notes by Russian travellers, and in particular, by A. Popov on the Zyryan people (1847); by D. P. Nikol’skii on his travels among the eastern Cheremis (1894); etc.
Pertaining to the history of Jews in Russia are particular files and file fragments; in particular, there is a manuscript titled “A Codex of Laws on Persons of Foreign Faiths,” which consists of detailed references to and excerpts from Russian imperial legislation in tabular form, and includes the separate sections “Laws and Obligations of Jews According to their Religious Confession” and “Personal and Property Rights of Jews,” with excerpts from laws on Karaites cited separately (undated); a study titled “Statistical Information on Jews, with Four Tables Appended” (based on census data for 1835, calculations of P. P. Keppen for 1838, “tabulations” for 1843-48, an “approximate calculation” and a “summary of all calculations and a critical evaluation thereof” for 1849); this study indicates the number of Jews residing in various provinces of the Russian Empire, and the number of Jewish communities and their makeup (detailed information is given on the Podolia, Kovno, Kherson, and Tavriia provinces); there is a description of the “everyday economic life” of the Jewish population and the general nature of the “industrial occupations of Jews,” with the following tables appended: “Official totals of the population of Jews from 1838-48”; “Probable totals of the Jewish population, based on data on the average annual growth thereof”; “The distribution of Jews among the provinces for 1848”; and “Jewish merchant capital in 1849” – according to which, in 1835, a total of 1,054,349 male Jews resided in Russia, which constituted 6% of the total male population of the empire; also cited is the number of commercial enterprises, arranged by size of guild capital belonging to Jews as of the early 1850s (1850).
There is an anonymous memorandum written in pencil titled “A Draft Report on Jews,” including the following sections: “Introduction”; “Whereabouts”; “Physical description”; “Language breakdown”; “Relation to the Indo-European tribe – by way of the Phoenicians and Carthaginians”; “The tribal nature of Jews as attested by their history”; “The influence of Talmudism on Jews and their development”; “The status of Jews among the Christian peoples of Europe”; “Jews in Russia”; and “Karaites” (1870s). There is a manuscript (in two notebooks), presumably by M. E. Polinkovskii, titled “Certain Remarks on Jews”; this bears a postscript: “As determined by the commission, excluded from the text of vol. 7” (which apparently indicates that originally the information given in this memorandum was to be included in the first edition of volume seven of Works of the Ethnographic-Statistical Expedition to the West-Russian Territory [St. Petersburg, 1872] by the historian and ethnographer P. P. Chubinskii). The author of the memorandum seeks to analyse in detail the causes of the “economic harm” wrought by Jews on the territory they inhabit, the Pale of Settlement; in his opinion, the primary reason for Jews’ alleged disinterest in agricultural labour is their “appalling national-religious and everyday insularity and the influence of the ‘tzadiks’”; he also cites information on Jews’ earnings in middleman operations, including in the city of Berdichev; and describes the two rabbinical seminaries (in Zhitomir and Vil’na) and the status of their graduates, who among their coreligionists hardly have the reputation of being Talmudic scholars. The memorandum proposes ten measures “to improve the organization of the Jews,” and in particular: abolishing the 1850 law on “payot and frockcoats,” i.e., lifting the ban on wearing traditional Jewish clothing; allowing Jews to acquire agricultural estates and other forms of real estate; liquidating the Pale of Settlement entirely; closing the state Jewish schools; and abolishing the kahals and special Jewish taxes – the korobka [kosher meat tax] and candle tax (1860s-70s).
