home / Self-development/ 215 years since the formation of the Grodno province. F.V

215 years since the formation of the Grodno province. F.V

Plan:

1 Historical sketch
2 Geography
3 Administrative division
4 Population
- 4.1 National composition
- 4.2 Noble families
- 4.3 Notable residents and natives
5 Religion
6 Economics
- 6.1 Agriculture
- 6.2 Forestry trades
- 6.3 Industry
- 6.4 Trade and transport
7 Governors

10 Source

Introduction

Grodno province- one of the northwestern provinces of the Russian Empire with its center in the city of Grodno.

1. Historical sketch

Reliable information about the current Grodno province - which in more distant times represented a country covered with impenetrable forest wilds and swamps and inhabited by the Yatvingians - begins in the 11th century, that is, from the time of the Slavs’ movement here. Around 1055, Slavic settlements appeared. At first, the country constituted a special Gorodny principality, which became part of Lithuania around the half of the 13th century. In 1501, when the Grand Duchy of Lithuania was divided into voivodeships, the northwestern part of the Grodno province belonged to the Troka voivodeship, the northeastern part to the Novogrudok voivodeship, and the southern part was originally the Narevsky voivodeship, and from 1520 the Podlassky voivodeship, which in 1596 formed the Brest voivodeship , merged with Poland. This administrative division marked the last partition of Poland. From the part that passed to Russia in 1795, the Slonim province was formed in 1796, consisting of 8 counties: Slonim, Novogrudok, Grodno, Volkovysk, Brest, Kobrin, Pruzhansky and Lida. A year later, in 1797, the Slonim province was united with the Vilna province, under the name of the Lithuanian province, and five years later, by decree of 1801, it was separated in its previous composition from the Vilna province, and was renamed Grodno. In this form, it existed for 40 years until the Bialystok region was annexed to it in 1842, which included 4 districts: Bialystok, Sokolsky, Belsky and Drogichinsky, and the latter was connected with Belsky into one district; Lida district went to the Vilna province, and Novogrudok - to Minsk, so that the Grodno province now consists of 9 districts.

2. Geography

It was located between 51°30"-54°3" N. w. and 26°44" - 30°16" E. d.; borders: to the north - with the Vilna province, to the east - with Minsk, to the south - with Volyn and to the west and north-west - with the Vistula region, from which pp. is separated. Neman, Bobr, Narev, Liza, Nurp and Western Bug.

According to the occupied space of 33979 sq. verst was one of the smallest provinces in Russia.

The entire surface of the middle, and especially the southern part of the Grodno province is a continuous plain, and only the northern and northeastern parts of the province are somewhat undulating, however, with gentle hills not exceeding 924 feet above sea level - near the Tarasovets farm of Slonim district.

According to the structure of its soil, the Grodno province belongs predominantly to the middle and lower tertiary system and only along the Neman, and in some limited places - in the counties of Bialystok, Belsky and Brest - a Cretaceous formation with remains of belemnites is found in it. Along the Western Bug, granite predominates, turning into gneiss below. In the beams along the river. In Lososna and near Grodno, peat coal is found, as well as in many places - deposits of lake and swamp iron ores. The most common soils throughout the province: sandy with a greater or lesser admixture of clay or humus, sandy loam and loamy soil occupy more than 5/7 of the entire space of the province. Shifting sands are found most often in the northern part of the Grodno district, and in other districts - along the rivers Nareva, Nurtsa, Zap. Bug and Lesne. Sandy-stony soil occupies about a quarter of the entire area of Sokol and Bialystok counties. Black soils (forest and marsh) have a relatively small distribution, occupying up to 140,000 dessiatines, in the districts of Grodno, Pruzhansky, in the middle part of Brest and in the north-west of Kobrin. Soils - podzolic (77,600 dessiatinas), peat (3,320 dessiatinas) and swampy (196,000 dessiatinas) are most common in the southern part of the province, and peat deposits are found in all counties, with the exception of Pruzhansky; their depth in some places reaches 2-3 arshins; they are partly developed by the local population.

Most of the Grodno province lies on the outskirts of the Baltic basin and only its southeastern part belongs to the Black Sea; lips satisfactorily irrigated with water. The Neman, entering the province from the west, initially flows through a small part of the Slonim and Volkovy districts, and then cuts through the entire Grodno district. The length of the river in the province is up to 140 versts, its width is from 20 to 110 fathoms, the depth is from 3 to 12 feet with a slight fall of the river from 1 to 1.5 feet per verst; the river freezes on December 9 and opens on March 28; ice-free for 256 days (near Grodno). The Neman is navigable throughout its entire area, but proper navigation is hampered by shoals. The river is of great importance for local trade traffic, which is facilitated by artificial connections - the Oginsky canal, a tributary of its river. Shchary from the river Yaselda, flowing into the Pripyat, and from the West. Bug - Augustow Canal. The left tributaries of the Neman are larger than the right ones; there are 13 of them, and the most important are: Shchara, which flows within the province up to 207 versts, receiving rafting rivers - Lokhozva (86 versts), Grivda (100 versts) and Nessa (84 versts); less significant left tributaries of the Neman: Zelva (150 versts), Kan (100 versts), Svisloch (120 versts) and Lososna (55 versts). Of the 8 right tributaries, the most significant are: Kotra with its tributary Pyrra and Issa. R. Narev, flows from the swamps of the Pruzhany district, the length of the course is 248 versts, it receives on the right: Suprasl (95 versts) and Bobr (170 versts) with tributaries - Sidryanka, Lososnaya and Brzhezovka; Having accepted the Bobr River, the Narev becomes navigable; its left tributaries are insignificant. The Western Bug belongs only to the right bank for 252 versts of the Grodno province, separating it from the Privislyansky region. Through the Dnieper-Bug Canal, connecting the river. Mukhovets from the river Ninoy, is part of the water system of the Dnieper and Vistula. The Western Bug receives 11 tributaries within the province, of which the most important on the right side are: Mukhovets (83 versts) with the tributary Ryta, Lesna (100 versts), Nurets and Pulva; of these, the last one and Mukhovets are navigable. Yaselda, the left tributary of the Pripyat, originates in vast swamps on the western border of Volkovysky district; the length of its course within the province is 130 versts; the most important right tributary is the river. Pina.

There are many lakes, but they are not big. Some of the lakes, such as Zadubenskoye, Beloe, Molochnoye and Lot, are connected to each other and to the top of the river. Pyrras with natural and artificial water canals (Tizengauzen or Royal) provide convenient rafting routes. All waterways in the Grodno province belong to the western system of artificial water communication connecting the Baltic Sea with the Black Sea, and the entire length of shipping routes within the province is about 1,400 versts. The most important piers enter the river. Neman - in Grodno and in places. Mostakh; on the river Shara - in the city of Slonim, on the river. Beaver - in pcs. Goniondzakh; on the Western Bug - in the city of Brest-Litovsk, on Mukhovets - in the city of Kobrin. Navigation on the Neman, as well as rafting on other waterways, begins in the second half of April and ends in October. The ships sailing along the rivers of the Grodno province are named: Vitin lifting loads up to 14,000 poods, baroque- up to 5000 poods, Berdin- up to 4000 poods, gauge(iron) up to 1500 poods; smaller vessels: dubass, ligives, komygas, or semi-barks, boats, boats, etc. Swamps occupy up to 1/15 of the entire territory of the province. The most swampy areas are located: in the Belovezhskaya and Grodno forests, at the confluence of the Bobr and the Narev, along the rivers Mukhovtsa, Narev, Nurtsa and others. Impassable swamps stretch along the left bank of the river. Piny, in Kobrin district, having up to 70 versts in length and from 6 to 30 versts in width; The Piotkovskoe swamp is remarkable in size, 22 square meters. verst, lying between pp. Narev and Liza. The salt-bromine mineral springs in the province, Druskeniki, are widely known.

The climate of the province is moderate; There are neither intense heat nor severe, prolonged frosts. According to observations in Bialystok, Grodno, Svisloch and Brest-Litovsk, the average temperature of the year is 6°.3. The prevailing winds are the westerly direction; the number of days with precipitation is 145 with an average annual amount of moisture falling of about 500 mm. The entire forest area occupies almost 18% of the province's space, namely 484,000 dessiatines, and under artificial plantings - 1,584 dessiatines. The forests are dominated by pine and spruce; then, in some places there are oak, birch, aspen, and alder as pure stands; Hornbeam, elm, ash and maple are even less common; The edges of the forest sometimes consist of hazel, wild apple, pear, etc. There are very few mast trees; There is enough construction and commercial timber, and some of it is rafted to Prussia and the Vistula region. Forests along the Western Bug are valued higher than the forests of the Neman; the districts of Grodno, Pruzhansky and Slonim are the richest in forests; and among the forest dachas, the Belovezhskaya and Grodno forests are remarkable.

The province is divided into 9 districts: Grodno, Sokolsky, Bialystok, Belsky, Brest, Kobrin, Pruzhansky, Volkovysky and Slonim; 39 camps, 185 volosts, 2233 rural societies with 7992 peasant villages in 112663 households; 16 provincial cities and 62 towns.

The educational institutions included: 5 secondary schools with 1206 students; 6 district schools with 390 students; 38 parochial schools with 2529 students; 300 public schools of the Ministry of Public Education with 19,645 students; 1 religious school with 158 students; 556 parochial and literacy schools with 8,445 students; 21 private colleges and schools with 1402 students; 3 special educational institutions with 219 schools; 237 Jewish educational institutions with 5047 students. The number of libraries at schools is shown as 78 with 11,190 volumes. books. In the peasant population there was one school per 1061 people. p. and one student for 33.5 souls. 87 civil department hospitals with 812 beds; including 17 rural hospitals with 102 beds and 36 medical waiting rooms; medical institutions of the military department 47 with 1450 beds; There are 129 civilian doctors and 87 military doctors.

3. Administrative division

Administrative division of the Grodno province

Initially, the province was divided into 8 districts: Brest, Volkovysk, Grodno, Kobrin, Lida, Novogrudok, Pruzhansky and Slonim. In 1843, Bialystok, Belsky and Sokolsky districts were transferred from the abolished Bialystok region to the Grodno province. At the same time, Lida district went to the Vilna province, and Novogrudok to Minsk.

At the beginning of the 20th century, the province included 9 districts:

No.	County	County town	Square, sq. verst	Population, people
1	Bialystok	Bialystok (56,629 people)	2551,8	187 531 (1889)
2	Belsky	Belsk (7012 people)	3130,3	175 855 (1889)
3	Brest	Brest-Litovsk (41,615 people)	4299,7	193 851 (1889)
4	Volkovysk	Volkovysk (7071 people)	3358,0	125 817 (1889)
5	Grodno	Grodno (49,952 people)	3770,0	137 779 (1891)
6	Kobrinsky	Kobrin (8998 people)	4645,3	159 209 (1894)
7	Pruzhansky	Pruzhany (7634 people)	3659,4	139 879 (1897)
8	Slonimsky	Slonim (15,893 people)	6359,2	233 506 (1897)
9	Sokolsky	Sokolka (7595 people)	2290,0	113 746 (1897)

In 1920, the territory of the province went to Poland.

4. Population

Population of the Grodno province according to the 1897 census.

Population of the provinces in 1891 it extended to 1,509,728 souls (776,191 men and 733,837 women); including: hereditary nobles 10977, personal 2909, Orthodox white clergy 2310, monastics 55, Catholic 124, Protestant 20, Jewish 439, Mohammedan 11, hereditary and personal citizens 876, merchants 2876, burghers 389249, guilds 14437, peasants 9408 56, colonists 7088, 48 odnodvortsy, 39911 regular troops, 49330 indefinite leave troops, 26339 retired lower ranks, 14341 children of soldiers, 6239 foreign nationals.

There were 12,581 marriages, born. 62,180, 38,812 died. In 1891, there were 1,167 educational institutions with 39,041 students, including 5,579 girls.

4.1. National composition

In 1897:

County	Belarusians	Ukrainians	Jews	Poles	Russians	Lithuanians	Germans
Province as a whole	44,0 %	22,6 %	17,4 %	10,1 %	4,6 %	…	…
Bialystok	26,1 %	…	28,3 %	34,0 %	6,7 %	…	3,6 %
Belsky	4,9 %	39,1 %	14,9 %	34,9 %	5,9 %	…	…
Brest	1,8 %	64,4 %	20,8 %	3,9 %	8,1 %	…	…
Volkovysk	82,4 %	…	12,4 %	2,1 %	2,3 %	…	…
Grodno	65,7 %	…	19,9 %	5,7 %	6,2 %	1,4 %	…
Kobrinsky	…	79,6 %	13,7 %	2,2 %	3,1 %	…	…
Pruzhansky	75,5 %	6,7 %	12,8 %	1,4 %	3,0 %	…	…
Slonimsky	80,7 %	…	15,2 %	1,6 %	2,1 %	…	…
Sokolsky	83,8 %	…	12,2 %	1,2 %	1,8 %	…	…

4.2. Noble families

Zhokhovsky, Zabello, Yodko, Kandyba, Karsnitsky, Kelchevsky, Klechkovsky, Kozeradsky.

4.3. Notable residents and natives

Karsky, Evfimy Fedorovich
Zamenhof, Lazar Markovich

5. Religion

Orthodox - 827.724
Catholics - 384.696
Jews - 281.303
Protestants - 13,067
Mohammedans - 3.238

The predominant population is mainly Belarusians, amounting to about 54%; Jews, believed to have arrived here in the first half of the 12th century, account for up to 19%; Poles (mostly Masurians) make up a little more than 20%, mainly in the southwest. counties, especially Bialystok and Belsk. Several thousand Lithuanians live in the northern part of the province. The Tatars, resettled to Lithuania by the Grand Duke Vytautas between 1395-98, now number 3273. items are found most often in Slonim district. A significant part of the Germans live in the part of the Bialystok region annexed from Prussia. A small number of Dutch (see Golendra). Some also show up Buzhans and Yatvingians; but they completely merged with the local population, from which it is impossible to distinguish them.

Orthodox - 4 monasteries, 490 churches and 54 Jewish chapels - 57 synagogues and 316 houses of prayer (schools) Catholic - 2 monasteries, 92 churches, 58 chapels Protestant - 7 churches and 6 Muslim houses of prayer - 3 mosques

6. Economy

6.1. Agriculture

Agriculture is the main occupation of the majority of the population.

Out of 3574746 des. the land in peasant ownership in 1890 was 1,498,902 dessiatines, that is, 42.2% of the entire province (2.3 dessiatines per capita); including under estates - 50521, arable land - 862078, meadow land - 241118, pastures - 170327, forests - 44994, inconvenient - 129863. The three-field system prevails; In some places there is a two-field and, as an exception, a multi-field. The grain harvest is generally average; absolute crop failures are a rarity in the Grodno province. A lot of potatoes are sown due to the sandy soil and the significant demand for distilleries. There are 2,122 bakery stores with a stock of 281,177 winter and 138,860 spring bread. The class food capital formed in 1868 is only 47,753 rubles. Cattle breeding does not constitute a separate branch of agriculture. In 1891, there were 176,245 horses, 484,107 cattle, 591,691 simple sheep, 93,522 fine-wool sheep, 3,642 goats, 28 donkeys and mules, 320,701 pigs. Per 100 people there were about 12 horses and 32 heads of cattle. livestock, and per 100 des. land - about 5 horses and about 14 heads of cattle. Fine-wool sheep are bred primarily by landowners; the wool goes to local cloth factories. There are 13 private horse farms.

Of other rural occupations, gardening and horticulture are the most common - in the counties of Bielsk and Bialystok; although few estates do not have an orchard, this branch of the economy is now greatly neglected. Tobacco growing is insignificant; Mostly shag is bred; in 1890, there were 5,995 tobacco plantations in the province, occupying only 22.25 dessiatines, from which only 1,101 poods of tobacco were harvested.

Beekeeping is poorly developed and is most concentrated in the Slonim and Brest districts, where mainly bee hives are found.

6.2. Forestry

The main forestry industry is cutting firewood and timber, which is floated to Prussia and the Vistula region. In some places they burn coal, they are engaged in tar smoking, sour tar and turpentine, especially in the Slonim district. In the Pruzhany district they make wooden utensils and wheels, in the Belsky district - sleighs, rims and arches.

6.3. Industry

The factory industry is firmly established in the province. in the first quarter of this century with the advent of the first cloth and flannelette factories, of which there were nine here in 1815 with a production of 300,000 rubles. The number of cloth factories increased with the construction of a customs line along the borders of the Kingdom of Poland in 1832.

In 1843 there were already 59 factories processing wool, with production worth 1,521,498 rubles.

In 1891, there were 3022 factories and plants with a total production of 7,545,216 rubles. and 14,041 workers, including 9,660 men, 3,870 women and 511 minors. There were 2,709 factories with 4,754 workers, with production worth 2,286,456 rubles; There were 313 factories with production worth 5,258,760 rubles. The first place belongs to cloth court factories, of which there are 146 with 4,772 workers, with a production amount of 3,306,837 rubles; in products of this kind, the Grodno province is second only to Moscow and Simbirsk. The goods of its cloth factories are required in St. Petersburg, Moscow, Odessa, Warsaw, etc., and some even go abroad. There are more of these factories in Bialystok and its district. In recent years, however, there has been a noticeable decrease in cloth production. Second place belongs to 13 tobacco factories, which by 2030 will have workers. proceeds amounted to 814,517 rubles. Then come 17 wool factories with a turnover of 805,100 rubles. at 390 work; 5 silk - 214980 rub. with 237 workers, 12 spinning machines - 102,165 rubles. at 217 workers, and 2 rags - 94800 at 106 workers.

Among the factories, the first place is occupied by distilleries and yeast ones, numbering 73, with the production of anhydrous alcohol worth 740,989 rubles. with 540 workers. There were 57 breweries with 227 workers and a production of 502,839 rubles; at 150 brick factories there are 478 workers, the amount of production is 81,789 rubles; 1926 flour mills with 2139 workers produced 505,636 rubles. There are 29,481 artisans, including 20,703 masters, 5,486 workers and 3,292 apprentices; Of the artisans, there were 12,220 Christians, 17,183 Jews and 78 Mohammedans, and in the cities Christians make up 22%, Jews 78%, and in the districts - Christians 49%, and Jews 51% of all artisans.

6.4. Trade and transport

Trade is developed, which is facilitated, in addition to waterways, by highway communications and railways: St. Petersburg-Warsaw, Bresto-Grayevskaya, Moscow-Brestskaya, Belostok-Baranovichi, Bresto-Bryanskaya.

The Bresto-Kholmskaya, Warsaw-Terespolskaya and Vilno-Rovno railway lines touch only the edges of the province.

In addition to the provincial and district cities, intermediaries in trade are small towns and provincial cities: Luna, Mosty, Zelva, Vysoko-Litovsk, Tsekhanovich, etc. Trade of the provinces. gravitates most towards the Privislyansky region. Mostly timber and grain bread are sold abroad.

In 1889, along the river basin. Neman cargo arrived, in thousand poods, 721, 13,303 shipped; 59 arrived in the Vistula basin, 1,364 departed; along the river basin Dnepr - 279 sent. 59 fairs in 32 different locations; they do not play a big role in commercial and industrial relations.

The income of all cities of the Grodno province in 1889 amounted to 403,484 rubles, expenses - 400,783 rubles; city capital was shown to be only 16,367 rubles, and the debt for the cities was listed as 207,981 rubles.

Coat of arms of the province with official description, approved by Alexander II (1878)

7. Governors

March 20, 1802-June 26, 1803 - Koshelev, Dmitry Rodionovich
June 26, 1803-March 25, 1812 - Lanskoy, Vasily Sergeevich
March 25, 1812 - July 1, 1812 - Bulgakov, Konstantin Yakovlevich, acting. D. Governor
January 1813-March 25, 1813 - Drutsky-Lubetsky, Francis-Xavier
March 25, 1813-January 22, 1816 - Leshern Karl Karlovich
January 22, 1816-July 20, 1816 - Drutsky-Lubetsky, Francis-Xavier
July 20, 1816-November 22, 1817 - Ursin-Nemtsevich Stanislav Frantsevich governor
1817-1819 - Merzhevsky Calixt Iosifovich (leader of the nobility)
February 5, 1819-October 30, 1824 - Butovt-Andrzheikovich Mikhail Faddeevich
October 30, 1824-August 14, 1831 - Mikhail Trofimovich Bobyatinsky
August 14, 1831 - August 24, 1831 - Georgy Ilyich Bazhanov
August 23, 1831-March 18, 1840 - Dolgorukov, Nikolai Andreevich (military governor)
August 24, 1831-January 12, 1835 - Muravyov-Vilensky, Mikhail Nikolaevich (civil governor)
January 12, 1835-May 16, 1836 - Koptev Nikifor Kharlamovich
May 16, 1836-October 19, 1842 - Doppelmayer Grigory Gavrilovich
July 27, 1844 - March 17 - 1848 Vaskov Fedor Ivanovich
March 17, 1848 - May 3, 1856 - Hoven, Christopher Khristoforovich
May 4, 1856-September 1, 1861 - Speyer Ivan Abramovich
September 19, 1861-March 23, 1862 - Drenyakin Alexander Maksimovich
March 23, 1862 - March 5, 1863 - Ivan Vladimirovich von Haller (acting governor)
March 5, 1863-April 17, 1863 - Ivan Vladimirovich von Haller
1862-1863 - Bobrinsky, Vladimir Alekseevich
July 21, 1863-January 13, 1868 - Skvortsov Ivan Nikolaevich
January 13, 1868-July 15, 1870 - Kropotkin, Dmitry Nikolaevich
July 15, 1870 - May 19, 1878 Zurov, Alexander Elpidiforovich
June 4, 1878 - January 9, 1879 Val, Viktor Vilgelmovich (acting governor)
January 9, 1879 - February 27, 1879 - Val Viktor Wilhelmovich von
May 3, 1879-August 30, 1879 - Zeimern, Nikolai Maksimovich (acting governor)
August 30, 1879-October 16, 1883 - Zeimern, Nikolai Maksimovich
November 10, 1883-April 19, 1890 - Potemkin Alexander Nikolaevich
April 19, 1890 - March 6, 1899 - Batyushkov Dmitry Nikolaevich
April 2, 1899 - February 5, 1900 - Dobrovolsky, Nikolai Alexandrovich (correcting the post of governor);
February 5, 1900-October 19, 1900 - Dobrovolsky, Nikolai Alexandrovich
January 29, 1901-December 22, 1901 - Urusov, Nikolai Petrovich (acting governor)
December 22, 1901-April 28, 1902 - Urusov, Nikolai Petrovich
May 30 (July 21, current style) 1902 - February 1 (February 15, current style) 1903 - State Councilor Pyotr Stolypin
1903 - Bogdanovich, Nikolai Modestovich
February 15, 1903-1905 - Osorgin Mikhail Mikhailovich
1905-1906 - Blok, Ivan Lvovich
1906 - Kister Vladimir Konstantinovich
June 24, 1906-October 20, 1907 - Zein, Franz-Albert Alexandrovich
December 10, 1907-1912 - Borzenko Viktor Mikhailovich
December 21, 1912-1914 - Boyarsky Pyotr Mikhailovich
1914-21 August 1915 - Shebeko Vadim Nikolaevich