- Archival history:
- The Russian Geographic Society (RGO) was founded by imperial decree of Emperor Nicholas I and on recommendation of Interior Minister L. A. Perovskii on 6 (18) August 1845. The idea to establish the society was conceived by Admiral Baron F. P. Litke (subsequently head of the Imperial Academy of Sciences), tutor of Grand Prince Konstantin Nikolaevich, the future first chairman of the RGO. The mission of the RGO was to “assemble and direct the best young minds of Russia toward a comprehensive study of their native land.” The RGO combined specialists in geography and allied sciences, as well as travel enthusiasts, ethnographers, and public figures. In the course of its activities it was renamed on several occasions: from 1845-50, it was called the Russian Geographic Society (RGO); from 1850-1917, the Imperial Russian Geographic Society (IRGO); from 1917-25, the Russian Geographic Society (RGO); from 1925-38, the State Geographic Society (GGO); from 1938-92, the Geographic Society of the USSR (the All-Union Geographic Society; VGO); from 1992-95, the Russian Geographic Society; and from 1995 to the present, the All-Russian Public Organization “Russian Geographic Society” (VOO “RGO”). At different times, the society has been headed by representatives of the royal family, famous travellers, researchers, and statesmen. The hundreds of expeditions organised by the society have played an important role in the colonisation of the Arctic, Siberia, the Far East, Central Asia, Australia, and the world’s oceans and seas. Honorary members of the IRGO / RGO have included statesmen, public figures, and scientists of Russia – P. P. Semenov-Tian-Shanskii, Count S. Iu. Witte, N. I. Vavilov, V. I. Vernadskii, Baron F. P. Vrangel’, A. M. Gorchakov, V. I. Dal’, V. A. Obruchev – as well as Leopold II of Belgium, the Ottoman Sultan Abdul-Hamid, Carl Gustaf XVI of Sweden, King Oscar II of Norway, Shah Naser al-Din Shah Qajar of Persia, Baron Ferdinand Richthofen, Roald Amundsen, Fridtjof Nansen, and Thor Heyerdahl. Since 2009, the president of the Russian Geographic Society has been RF Defense Minister S. K. Shoigu. In 2010, the RGO Board of Trustees was established; it is headed by RF Pres. Vladimir Putin.
- Administrative/biographical history:
- The Research Archive of the Russian Geographic Society began to form archival collections (categories) in connection with the development, publication, and distribution to all provinces of the Russian Empire of seven thousand copies of the society’s ethnographic agenda. These were in the form of instructions for persons interested in providing the Russian Geographic Society with ethnographic materials. The agenda proposed that ethnographic descriptions of the peoples inhabiting the empire be prepared according to the following subjects: “1) with regard to appearance, 2) on language, 3) on everyday home life, 4) on features of social life, 5) on mental and moral capabilities and education, 6) on folk traditions and monuments.” The publication and distribution of the ethnographic agenda led to the Russian Geographic Society receiving a large quantity of ethnographic descriptions, and not only from members of the society, but also from local officials, representatives of the urban and rural intelligentsia (clergy, teachers, doctors), and peasants. In 1853 alone, the Imperial Russian Geographic Society received approximately two thousand manuscripts from various provinces. The materials received were originally stored in the society’s library or in the archives of its departments. Between 1863-67, the archives of the society’s departments were unified into a single overall Research Archive of the Imperial Russian Geographic Society. F. I. Istoman, secretary of the ethnography department, began the process of cataloguing the archive’s manuscripts in 1886. He systematised the manuscripts on Russia as a whole and set apart collections (categories) of manuscripts pertaining to major administrative-territorial units. Materials received by the society’s archive subsequently went to supplement already-formed categories. These were mainly materials sent from the local level containing answers to questionnaires found in various society agendas developed in the period of 1866-1913, for example, the “Agenda for the collection of local ethnographic information,” “The agenda for the collection of folk legal customs,” “The agenda for the collection of information on ethnography,” etc. In the 1910s, the ethnographer D. K. Zelenin analysed and described documents housed in the categories of the Research Archive; the inventories he compiled were published as A Description of the Manuscripts of the Research Archive of the Russian Geographic Society (pts. 1–3., St. Petersburg, 1914–16). The materials of the Research Archive were originally arranged mostly by province of the Russian Empire; in 1895, new categories started to be formed that included documents that did not pertain to any particular location or province; and collections of graphic materials started to be formed as well.
- Access points: locations:
- Berdichev
- Europe
- Kherson province
- Podolia province
- Russia
- St Petersburg
- Access points: persons/families:
- Chubinskii, P. P.
- Keppen, P. P.
- Nikol’skii, D. P.
- Polinkovskii, M. E.
- Popov, A.
- Subject terms:
- Agriculture
- Antisemitism
- Clothing
- Education
- Ethnography
- Jewish languages
- Jewish-Christian relations
- Kahal
- Karaite Judaism
- Legal matters
- Legal status of Jews
- Manuscripts
- Pale of Settlement
- Professions
- Real estate
- Statistics
- Taxation
- Taxation--Candle tax
- Taxation--Korobka
- Trade and commerce
- System of arrangement:
- The category includes a single inventory without any apparent structure.
- Finding aids:
- An inventory is available.
- Yerusha Network member:
- Jewish Theological Seminary