108. Verkhovichi 6. Mizgiri 58. Yanov 109. Dmitrovichi 7. Alekseevka 59. Yasvils 110. 8. Zhirovitsy 60. Goniondz 111. Great Forest 9. Shilovychi River pool Nareva. 112. Rechitsa 10. Wooden 61. Dobrovolya 113. Kamenets-Litovsk 11. Slonim 62. Tarnopol 114. Troops 12. Synkovichi 63. Bakuny 115. Ratajczycy 13. Golynka 64. Sukhopol 116. Lyschitsy 14. Derechin 65. Belovezh 117. Chernavchitsy 15. Shara 66. Narewka 118. Motykaly 16. Yatvesk 67. Narew 119. Cumans 17. Bridges 68. Zabludov 120. Vysoko-Litovsk 18. Lyskovo 69. Chubby 121. Volchin 19. Zelzin 70. Siskins 122. Miller 20. Ruzhany 71. Old Kornyn 123. Semyatichi 21. Mizhevichi 72. Stepchildren 124. Drogichin 22. Milkanovici 73. Rajsk 125. Naroyki 23. Jezernitsa 74. Belsk 126. Pincers 24. Ivashkevichi 75. Suraj 127. Rogachi 25. Mezhireche 76. Khoroshch 128. Maleshi 26. Zelva 77. Town 129. Bryansk 27. Kremyanitsa 78. New Will 130. Tsekhanovets 28. Belavichi 79. Suprasl 131. Grodisk 29. Porozovo 80. Vasilkov River pool Pripyat. 30. Malaya Lapenitsa 81. Bialystok 132. Roller coaster 31. Velyka Sventitsa 82. Fasts 133. Smolyanitsa 32. Mstibovo 83. Choppers 134. Selets 33. Gniezno 84. Knyshin 135. Kartuz-Birch 34. Volkovysk River pool Zap. Buga. 136. Malech 35. Russia 85. Priborovo 137. Revyatichi 36. Volpa 86. Radezh 138. Matveevichi 37. Massalyan 87. Chersk 139. Khomsk 38. Lunna 88. Stradech 140. Belavichi 39. Svisloch 89. Dobuchin 141. Goshchevo 40. Shilovychi 90. Zosimovichi 142. Gichitsy 41. Yalovka 91. Pruzhany 143. Opol 42. Golynka 92. Tevli 144. Motol 43. V. Berestovitsa 93. Khabovichi 145. Druzhilovichi 44. M. Berestovitsa 94. Bukhovichi 146. Detkovichi 45. Krynki 95. Zalesye 147. Grushevo 46. Indura 96. Kobrin 148. Gorodets 47. Bershta 97. Andronovo 149. Antopol 48. Skidel 98. 150. Brashevici 49. Lakes 99. Orepici 151. Drogichin 50. Zhidomlya 100. Sekhnovichi 152. Osovtsy 51. Koptevka 101. Ozyats Topographical and
subject index
to the archaeological map
Grodno province 52. Grodna 102. Rogozna

PREFACE

Just as in the compilation of the archaeological map of the Vilna province, the main extensive material for the map of the Grodno province was information provided by the Orthodox clergy, folk teachers and volost clerks. This information for the Grodno province in general, of course, is the same as the same information for the Vilna province, with the difference, however, that, in view of the almost complete Orthodox population of the Grodno province, the information of the clergy for this province covers the entire province, while in the Vilna province they almost completely absent for its western parts. - The information delivered by the volost clerks was printed, after supplementing it with messages from some persons of the village administration, in a special brochure - “Topographic information about the settlements and mounds in the Grodno province” (A. Shtriter), while the information from the clergy and folk teachers is preserved in manuscripts - the first in the archives of the Lithuanian ecclesiastical consistory, and the last in the Vilna Public Library, where they were transferred from the preliminary committee for the organization of the IX Archaeological Congress. The information of the persons mentioned above, reporting, in most cases, about the same objects, often differs in completeness, accuracy of description, and sometimes is not free from mutual contradictions. In the absence of discrepancies in the information, we, as in the explanatory text for the archaeological map of the Vilna province, limited ourselves to compiling one possibly complete description of each object, and often some features of the object had to be borrowed from one author (priest, teacher, clerk), others from another , so sometimes the shortest note, in the amount of one sentence, was compiled on the basis of two or three sources. In this case, we considered it pointless to indicate the source each time, replacing the numerous citations inevitable in this order of affairs with one general indication of the sources at the end of the description of each place. This instruction is expressed in the form of the letters S, U, P, of which S means the message of the local priest, U means the teacher of the local public school, and P means the volost clerk. In case of disagreement between the information, in addition to these general instructions, each time we quoted directly in the text the source to which one or another of the contradictory testimonies belongs. We considered it necessary, to the extent we were physically able, to supplement the text compiled in this way on the basis of the specified information with all those facts that have become available to the press. The archaeological literature of the Grodno province is not striking, however, with the abundance of scientific and systematic research, however, in view of the coincidence of the supposed place of settlement of the Yatvingians - this still mysterious tribe - with the western borders of the Grodno province, also due to the location of the city of Drogichin in the Grodno province , - this Western Russian Pompeii, and the Kolozha Church, - this most curious monument of ancient Russian church architecture, naturally, for a long time there was a need to pay attention to the monuments of Grodno antiquity, which resulted in the appearance of more than one monograph about these monuments and more or less extensive notes about them in integral historical systems. The 9th archaeological congress held in Vilna in 1893 also left its mark on the archaeological research of the Grodno province. In any case, the Grodno province in archaeological terms can be considered more explored than, for example, the Vilna province.

For the purposes of the strictest possible objectivism, we place the list of sources below in the chronological order of their appearance, and, in view of considerations of a purely external practical nature, we indicate first articles and works in Russian, and then in foreign ones (mainly, of course, in Polish). We also consider it not superfluous to note that the proposed list contains only those articles and works that represent factual and original material for the archaeological map: thus works of the kind, for example, “Mounds in Lithuania and Western Rus'”, by K. Tyshkevich are excluded from it , or the third volume of “Picturesque Russia,” which, judging by their title, should be directly related to our question, but in fact do not provide a single fact for the archaeological map of the Grodno province. It is also not considered necessary to indicate the entire amount of treatises relating to one monument, nor to list everything that is only incidentally related to the matter. In relation to sources of this kind, we consider it possible to limit ourselves to indicating them in the places of their direct application. It is possible to limit ourselves to the same indication in relation to sources of an ecclesiastical nature, since the ecclesiastical archaeological material itself has only a secondary significance in the map.

A) Russian sources for the archaeological map of the Grodno province.

„Numismatic news“. - Grodno Governorate. Vedomosti, 1847, No. 32. Description of a silver Jewish coin (shekel) located in the Suprasl monastery.

The latest finds of coins in different provinces. - News of the Imperial Archaeological Society, 1859. T. I. Mixture, p. 406. Indication of the find of a coin treasure in the Dvorets metro station, Slonimsky district.

P. Bobrovsky. Druskeniki mineral waters. - Vilna Bulletin 1861, No. 67. There is a mention of mounds scattered in large numbers near Druskenik.

Grodno province. S.-Pb. 1863. When describing places of interest in the province, some ancient historical monuments are also indicated (repeated, sometimes with a peculiar coloring, mainly information from “Starożytna Polska” - Balinsky). - Information on the Slonim district is reprinted in a special article by P. Bobrovsky, Slonim and notable places of the Slonim district. - Bulletin of Western Russia 1866 T. IV, Dept. II, pp. 161 et seq.

Stone tower in Kamenets-Litovsky. - Memorial book of the Grodno province for 1866. The content of the article is determined by its title.

Gr. K. Tyshkevich. - Lead prints found in Bug. - Antiquities. Proceedings of the Moscow Archaeological Society, 1867 T. I, V. 2, p. 115 et seq. The first news of the discovery in the city of Drogichin of one of the most interesting objects now in Russian archeology - lead seal-like impressions, and an attempt, with the assistance of famous foreign archaeologists, to explain the meaning of the impressions.

Vilna Herald, 1867 No. 92. The first news of the bell from the Nevodnitsa borough, now located in the Vilna Museum.

Gr. K-th. Krzyżacke graves. - Grodno Provincial Gazette, 1867, No. 29. - A short note about the hill known by the mentioned name, near them. Veliky-Rusoty.

Russian. Attractions in Belsky district. - Grodno Lips. Vedomosti, 1868, No. 13. - Indication of the mountain located in the town of Melnik, the trenches located near the town of Melnik, and the miraculous icon preserved in the Prechistensky Melnik Church.

Korchan. Kurgan Zhenikhovshchina. - Vilna Vestnpk, 1868, No. 6. - Description of the mound and the legends and folk customs associated with it, near the village of Mostovlyan, Grodno district.

An ancient monument in Brest district. - Bulletin of Western Russia, 1870, vol. II, p. 332. Description of a stone tower near Kamenets-Litovsk.

New addition to the archaeological department of the Vilna Museum. - Vilna Bulletin, 1872 No. 5. A list of objects obtained during excavations of mainly stone graves - in some places of the Belsky district, and an attempt, based on a comparison of these objects with homogeneous things of the Vilna Museum, to explain the same tribe of the Yatvingians with the Lithuanians. The items listed in this article now constitute the so-called Schneider Collection of the Vilna Museum.

J. Iversen. Several news about treasures found in Russia. - News of the Imperial Archaeological Society, 1872 T. VII. Issue I, pp. 1-6. A list of coins found in the village of Podluzhe, Brest district, and in the village of Sherbin, the same district.

Yu. Kuznetsov. Letter to the Secretary of the Russian Geographical Society. - Izvestia Imper. Russian geogr. Societies, 1873, Vol. IX, No. 1, pp. 18-19. Traces of an ancient structure on stilts in Lake Rybnitsa, Grodno district.

A. Budzinsky. Archaeological research in the Grodno, former Augustow, now Suwalki and Lomzhinsk provinces, in the period from 1857 to 1869, carried out by A. Budzinsky. - Commemorative book of the Suwalki province, for 1875. Dept. III, pp. 81-95; with two tables of drawings, - The same “Bibl Warzsawska”, 1871 February, - The article refers to the Grodno region a description of a stone burial ground, near the village. Ostrozhanakh, Naroi vol., Belsky district.

V. Balabushevich. Kamenets pillar. - Lithuanian Diocesan Gazette., 1881. Nos. 14 and 15. - A brief historical outline of Kamenets-Litovsk and the current state of the stone tower located nearby, built in the 13th century.

E. Voltaire. Archaeological collections of private individuals in the North-Western region. - Vilna Bulletin, 1889. No. 269. Of the collections listed here, those that are related to the region of the Grodno province are the collection of gr. Fleury - in them. Kemna, Bialystok district, and the city of Gloger - in Yezhov, Lomzhinsk province.

Batyushkov. Belarus and Lithuania; historical destinies of the Northwestern region. Sib. 1890. For our purpose, the work is most significant for its drawings of some local antiquities.

N. Avenarius. Drogichin-Nadbuzhsky and its antiquities. - Materials on the archeology of Russia, published by the Imperial Archaeological Commission, No. 4. St. Petersburg. 1890, pp. 3-12. An extensive article by Mr. Avenarius consists of the following VII sections: I) A brief outline of the history of Drogichin. II) Drogichin settlement and the results of its research by Mr. Avenarius. III) Drogichin lead impressions and their supposed meaning. IV) Characteristics of mounds and stone graves mainly in the parts of Belsky district neighboring Drogichin. V) Criticism of the prevailing belief, mainly in Polish archaeological literature, about the belonging of the stone graves to the Yatvingians, and an attempt to move the Yatvingian settlement further to the north-west, into the river basin. Beaver. VI) Chronological order of mounds and stone graves. VII) Russian-church Drogichin antiquity. An archaeological map of part of the Belsky district and two tables of drawings are attached to the article. For the archaeological map of the Grodno province, Mr. Avenarius’s article provides the most material with its second and fourth sections.

E. Orlovsky. An essay on the history of the city of Grodna, compiled on the basis of printed sources. - Memorial book of the Grodno province for 1890. Appendix, page 76, and special reprint. The content of the article is determined by its title; For our purpose, although not original, the notes about the old castle and the Kolozha Church are of some importance.

M. I. Makarevsky. Message for the upcoming (IX) archaeological congress. - Vilensky Vestnik, 1892, No. 241. Description of the village located near. Nakryshek, Slonim district, a stone slab and an indication of some other archaeological sites in the Nakrysh region.

Review of excavations, finds, acquisitions of antiquities by museums and so on. in Russia and abroad. - Archaeological news and notes published by the Imperial Moscow Archaeological Society, 1893, No. 1, pp. 17-18. Description of settlements and mounds near them. Kozhany, Zavykovsky volost, Bialystok district.

I. Shulitsky. Archaeological and historical-geographical notes. - Proceedings of the Vilna Branch of the Moscow Preliminary Committee for the Organization of the IX Archaeological Congress in Vilna. Vilna, 1893 Dept. I, pp. 60-65. A list of fourteen villages of the Grodno province, marked by the location of some archaeological monuments near them, mainly settlements.

E. Mikhailovsky. Archaeological essays of Slonim district, Grodno province. - Proceedings of the Vilna Branch of the preliminary Committee for the organization of the IX Archaeological Congress in Vilna, Vilna, 1893. Dept. II, pp. 165-186. Description of the ancient settlements, mounds and other archaeological sites partially explored by the author, located mainly within the Slonim district, precisely along the line starting from the Palace metro station in the south - to the city of Slonim and from here, in the direction of the west, to the city of Volkovysk . At the end of the article there is a list of some antiquities belonging to the author, which he transferred to the preliminary Committee of the IX Archaeological Congress and are now in the Vilna Museum of Antiquities.

N. Leopardov. On the importance of archeology in the assessment of historical monuments. - Proceedings of the Vilna Branch of the preliminary Committee for the organization of the IX Archaeological Congress in Vilna. Vilna, 1893. Dept. II, pp. 329-336. Drawings of six Christian crosses found in Drogichin and an attempt to substantiate on this find the existence of Drogichin already in the 4th-5th centuries AD.

V. Gryaznov. Kolozha Boris and Gleb Church in Grodno, - Proceedings of the Vilna Branch of the preliminary Committee on the organization of the IX Archaeological Congress. Vilna, 1893 Dept. II, pp. 361-71. In addition to its main subject, the article is of some interest due to the indication of the primitive cultural layer discovered in the coastal slope of the Neman, near the Kolozha Church.

Gr. Fleury. About the Neolithic site in Kemp. - News of the IX Archaeological Congress. Vilna, 1893. Abstract August 5.

K. Konopatsky. The village of Yatvesk, Grodno district. - Vilna Bulletin, 1894 No. 43. - A “stone pillar” located near Yatvessk and folk stories associated with it.

At the end of this list, it should be mentioned

Archive of the Imperial Archaeological Commission. Cases: 1867, No. 41; 1868, No. 16; 1879, No. 29; 1880, No. 7; 1884, No. 35; 1885, Nos. 7 and 17; 1886, Nos. 37 and 55; 1887, No. 35; 1889, No. 92; 1892, No. 75. The content of the listed cases consists of correspondence regarding treasures delivered from the Grodno province to the Imp. Archaeol. Commission. In some of the files there are indications of ancient settlements and burial mounds. treasures found nearby. The treasure found in the village is of greatest archaeological interest. Buzhiske, Belsky district, and in ur. Dubrova, owned by them. Kundzin, Sokolsky district.

B) Sources in Polish.

T. Narbutt. Badanie starożytności litewskich. O Jatweżach. - Tygodnik Wileńsky, 1817. Volume IV, str. 59, 79. 80. Inscriptions on logs of Skidelskaya, Grodno district, churches related to the history of the Yatvingians.

--- Dzieje starożytne narodu litewskiego. Volume I-IX. Wilno, 1835-1841 Among other dubious information, the description of a prehistoric cemetery near Druskenik stands out for its comparative reliability.

I. Jaroszewicz. Obraz Litwy pod względem jej cywilizacyi od czasów najdawniejszych do końca wieku XVIII. Wilno, 1844 In addition to many other comments in the text of a historical, mainly nature, for the archaeological map of the Grodno province, note II is of particular interest, which contains quite significant information about the settlements and mounds (magilas), now located in the Belsky district, and defined by Yaroshevich as material remains of the disappeared Yatvingian tribe.

Balińsky. Starożytna Polska. Warszawa, 1845-46 rr. In the descriptions of individual places, ancient (sometimes prehistoric) defensive castles are mentioned; Some of them also indicate burial mounds.

Miasto Kleszczele na Podlasiu. - Biblioteka Warszawska, 1845 Tom III, str. 173 and the next An explanation of the name of one of the areas located near Kleshcheli in the sense of indicating the existence of a place of pagan cult here.

W. Ossolińsky. O uroczysku historycznym, zwanem Kumat. - Biblioteka Warszawska, 1848. Zeszit XCVI, str. 465 and the next Description of a settlement - a burial ground located in the Kumat tract and attributed by the author to the last days of the Yatvingians.

I. Jaroszewicz. Jadźwingi. - Biblioteka Warszawska, 1853. Zeszit CLII, str. 193 etc. A somewhat expanded (especially in relation to archaeological sites) excerpt from the work of the same author - Obraz Litwy pod względem jej cywilizaсyi, od czasów najdawniejszych do końca wieku XVIII. Wilno, 1844 r., str. 204 etc.

J. Zawisza. Mereczowskie okopisko i jezioro Switez. - Biblioteka Warszawska, 1872 Tom III, str. 444. Description of a settlement located in the area of Kossovo Volost, Slonim District and the result of a study of the mounds and pagan cemetery located nearby.

Z. Głoger. Osady nad Niemnem i na Podlasiu z czasów użytku krzemienia. - Wiadomości Archeologiczne. Tom I. Warszawa, 1873 str. 97 - 123. The Grodno region includes primitive sites located along the banks of the Neman, within its course on the border of Gozhskaya and Sobolyanskaya volosts, Grodno district.

--- Korespondencya do Redakcyi Biblioteki Warszawskiey. - Bibl. Warsz., 1876 Tom I, str. 131. One of the usual short reports about his archaeological excursions and acquisitions during the previous year placed in the “Warsaw Library” by Mr. Gloger over the next few years. This correspondence indicates 7 primitive sites - two near Narev, near the village. Gura, and five in the river basin. Z. Bug, namely: a) in the vicinity of the village. Rechitsa, b) near the mouth of the river. Pulva, c) near a settlement called Banduga, d) between Krynki and Nemirov and e) near the village. Verkhutsy Nadbuzhskaya.

--- Same. - Biblioteka Warszawska, 1877 T I, str. 146. Primitive sites near the village. Pogorelok, Bialystok district, and Volchin, Brest district.

Zabytki przedhistoryczne. - Gazeta Warszawska, 1878, No. 207. A note about the prehistoric site located in them. Kempe Gelczynska, Bialystok district.

Z. Głoger. Korespondencya do Redakeyi Biblioteki Warszawskiej. - Bibl. Warsz., 1878 Tom I, str. 151. Primitive site on the bank of the river. Suprasli; - see p. Fasts.

--- Same. - Biblioteka Warszawska, 1879 Tom I, str. 143 - 5. Primitive sites near the village. Klyzovka, Belsky district, and village. Gelchin, Bialystok district.

A. Kohn u. Mehlis. Materialien zur Vorgeschichte des Menschen im östlichen Europa. Jena. 1879. The work is a reprint of archaeological information that appeared in Polish before 1879. From the materials relating it to the Grodno province, the city of Glogera - Osady nad Niemnem... and the city of Yagmina - Brżegi Buga are placed here.

Z. Głoger. Korespondencya do Redakcyi. Biblioteki Warszawskiej - Bibl. Warsz. 1880 r., Tom I, str. 154. Primitive sites along the banks of the river. Beaver and near Lunny, and the discovery of a flint knife near Pruzhany.

--- Same. - Biblioteka Warszawska, 1881 Tom I, str. 111 - 114. Indication of primitive (flint) sites in the upper Narev basin, also on the Narevka and Rotnichanka rivers. The finds of stone cores in Narew, near Tikocin are also mentioned here.

--- Same. - Biblioteka Warszawska, 1882. Volume I, str. 147. The results of the excavation of the mound in them. Vishov, Slonim district, and the discovery of a stone ax in the Bug River, opposite Gorodok.

Z. Głoger. Osady przedhistoriezne na porzeczu Biebrzy. - Zbiór wiadomości do anthropologii krajowej. Tom VI. Kraków, 1882, str. 3-10. Results of a study of primitive (flint) sites located along the banks of the Bobra River. In the region of the Grodno province, of the sites indicated here, there are two, namely near the village. Shafrankah, and in them. Kempe Gelyazhinskaya (Gelchinskaya).

--- Notatki archeologiczne Michała Fedorowskiego z okolic Słonima, kurhany pod Wiszowem. - Pamiętnik Fizyjograficzny, 1882. Volume II, str. 491 etc. A few words about the archaeological monuments of Slonim district, and the result of the excavation of one of the mounds in them. Vishov, Slonim district.

K. Jagmin. Skorbiczi. - Wiadomości Archeologiczne, Volume IV. Warszawa, 1882, str. 98-108. The result of a study of two ancient (one prehistoric) cemeteries, near the village. Skorbichi, Brest district. It also mentions the discovery of clay urns in them. Vistitsakh.

Z. Głoger. Korespondencja do Redakcyi Biblioteki Warszawskiej. - Biblioteka Warszawska, 1883, Volume I, str. 141. - Primitive sites near the village. Lyaskovets, Surazh, Bialystok and the village of Skorbichi; the discovery of stone objects in Visov and Njevodnica (see the listed places in the text).

--- Podróż Niemnem. Warsaw. 1888; - reprint from volume II - „Wisła“. - Boat trip along the Neman from Grodna to Kovna. Of archaeological interest is the indication of primitive sites along the banks of the Neman and the finds in these places of various antiquities, mainly flint weapons. The archaeological part of the article, in a slightly expanded form, is repeated in Wiadomości Archeologiczne, Volume I, str. 97 - 123, - Osady nad Niemnem.

The given list of sources should be supplemented by an indication of archaeological collections related to the Grodno province. Without listing individual items in private hands, as well as those collections into which items of Grodno antiquity are included by chance and always in the most insignificant quantities), here we consider it necessary to mention, firstly, the Vilna Museum of Antiquities, and then the private collections of Glogera, gr. Fleury, Mr. Bolsunovsky and, perhaps, minor collections of antiquities by Mr. Avenarius and the Grodno Statistical Committee.

In the Vilna Museum of Antiquities, in addition to isolated finds, the so-called Schneider collection is of particular interest to the Grodno province, consisting of items collected by the excise official Songin and the son of the manufacturer Schneider within the Belsky district, mainly in the area of the Semyatichi and Naroy volosts. Of the later acquisitions to the Museum, in the Grodno province, it should be noted a small collection collected by the priest of the Synkovichi, Slonim district, church, Fr. Mikhailovsky, - In the explanatory text to the archaeological map, the Museum’s objects are quoted from the following publications:

a) Catalog of objects from the Museum of Antiquities, which is part of the Vilnius Public Library. Vilna, 1885;

b) Catalog of objects delivered to the archaeological exhibition at the IX Archaeological Congress in Vilna in 1893. Vilna, 1893; And

c) Ө. Pokrovsky. - Vilna Museum of Antiquities. Vilna, 1892.

Mr. Gloger's collection was made up of items collected by its owner during repeated archaeological excursions (including throughout the Grodno province), as well as from random acquisitions. Some of the items are now in Krakow, as well as in Warsaw, but the majority, apparently, are preserved in the estate of the city of Gloger - Yezhov, Lomzhinsky province. There is no catalog of the collection, but thanks to the nice custom of the owner to place reports on his excursions and acquisitions in the “Warsaw Library”, it seems that we hardly omitted any items from the collection related to the Grodno province when compiling the Archaeological Map. Judging by the mentioned reports and other numerous articles by Mr. Gloger, his collection is of particular interest for the wealth of flint weapons.

Collection gr. Fleury consists of items collected mainly within the Siedlce, Lomzhinsk and Grodno provinces. Like the collection of Mr. Gloger, it is dominated in quantitative terms by objects made of flint, and, in particular, for the Grodno province those found on the estate of Mr. Gloger are significant. Fleury - Kempe Gelchinskaya, Bialystok district, and several items from the Drogichin settlement. There is no catalog of the collection, and our acquaintance with it is based on direct observation of what seems to be the largest part of the collection, which was at the Archaeological Exhibition at the IX Archaeological Congress in Vilna.

The collection of Mr. Bolsunovsky is of interest for our purpose due to the significant number of items from the Drogichin settlement included in its composition. A list of objects from this collection is in the “Catalog of objects delivered to the archaeological exhibition at the IX Archaeological Congress in Vilna in 1893.” Several drawings of Drogichin objects from the collection of Mr. Bolsunovsky are placed in the publication of Mr. Leopardov: Collection of photographs from antiquities located in Kyiv, in private hands.

The archaeological objects preserved by Mr. Avenarius (in Bialystok) represent the actual random remnant of a rich collection collected by him during the study of the Drogichin settlement and mounds and stone graves, Bielsky district, and transferred to the Imperial Archaeological Commission. There is no detailed list of items from this collection in print, but the more characteristic of them are described, with drawings attached, in the above-mentioned article by Mr. Avenarius - Drogichin of Nadbuzhsky. The items in Mr. Avenarius’s possession were at the exhibition at the IX Archaeological Congress, and a list of them is included in the catalog of this exhibition.

The small collection of antiquities at the Grodno Statistical Committee consists, for the most part, of coins found in the Grodno province and returned to the Committee after checking them at the Imperial Archaeological Commission. With the exception of a small number of coins and 2-3 items, unfortunately, they have lost their history. the collection has no archaeological interest, and there is no need for its cataloging.

The material obtained on the basis of the listed sources is located, as in the explanatory text to the map of the Vilna province, in the order of the hydrographic division of the Grodno province. From this point of view, the entire province can be divided into the following five parts:

I) Neman River basin: most of the Slonim and Volkovy districts and the entire Grodno district.

II) Beaver River basin: the northern part of Sokol and the northwestern part of Bialystok counties.

III) The Narew River basin: the southwestern part of Volkovysk and the northwestern part of Pruzhany district, the northwestern part of Belsky district, almost the entire Bialystok and southern part of Sokolsky district.

IV) Western River Basin. Buga: the entire Brest district, the western parts of Kobrin and Pruzhany districts and the southwestern part of Belsky district.

V) Pripyat River basin: the southern part of Slonim and eastern parts of Pruzhany and Kobrin counties.

________________

1 - With one exception.

2 - For information about such collections, as well as about the owners of individual items, see the text.

3 - Catalog of the Vilna Museum of Antiquities, 1885 Dept. 3, no. 467-878.

, Kobrin, Pruzhansky and Lida. A year later, in 1797, the Slonim province was united with the Vilna province, under the name of the Lithuanian province, and five years later, by decree of 1801, it was separated in its previous composition from the Vilna province, and was renamed Grodno.

In this form, it existed for 40 years until the Bialystok region was annexed to it in 1842, which included 4 districts: Bialystok, Sokolsky, Belsky and Drogichinsky, and the latter was connected with Belsky into one district; Lida district went to the Vilna province, and Novogrudok - to Minsk.

Geography

It was located between 51°30" - 54°3" N. w. and 26°44" - 30°16" E. d.; borders: to the north - with the Vilna province, to the east - with Minsk, to the south - with Volyn and to the west and north-west - with the Vistula region, from which pp. is separated. Neman, Bobr, Narev, Liza, Nurp and Western Bug.

In terms of occupied space of 33,979 square miles, it was one of the smallest provinces in Russia.

According to the structure of its soil, the Grodno province belongs predominantly to the middle and lower tertiary system and only along the Neman, and in some limited places - in the counties of Bialystok, Belsky and Brest - a Cretaceous formation with remains of belemnites is found in it. Along the Western Bug, granite predominates, turning into gneiss below. In the beams along the river. In Lososna and near Grodno, peat coal is found, as well as in many places - deposits of lake and swamp iron ores. The most common soils throughout the province: sandy with a greater or lesser admixture of clay or humus, sandy loam and loamy soil occupy more than 5/7 of the entire space of the province. Shifting sands are found most often in the northern part of the Grodno district, and in other districts - along the rivers Nareva, Nurtsa, Zap. Bug and Lesne. Sandy-stony soil occupies about a quarter of the entire area of Sokol and Bialystok counties. Black soils (forest and swamp) have a relatively small distribution, occupying up to 140,000 dessiatines, in the districts of Grodno, Pruzhansky, in the middle part of Brest and in the north-west of Kobrin. Soils - podzolic (77,600 dessiatines), peat (3,320 dessiatines) and marshy (196,000 dessiatines) are most common in the southern part of the province, and peat deposits are found in all counties, with the exception of Pruzhansky; their depth in some places reaches 2-3 arshins; they are partly developed by the local population.

Most of the Grodno province lies on the outskirts of the Baltic basin and only its southeastern part belongs to the Black Sea; lips satisfactorily irrigated with water. The Neman, entering the province from the west, initially flows through a small part of the Slonim and Volkovy districts, and then cuts through the entire Grodno district. The length of the river in the province is up to 140 versts, its width is from 20 to 110 fathoms, its depth is from 3 to 12 feet with a slight fall of the river from 1 to 1.5 feet per verst; the river freezes on December 9 and opens on March 28; ice-free for 256 days (near Grodno). The Neman is navigable throughout its entire area, but proper navigation is hampered by shoals. The river is of great importance for local trade traffic, which is facilitated by artificial connections - the Oginsky canal, a tributary of its river. Shchary from the river Yaselda, flowing into the Pripyat, and from Western. Bug - Augustow Canal. The left tributaries of the Neman are larger than the right ones; there are 13 of them, and the most important are: Shchara, which flows within the province up to 207 versts, receiving rafting rivers - Lokhozva (86 versts), Grivda (100 versts) and Nessa (84 versts); less significant left tributaries of the Neman: Zelva (150 versts), Kan (100 versts), Svisloch (120 versts) and Lososna (55 versts). Of the 8 right tributaries, the most significant are: the Kotor with its tributary Pyrra and Issa. R. Narev, flows from the swamps of the Pruzhany district, the length of the course is 248 versts, it receives on the right: Suprasl (95 versts) and Bobr (170 versts) with tributaries - Sidryanka, Lososnaya and Brzhezovka; Having accepted the Bobr River, the Narev becomes navigable; its left tributaries are insignificant. The Western Bug belongs only to the right bank for 252 versts of the Grodno province, separating it from the Privislyansky region. Through the Dnieper-Bug Canal, connecting the river. Mukhovets from the river Ninoy, is part of the water system of the Dnieper and Vistula. The Western Bug receives 11 tributaries within the province, of which the most important on the right side are: Mukhovets (83 versts) with the tributary Ryta, Lesna (100 versts), Nurets and Pulva; of these, the last one and Mukhovets are navigable. Yaselda, the left tributary of the Pripyat, originates in vast swamps on the western border of Volkovysky district; the length of its course within the province is 130 versts; the most important right tributary is the river. Pina.

There are many lakes, but they are not big. Some of the lakes, such as Zadubenskoye, Beloe, Molochnoye and Lot, are connected to each other and to the top of the river. Pyrras with natural and artificial water canals (Tizengauzen or Royal) provide convenient rafting routes. All waterways in the Grodno province belong to the western system of artificial water communication connecting the Baltic Sea with the Black Sea, and the entire length of shipping routes within the province is about 1,400 versts. The most important piers enter the river. Neman - in Grodno and in places. Mostakh; on the river Shara - in the city of Slonim, on the river. Beaver - in pcs. Goniondzakh; on the Western Bug - in the city of Brest-Litovsk, on Mukhovets - in the city of Kobrin. Navigation on the Neman, as well as rafting on other waterways, begins in the second half of April and ends in October. The ships sailing along the rivers of the Grodno province are named: Vitin lifting loads up to 14,000 poods, baroque- up to 5000 poods, Berdin- up to 4000 poods, gauge(iron) up to 1500 poods; smaller vessels: dubass, ligives, komygas, or semi-barks, boats, boats, etc. Swamps occupy up to 1/15 of the entire territory of the province. The most swampy areas are located: in the Belovezhskaya and Grodno forests, at the confluence of the Bobr and the Narev, along the rivers Mukhovtsa, Narev, Nurtsa and others. Impassable swamps stretch along the left bank of the river. Piny, in Kobrin district, having up to 70 versts in length and from 6 to 30 versts in width; The Piotkovskoe swamp is remarkable in size, 22 square meters. verst, lying between pp. Narev and Liza. The saline-bromine mineral springs in the province, Druskeniki, are widely known.

The province is divided into 9 districts: Grodno, Sokolsky, Bialystok, Belsky, Brest, Kobrin, Pruzhansky, Volkovysky and Slonim; 39 camps, 185 volosts, 2233 rural communities with 7992 peasant villages in 112,663 households; 16 provincial cities and 62 towns.

Administrative division

No.	County	County town	Square, sq. verst	Population, people
1	Bialystok	Bialystok (56,629 people)	2551,8	187 531 ()
2	Belsky	Belsk (7012 people)	3130,3	175 855 ()
3	Brest	Brest-Litovsk (41,615 people)	4299,7	193 851 ()
4	Volkovysk	Volkovysk (7071 people)	3358,0	125 817 ()
5	Grodno	Grodno (49,952 people)	3770,0	137 779 ()
6	Kobrinsky	Kobrin (8998 people)	4645,3	159 209 ()
7	Pruzhansky	Pruzhany (7634 people)	3659,4	139 879 ()
8	Slonimsky	Slonim (15,893 people)	6359,2	233 506 ()
9	Sokolsky	Sokolka (7595 people)	2290,0	113 746 ()

Population

The population of the province in 1891 reached 1,509,728 souls (776,191 men and 733,837 women); including: hereditary nobles 10,977, personal 2909, Orthodox white clergy 2310, monastics 55, Catholic 124, Protestant 20, Jewish 439, Mohammedan 11, hereditary and personal citizens 876, merchants 2876, burghers 389,249, guilds 14,437, peasants 940,856, colonists 7,088, single-lords 48, regular troops 39,911, permanent leave - 49,330, retired lower ranks 26,339, children of soldiers 14,341, foreign nationals 6,239.

There were 12,581 marriages, born. 62,180, 38,812 died. In 1891, there were 1,167 educational institutions with 39,041 students, including 5,579 girls.

National composition

County	Belarusians	Ukrainians	Jews	Poles	Russians	Lithuanians	Germans
Province as a whole	44,0 %	22,6 %	17,4 %	10,1 %	4,6 %	…	…
Bialystok	26,1 %	…	28,3 %	34,0 %	6,7 %	…	3,6 %
Belsky	4,9 %	39,1 %	14,9 %	34,9 %	5,9 %	…	…
Brest	1,8 %	64,4 %	20,8 %	3,9 %	8,1 %	…	…
Volkovysk	82,4 %	…	12,4 %	2,1 %	2,3 %	…	…
Grodno	65,7 %	…	19,9 %	5,7 %	6,2 %	1,4 %	…
Kobrinsky	…	79,6 %	13,7 %	2,2 %	3,1 %	…	…
Pruzhansky	75,5 %	6,7 %	12,8 %	1,4 %	3,0 %	…	…
Slonimsky	80,7 %	…	15,2 %	1,6 %	2,1 %	…	…
Sokolsky	83,8 %	…	12,2 %	1,2 %	1,8 %	…	…

Noble families

Religion

Orthodox - 827.724
Catholics - 384.696
Jews - 281.303
Protestants - 13,067
Mohammedans - 3.238

The predominant population is mainly Belarusians, making up about 54%; Jews, who appeared here, are believed to have occurred in the first half of the 12th century, account for up to 19%; Poles (mostly Masurians) make up a little more than 20%, mainly in the southwest. counties, especially Bialystok and Belsk. Several thousand Lithuanians live in the northern part of the province. Tatars, resettled to Lithuania by Grand Duke Vytautas between 1395-98, now number 3273. items are found most often in Slonim district. A significant part of the Germans live in the part of the Bialystok region annexed from Prussia. A small number of Dutch. Some also show up the Buzhans and Yatvingians; but they completely merged with the local population, from which it is impossible to distinguish them.

Economy

Agriculture

Agriculture is the main occupation of the majority of the population.

Of the 3,574,746 acres of land in peasant ownership in 1890, there were 1,498,902 acres, that is, 42.2% of the entire province (2.3 acres per capita); including under estates - 50,521, arable land - 862,078, meadow - 241,118, pastures - 170,327, forests - 44,994, inconvenient - 129,863. The three-field system prevails; In some places there is a two-field and, as an exception, a multi-field. The grain harvest is generally average; absolute crop failures are a rarity in the Grodno province. A lot of potatoes are sown due to the sandy soil and the significant demand for distilleries. There are 2,122 bakery stores with a stock of 281,177 quarters of winter bread and 138,860 quarters of spring bread. The class food capital, formed in 1868, is only 47,753 rubles. Cattle breeding does not constitute a separate branch of agriculture. In 1891, there were 176,245 horses, 484,107 cattle, 591,691 sheep, 93,522 fine wool sheep, 3,642 goats, 28 donkeys and mules, 320,701 pigs. There were about 12 horses per 100 people. and 32 heads of cattle, and for 100 acres of land - about 5 horses and about 14 heads of cattle. Fine-wool sheep are bred primarily by landowners; the wool goes to local cloth factories. There are 13 private horse farms.

Of other rural occupations, gardening and horticulture are the most common - in the counties of Bielsk and Bialystok; although few estates do not have an orchard, this branch of the economy is now greatly neglected. Tobacco growing is insignificant; Mostly shag is bred; in 1890, there were 5,995 tobacco plantations in the province, occupying only 22.25 acres, from which only 1,101 poods of tobacco was collected.

Beekeeping is poorly developed and is most concentrated in the Slonim and Brest districts, where mainly bee hives are found.

Forestry

Industry

In 1843, there were already 59 factories processing wool, with production worth 1,521,498 rubles.

In 1891, there were 3022 factories and plants with a total production of 7,545,216 rubles. and 14,041 workers, including 9,660 men, 3,870 women and 511 minors. There were 2,709 factories with 4,754 workers, with production worth 2,286,456 rubles; There were 313 factories with a production of 5,258,760 rubles. The first place belongs to cloth court factories, of which there are 146 with 4,772 workers, with a production amount of 3,306,837 rubles; in products of this kind, the Grodno province is second only to Moscow and Simbirsk. The goods of its cloth factories are required in St. Petersburg, Moscow, Odessa, Warsaw, etc., and some even go abroad. There are more of these factories in Bialystok and its district. In recent years, however, there has been a noticeable decrease in cloth production. Second place belongs to 13 tobacco factories, which by 2030 will have workers. proceeds: 814,517 rubles. Then there are 17 wool factories with a turnover of 805,100 rubles. at 390 work; 5 silk - 214,980 rub. with 237 workers, 12 spinning machines - 102,165 rubles. at 217 workers, and 2 rags - 94,800 at 106 workers.

Among the factories, the first place is occupied by distilleries and yeast ones, numbering 73, with the production of anhydrous alcohol worth 740,989 rubles. with 540 workers. There were 57 breweries with 227 workers and a production of 502,839 rubles; at 150 brick factories there are 478 workers, the amount of production is 81,789 rubles; at 1926 flour mills with 2139 workers, the output was 505,636 rubles. There are 29,481 artisans, including 20,703 masters, 5,486 workers and 3,292 apprentices; of the artisans there were 12,220 Christians, 17,183 Jews and 78 Mohammedans, and in the cities Christians make up 22%, Jews 78%, and in the counties - Christians 49%, and Jews 51% of all artisans.

Trade and transport

The Bresto-Kholmskaya, Warsaw-Terespolskaya and Vilno-Rovno railway lines touch only the edges of the province.

The income of all cities of the Grodno province in 1889 amounted to 403,484 rubles, expenses - 400,783 rubles; urban capital was shown to be only 16,367 rubles, and the debt for the cities was listed as 207,981 rubles.

Leaders of the province

Governors

Throughout the existence of the province, there were 36 Grodno governors and their acting responsibilities, most of whom were natives of indigenous Russian provinces: Ryazan, Novgorod, St. Petersburg, Tver, Kaluga, Kostroma, etc.

Provincial leaders of the nobility

FULL NAME.	Title, rank, rank	Time to fill a position
Brzhostovsky Mikhail Ieronim Stanislavovich	count, actual privy councilor	1798-1801
Ursyn-Nemtsevich Stanislav Martselevich		1801-1807
Boreysha Pavel Mikhailovich	collegiate advisor	1808-1809
Pantserzhinsky Ludwig Karlovich	collegiate advisor	1809-23.03.1817
Merzhevsky Calixt Iosifovich		1817-1819
Grabovsky Kazimir Ivanovich	graph	1819-1825
Chetvertynsky Konstantin Antonovich	prince, actual state councilor	1825-02.09.1834
Gouvald		02.09.1834-1837
Zalensky Karl Rafailovich		1837-1839
Job vacancy		1839-1840
Puslovsky Frand Adalbertovich	court councilor	16.02.1840-1846
Lyakhnitsky Roman Antonovich	guard lieutenant	1846-1847
Nezabytovsky Stepan Yakovlevich	titular councilor	1847-1853
Orzheshko Calixt Nikodimovich	with the rank of chamber cadet, court councilor	16.05.1853-21.10.1861
Starzhinsky Viktor Stanislavovich	count, retired centurion, etc. d.	21.10.1861-10.09.1863
Krzhivitsky Julian Ksaverevich	actual state councilor	10.09.1863-02.01.1867
Davydov Vladimir Alexandrovich	chamberlain, actual state councilor	01.12.1867-26.05.1878
Ursyn-Nemtsevich Ivan Faddeevich	with the rank of chamber cadet, collegiate councilor (privy councilor)	24.11.1878-04.04.1900
Verevkin Pyotr Vladimirovich	with the rank of chamber cadet, collegiate adviser	12.04.1901-13.05.1904
Vysheslavtsev Ivan Mikhailovich	actual state councilor	13.05.1904-15.12.1906
Neverovich Nikolay Grigorievich	court councilor	15.12.1906-1917

Lieutenant Governors

FULL NAME.	Title, rank, rank	Time to fill a position
Berg Peter Ivanovich	actual state councilor	1801-02.12.1803
Kozhevnikov Lev Alexandrovich	State Councillor	02.12.1803-27.09.1807
Bakeev Stepan Vasilievich	captain-commander	1807-11.01.1808
Andreevsky Stepan Semenovich	State Councillor	22.01.1808-28.05.1811
Boggovut Vladimir Fedorovich	State Councillor	1811-14.03.1813
Kiryanov	State Councillor	02.05.1813-13.08.1813
Butovt-Andrzheikovich Mikhail Fadeevich	State Councillor	26.08.1813-05.02.1819
Maksimovich Konstantin Osipovich	collegiate advisor	14.02.1819-09.11.1826
Khodoley Grigory Pavlovich	State Councillor	26.11.1826-12.02.1832
Lashkarev Grigory Sergeevich	State Councillor	12.02.1832-08.06.1832
Davydov Sergey Ivanovich	prince, chamberlain, state councilor	17.06.1832-10.1833
Sardi Mikhail Sergeevich	collegiate advisor	06.10.1833-15.03.1835
Taube Peter Ivanovich	Baron, collegiate advisor	15.03.1835-01.01.1838
Yanevich-Yanevsky Feodosius Semenovich	collegiate advisor	27.03.1838-1849
Porai-Lontkovsky Semyon Onufrievich	State Councillor	1849-18.05.1854
Rozhnov Yakov Petrovich	actual state councilor	18.05.1854-30.08.1861
Obolensky Yuri Alexandrovich	prince, collegiate adviser	26.09.1861-12.10.1861
Umyastovsky Emilius-Tsezary Antonovich	chamber cadet, court councilor, etc. d.	14.12.1861-15.03.1863
Belenkov Georgy Evstratovich	actual state councilor	22.03.1863-22.03.1868
Enakiev Valery Alexandrovich	actual state councilor	22.03.1868-21.04.1878
Ushakov Vasily Semenovich	State Councillor	12.05.1878-25.04.1880
Iskritsky Ivan Fedorovich	actual state councilor	25.04.1880-10.05.1890
Ozerov Alexey Nikolaevich	actual state councilor	10.05.1890-19.12.1896
Dobrovolsky Nikolay Alexandrovich	State Councillor	08.02.1897-02.04.1899
Lishin Viktor Dmitrievich	chamberlain, state councilor	17.04.1899-29.04.1905
Oznobishin Alexey Alexandrovich	collegiate advisor	29.04.1905-25.06.1906
Stolyarov Vladimir Vladimirovich	actual state councilor	25.06.1906-1917

Write a review on the article "Grodno province"

Notes

Literature

Source

// Encyclopedic Dictionary of Brockhaus and Efron: in 86 volumes (82 volumes and 4 additional). - St. Petersburg. , 1890-1907.

Links



General Governments

Provinces

Regions

City authorities

Regions of the Steppe region

Regions of Turkestan region

Provinces of the Baltic region

Countries of Finland

Provinces of the Kingdom of Poland

Provinces of Galicia and Bukovina, occupied in 1914-1915

Administrative units Caucasian governorship

Special districts

Special Education

Dependent government education

An excerpt characterizing the Grodno province

A minute later, the thick, large figure of an old man, in full dress uniform, with all the regalia covering his chest, and his belly pulled up by a scarf, pumping, came out onto the porch. Kutuzov put his hat on the front, picked up his gloves and sideways, stepping with difficulty down the steps, stepped down and took in his hand the report prepared for submission to the sovereign.
Running, whispering, the troika still desperately flying by, and all eyes turned to the jumping sleigh, in which the figures of the sovereign and Volkonsky were already visible.
All this, out of a fifty-year habit, had a physically disturbing effect on the old general; He hurriedly felt himself with concern, straightened his hat, and at that moment the sovereign, emerging from the sleigh, raised his eyes to him, cheered up and stretched out, submitted a report and began to speak in his measured, ingratiating voice.
The Emperor glanced quickly at Kutuzov from head to toe, frowned for a moment, but immediately, overcoming himself, walked up and, spreading his arms, hugged the old general. Again, according to the old, familiar impression and in relation to his sincere thoughts, this hug, as usual, had an effect on Kutuzov: he sobbed.
The Emperor greeted the officers and the Semenovsky guard and, shaking the old man’s hand again, went with him to the castle.
Left alone with the field marshal, the sovereign expressed his displeasure to him for the slowness of the pursuit, for the mistakes in Krasnoye and on the Berezina, and conveyed his thoughts about the future campaign abroad. Kutuzov made no objections or comments. The same submissive and meaningless expression with which, seven years ago, he listened to the orders of the sovereign on the Field of Austerlitz, was now established on his face.
When Kutuzov left the office and walked down the hall with his heavy, diving gait, head down, someone’s voice stopped him.
“Your Grace,” someone said.
Kutuzov raised his head and looked for a long time into the eyes of Count Tolstoy, who stood in front of him with some small thing on a silver platter. Kutuzov did not seem to understand what they wanted from him.
Suddenly he seemed to remember: a barely noticeable smile flashed on his plump face, and he, bending low, respectfully, took the object lying on the platter. This was George 1st degree.

The next day the field marshal had dinner and a ball, which the sovereign honored with his presence. Kutuzov was awarded George 1st degree; the sovereign showed him the highest honors; but the sovereign’s displeasure against the field marshal was known to everyone. Decency was observed, and the sovereign showed the first example of this; but everyone knew that the old man was guilty and no good. When, at the ball, Kutuzov, according to Catherine’s old habit, upon the Emperor’s entrance into the ballroom, ordered the taken banners to be laid down at his feet, the Emperor frowned unpleasantly and uttered words in which some heard: “old comedian.”
The sovereign's displeasure against Kutuzov intensified in Vilna, especially because Kutuzov obviously did not want or could not understand the significance of the upcoming campaign.
When the next morning the sovereign said to the officers gathered at his place: “You saved more than just Russia; you saved Europe,” everyone already understood that the war was not over.
Only Kutuzov did not want to understand this and openly expressed his opinion that a new war could not improve the situation and increase the glory of Russia, but could only worsen its position and reduce the highest degree of glory on which, in his opinion, Russia now stood. He tried to prove to the sovereign the impossibility of recruiting new troops; spoke about the difficult situation of the population, the possibility of failure, etc.
In such a mood, the field marshal, naturally, seemed to be only a hindrance and a brake on the upcoming war.
To avoid clashes with the old man, a way out was found by itself, which consisted in, as at Austerlitz and as at the beginning of the campaign under Barclay, to remove from under the commander-in-chief, without disturbing him, without announcing to him that the ground of power on which he stood , and transfer it to the sovereign himself.
For this purpose, the headquarters was gradually reorganized, and all the significant strength of Kutuzov’s headquarters was destroyed and transferred to the sovereign. Tol, Konovnitsyn, Ermolov - received other appointments. Everyone said loudly that the field marshal had become very weak and was upset about his health.
He had to be in poor health in order to transfer his place to the one who took his place. And indeed, his health was poor.
Just as naturally, and simply, and gradually, Kutuzov came from Turkey to the treasury chamber of St. Petersburg to collect the militia and then into the army, precisely when he was needed, just as naturally, gradually and simply now, when Kutuzov’s role was played, to take his place a new, needed figure appeared.
The war of 1812, in addition to its national significance dear to the Russian heart, should have had another – European one.
The movement of peoples from West to East was to be followed by the movement of peoples from East to West, and for this new war a new figure was needed, with different properties and views than Kutuzov, driven by different motives.
Alexander the First was as necessary for the movement of peoples from east to west and for the restoration of the borders of peoples as Kutuzov was necessary for the salvation and glory of Russia.
Kutuzov did not understand what Europe, balance, Napoleon meant. He couldn't understand it. The representative of the Russian people, after the enemy was destroyed, Russia was liberated and placed at the highest level of its glory, the Russian person, as a Russian, had nothing more to do. The representative of the people's war had no choice but death. And he died.

Pierre, as most often happens, felt the full weight of the physical deprivations and stresses experienced in captivity only when these stresses and deprivations ended. After his release from captivity, he came to Orel and on the third day of his arrival, while he was going to Kyiv, he fell ill and lay sick in Orel for three months; As the doctors said, he suffered from bilious fever. Despite the fact that the doctors treated him, bled him and gave him medicine to drink, he still recovered.
Everything that happened to Pierre from the time of his liberation until his illness left almost no impression on him. He remembered only grey, gloomy, sometimes rainy, sometimes snowy weather, internal physical melancholy, pain in his legs, in his side; remembered the general impression of misfortune and suffering of people; he remembered the curiosity that disturbed him from the officers and generals who questioned him, his efforts to find a carriage and horses, and, most importantly, he remembered his inability to think and feel at that time. On the day of his release, he saw the corpse of Petya Rostov. On the same day, he learned that Prince Andrei had been alive for more than a month after the Battle of Borodino and had only recently died in Yaroslavl, in the Rostov house. And on the same day, Denisov, who reported this news to Pierre, between conversations mentioned Helen’s death, suggesting that Pierre had known this for a long time. All this seemed strange to Pierre at the time. He felt that he could not understand the meaning of all this news. He was only in a hurry then, as quickly as possible, to leave these places where people were killing each other, to some quiet refuge and there to come to his senses, rest and think about all the strange and new things that he had learned during this time. But as soon as he arrived in Orel, he fell ill. Waking up from his illness, Pierre saw around him his two people who had arrived from Moscow - Terenty and Vaska, and the eldest princess, who, living in Yelets, on Pierre's estate, and having learned about his release and illness, came to him to visit behind him.
During his recovery, Pierre only gradually unaccustomed himself to the impressions of the last months that had become familiar to him and got used to the fact that no one would drive him anywhere tomorrow, that no one would take his warm bed away, and that he would probably have lunch, tea, and dinner. But in his dreams, for a long time he saw himself in the same conditions of captivity. Pierre also gradually understood the news that he learned after his release from captivity: the death of Prince Andrei, the death of his wife, the destruction of the French.
A joyful feeling of freedom - that complete, inalienable, inherent freedom of man, the consciousness of which he first experienced at his first rest stop, when leaving Moscow, filled Pierre's soul during his recovery. He was surprised that this internal freedom, independent of external circumstances, now seemed to be abundantly, luxuriously furnished with external freedom. He was alone in a strange city, without acquaintances. Nobody demanded anything from him; they didn't send him anywhere. He had everything he wanted; The thought of his wife that had always tormented him before was no longer there, since she no longer existed.
- Oh, how good! How nice! - he said to himself when they brought him a cleanly set table with fragrant broth, or when he lay down on a soft, clean bed at night, or when he remembered that his wife and the French were no more. - Oh, how good, how nice! - And out of old habit, he asked himself: well, then what? What will i do? And immediately he answered himself: nothing. I will live. Oh, how nice!
The very thing that tormented him before, what he was constantly looking for, the purpose of life, now did not exist for him. It was no coincidence that this sought-after goal of life did not exist for him at the present moment, but he felt that it did not and could not exist. And it was this lack of purpose that gave him that complete, joyful consciousness of freedom, which at that time constituted his happiness.
He could not have a goal, because he now had faith - not faith in some rules, or words, or thoughts, but faith in a living, always felt God. Previously, he sought it for the purposes that he set for himself. This search for a goal was only a search for God; and suddenly he learned in his captivity, not in words, not by reasoning, but by direct feeling, what his nanny had told him long ago: that God is here, here, everywhere. In captivity, he learned that God in Karataev is greater, infinite and incomprehensible than in the Architect of the universe recognized by the Freemasons. He experienced the feeling of a man who had found what he was looking for under his feet, while he strained his eyesight, looking far away from himself. All his life he had been looking somewhere, over the heads of the people around him, but he should have not strained his eyes, but only looked in front of him.
He had not been able to see before the great, incomprehensible and infinite in anything. He just felt that it must be somewhere and looked for it. In everything close and understandable, he saw something limited, petty, everyday, meaningless. He armed himself with a mental telescope and looked into the distance, to where this small, everyday thing, hiding in the fog of the distance, seemed great and endless to him only because it was not clearly visible. This is how he imagined European life, politics, Freemasonry, philosophy, philanthropy. But even then, in those moments that he considered his weakness, his mind penetrated into this distance, and there he saw the same petty, everyday, meaningless things. Now he had learned to see the great, the eternal and the infinite in everything, and therefore naturally, in order to see it, to enjoy its contemplation, he threw down the pipe into which he had been looking until now through the heads of people, and joyfully contemplated the ever-changing, ever-great world around him. , incomprehensible and endless life. And the closer he looked, the more calm and happy he was. Previously, the terrible question that destroyed all his mental structures was: why? did not exist for him now. Now to this question - why? a simple answer was always ready in his soul: because there is a God, that God, without whose will a hair will not fall from a man’s head.

Pierre has hardly changed in his external techniques. He looked exactly the same as he had been before. Just as before, he was distracted and seemed preoccupied not with what was in front of his eyes, but with something special of his own. The difference between his previous and present state was that before, when he forgot what was in front of him, what was said to him, he, wrinkling his forehead in pain, seemed to be trying and could not see something far away from him . Now he also forgot what was said to him and what was in front of him; but now, with a barely noticeable, seemingly mocking, smile, he peered at what was in front of him, listened to what was being said to him, although obviously he saw and heard something completely different. Before, although he seemed to be a kind person, he was unhappy; and therefore people involuntarily moved away from him. Now a smile of the joy of life constantly played around his mouth, and his eyes shone with concern for people - the question: are they as happy as he is? And people were pleased in his presence.
Before, he talked a lot, got excited when he spoke, and listened little; Now he rarely got carried away in conversation and knew how to listen so that people willingly told him their most intimate secrets.
The princess, who had never loved Pierre and had a particularly hostile feeling towards him since, after the death of the old count, she felt obliged to Pierre, to her chagrin and surprise, after a short stay in Orel, where she came with the intention of proving to Pierre that, Despite his ingratitude, she considers it her duty to follow him; the princess soon felt that she loved him. Pierre did nothing to ingratiate himself with the princess. He just looked at her with curiosity. Previously, the princess felt that in his gaze at her there was indifference and mockery, and she, as before other people, shrank before him and showed only her fighting side of life; now, on the contrary, she felt that he seemed to be digging into the most intimate aspects of her life; and she, at first with distrust, and then with gratitude, showed him the hidden good sides of her character.
The most cunning person could not have more skillfully insinuated himself into the princess’s confidence, evoking her memories of the best time of her youth and showing sympathy for them. Meanwhile, Pierre’s whole cunning consisted only in the fact that he sought his own pleasure, evoking human feelings in the embittered, dry and proud princess.
“Yes, he is a very, very kind person when he is under the influence not of bad people, but of people like me,” the princess said to herself.
The change that took place in Pierre was noticed in their own way by his servants, Terenty and Vaska. They found that he had slept a lot. Terenty often, having undressed the master, with boots and dress in his hand, wishing him good night, hesitated to leave, waiting to see if the master would enter into conversation. And for the most part Pierre stopped Terenty, noticing that he wanted to talk.
- Well, tell me... how did you get food for yourself? - he asked. And Terenty began a story about the Moscow ruin, about the late count, and stood for a long time with his dress, telling, and sometimes listening to, Pierre’s stories, and, with a pleasant consciousness of the master’s closeness to him and friendliness towards him, he went into the hallway.
The doctor who treated Pierre and visited him every day, despite the fact that, according to the duties of doctors, he considered it his duty to look like a man whose every minute is precious for suffering humanity, sat for hours with Pierre, telling his favorite stories and observations on the morals of patients in general and especially ladies.
“Yes, it’s nice to talk to such a person, not like here in the provinces,” he said.
Several captured French officers lived in Orel, and the doctor brought one of them, a young Italian officer.
This officer began to visit Pierre, and the princess laughed at the tender feelings that the Italian expressed towards Pierre.
The Italian, apparently, was happy only when he could come to Pierre and talk and tell him about his past, about his home life, about his love and pour out his indignation at the French, and especially at Napoleon.
“If all Russians are even a little like you,” he said to Pierre, “est un sacrilege que de faire la guerre a un peuple comme le votre. [It’s blasphemy to fight with a people like you.] You, who have suffered so much from the French, you don’t even have any malice against them.
And Pierre now deserved the Italian’s passionate love only because he evoked in him the best sides of his soul and admired them.
During the last period of Pierre's stay in Oryol, his old freemason acquaintance, Count Villarsky, came to see him, the same one who introduced him to the lodge in 1807. Villarsky was married to a rich Russian woman who had large estates in the Oryol province, and occupied a temporary position in the city in the food department.
Having learned that Bezukhov was in Orel, Villarsky, although he had never been briefly acquainted with him, came to him with those statements of friendship and intimacy that people usually express to each other when meeting in the desert. Villarsky was bored in Orel and was happy to meet a person of the same circle as himself and with the same, as he believed, interests.
But, to his surprise, Villarsky soon noticed that Pierre was very far behind real life and had fallen, as he himself defined Pierre, into apathy and selfishness.
“Vous vous encroutez, mon cher,” he told him. Despite this, Villarsky was now more pleasant with Pierre than before, and he visited him every day. For Pierre, looking at Villarsky and listening to him now, it was strange and incredible to think that he himself had very recently been the same.
Villarsky was married, a family man, busy with the affairs of his wife’s estate, his service, and his family. He believed that all these activities were a hindrance in life and that they were all despicable because they were aimed at the personal good of him and his family. Military, administrative, political, and Masonic considerations constantly absorbed his attention. And Pierre, without trying to change his view, without condemning him, with his now constantly quiet, joyful mockery, admired this strange phenomenon, so familiar to him.
In his relations with Villarsky, with the princess, with the doctor, with all the people with whom he now met, Pierre had a new trait that earned him the favor of all people: this recognition of the ability of each person to think, feel and look at things in his own way; recognition of the impossibility of words to dissuade a person. This legitimate characteristic of every person, which previously worried and irritated Pierre, now formed the basis of the participation and interest that he took in people. The difference, sometimes the complete contradiction of people's views with their lives and with each other, pleased Pierre and aroused in him a mocking and gentle smile.
In practical matters, Pierre suddenly now felt that he had a center of gravity that he did not have before. Previously, every money question, especially requests for money, to which he, as a very rich man, was subjected very often, led him into hopeless unrest and bewilderment. “To give or not to give?” - he asked himself. “I have it, but he needs it. But someone else needs it even more. Who needs it more? Or maybe both are deceivers? And from all these assumptions he had previously not found any way out and gave to everyone while he had something to give. He had been in exactly the same bewilderment before with every question concerning his condition, when one said that it was necessary to do this, and the other - another.
Now, to his surprise, he found that in all these questions there were no more doubts and perplexities. A judge now appeared in him, according to some laws unknown to himself, deciding what was necessary and what should not be done.
He was just as indifferent to money matters as before; but now he undoubtedly knew what he should do and what he should not do. The first application of this new judge for him was the request of a captured French colonel, who came to him, talked a lot about his exploits and in the end almost declared a demand that Pierre give him four thousand francs to send to his wife and children. Pierre refused him without the slightest difficulty or tension, marveling later at how simple and easy it was that which had previously seemed insurmountably difficult. At the same time, immediately refusing the colonel, he decided that it was necessary to use cunning in order to force the Italian officer, when leaving Orel, to take the money that he apparently needed. New proof for Pierre of his established view of practical matters was his solution to the issue of his wife’s debts and the renewal or non-renewal of Moscow houses and dachas.
His chief manager came to see him in Orel, and with him Pierre made a general account of his changing income. The Moscow fire cost Pierre, according to the chief manager’s accounts, about two million.
The chief manager, to console these losses, presented Pierre with a calculation that, despite these losses, his income not only would not decrease, but would increase if he refused to pay the debts remaining after the countess, to which he could not be obliged, and if he does not renew the Moscow houses and the Moscow region, which cost eighty thousand annually and brought nothing.
“Yes, yes, it’s true,” said Pierre, smiling cheerfully. - Yes, yes, I don’t need any of this. I became much richer from ruin.
But in January Savelich arrived from Moscow, told him about the situation in Moscow, about the estimate that the architect made for him to renovate the house and the Moscow region, speaking about it as if it was a settled matter. At the same time, Pierre received a letter from Prince Vasily and other acquaintances from St. Petersburg. The letters talked about his wife's debts. And Pierre decided that the manager’s plan, which he liked so much, was wrong and that he needed to go to St. Petersburg to finish off his wife’s affairs and build in Moscow. Why this was necessary, he did not know; but he knew without a doubt that it was necessary. As a result of this decision, his income decreased by three quarters. But it was necessary; he felt it.
Villarsky was traveling to Moscow, and they agreed to go together.
Throughout his recovery in Orel, Pierre experienced a feeling of joy, freedom, and life; but when, during his travels, he found himself in the free world and saw hundreds of new faces, this feeling intensified even more. Throughout the trip he felt the joy of a schoolboy on vacation. All the faces: the driver, the caretaker, the men on the road or in the village - everyone had a new meaning for him. The presence and comments of Villarsky, who constantly complained about poverty, backwardness from Europe, and ignorance of Russia, only increased Pierre's joy. Where Villarsky saw deadness, Pierre saw an extraordinary powerful force of vitality, that force that in the snow, in this space, supported the life of this whole, special and united people. He did not contradict Villarsky and, as if agreeing with him (since feigned agreement was the shortest way to bypass reasoning from which nothing could come of it), smiled joyfully as he listened to him.

Just as it is difficult to explain why and where ants rush from a scattered hummock, some away from the hummock, dragging specks, eggs and dead bodies, others back into the hummock - why they collide, catch up with each other, fight - it is just as difficult It would be possible to explain the reasons that forced the Russian people, after the French left, to crowd into the place that was formerly called Moscow. But just as, looking at the ants scattered around a devastated hummock, despite the complete destruction of the hummock, one can see from the tenacity, energy, and countless swarming insects that everything has been destroyed except for something indestructible, immaterial, which makes up the entire strength of the hummock - so too and Moscow, in the month of October, despite the fact that there were no authorities, no churches, no shrines, no wealth, no houses, Moscow was the same as it was in August. Everything was destroyed, except for something insubstantial, but powerful and indestructible.
The motives of people rushing from all sides to Moscow after its cleansing from the enemy were the most varied, personal, and at first mostly wild, animal. There was only one impulse common to everyone - this desire to go there, to that place that was formerly called Moscow, to carry out their activities there.
A week later there were already fifteen thousand inhabitants in Moscow, after two there were twenty-five thousand, etc. Rising and rising, this number by the autumn of 1813 reached a figure exceeding the population of the 12th year.
The first Russian people who entered Moscow were the Cossacks of the Wintzingerode detachment, men from neighboring villages and residents who fled from Moscow and were hiding in its environs. The Russians who entered devastated Moscow, finding it plundered, also began to plunder. They continued what the French were doing. Convoys of men came to Moscow in order to take away to the villages everything that had been thrown along the ruined Moscow houses and streets. The Cossacks took what they could to their headquarters; the owners of the houses took everything that they found in other houses and brought it to themselves under the pretext that it was their property.
But after the first robbers came others, third ones, and the robbery every day, as the number of robbers increased, became more and more difficult and took on more definite forms.
The French found Moscow, although empty, with all the forms of an organically correctly living city, with its various departments of trade, crafts, luxury, government, and religion. These forms were lifeless, but they still existed. There were rows, benches, stores, warehouses, bazaars - most with goods; there were factories, craft establishments; there were palaces, rich houses filled with luxury goods; there were hospitals, prisons, public places, churches, cathedrals. The longer the French stayed, the more these forms of urban life were destroyed, and in the end everything merged into one indivisible, lifeless field of plunder.
The robbery of the French, the more it continued, the more it destroyed the wealth of Moscow and the forces of the robbers. The robbery of the Russians, with which the occupation of the capital by the Russians began, the longer it lasted, the more participants there were in it, the faster it restored the wealth of Moscow and the correct life of the city.
In addition to the robbers, the most diverse people, drawn - some by curiosity, some by duty of service, some by calculation - homeowners, clergy, high and low officials, merchants, artisans, men - from different sides, like blood to the heart - flowed to Moscow.

OL Date of formation 1801

Continuity
← Lithuanian province	Białystok Voivodeship → Nowogrudok Voivodeship → Polesie Voivodeship →

Grodno Governorate at Wikimedia Commons

Grodno province- one of the northwestern provinces of the Russian Empire with its center in the city of Grodno. Currently, most of the territory is part of Belarus, a smaller part is part of Poland, and a small part is in Lithuania (Druskeniki-Druskininkai) and Ukraine.

Story [ | ]

This administrative division remained until the third partition of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in 1795. From the part that passed to the Russian Empire in 1795, the Slonim province was formed in 1796, consisting of 8 counties: Slonim, Novogrudok, Grodno, Volkovysk, Brest, Kobrin, Pruzhansky and Lida. A year later, in 1797, the Slonim province was united with the Vilna province, under the name of the Lithuanian province, and five years later, by decree of 1801, it was separated in its previous composition from the Vilna province, and was renamed Grodno.

In this form, it existed for 40 years until the Bialystok region was annexed to it in 1842, which included 4 districts: Bialystok, Sokolsky, Belsky, and the latter was connected with Belsky into one district; Lida district went to the Vilna province, and Novogrudok - to Minsk.

Geography [ | ]

Grodno province. 1910s.

It was located between 51°30" - 54°3" N. w. and 26°44" - 30°16" E. d.; borders: to the north - with the Vilna province, to the east - with Minsk, to the south - with Volyn and to the west and north-west - with the Vistula region, from which pp. is separated. Neman, Bobr, Narev, Nurts and Western Bug.

In terms of occupied space of 33,979 square miles, it was one of the smallest provinces in Russia.

According to the structure of its soil, the Grodno province belongs predominantly to the middle and lower tertiary system and only along the Neman, and in some limited places - in the counties of Bialystok, Belsky and Brest - a Cretaceous formation with remains of belemnites is found in it. Along the Western Bug, granite predominates, turning into gneiss below. In the beams along the river. In Lososna and near Grodno, peat coal is found, as well as in many places - deposits of lake and swamp iron ores. The most common soils throughout the province: sandy with a greater or lesser admixture of clay or humus, sandy loam and loamy soil occupy more than 5/7 of the entire space of the province. Shifting sands are found most often in the northern part of the Grodno district, and in other districts - along the rivers Nareva, Nurtsa, Zap. Bug and Lesne. Sandy-stony soil occupies about a quarter of the entire area of Sokol and Bialystok counties. Black soils (forest and swamp) have a relatively small distribution, occupying up to 140,000 dessiatines, in the districts of Grodno, Pruzhansky, in the middle part of Brest and in the north-west of Kobrin. Soils - podzolic (77,600 dessiatines), peat (3,320 dessiatines) and marshy (196,000 dessiatines) are most common in the southern part of the province, and peat deposits are found in all counties, with the exception of Pruzhansky; their depth in some places reaches 2-3 arshins; they are partly developed by the local population.

Most of the Grodno province lies on the outskirts of the Baltic basin and only its southeastern part belongs to the Black Sea; lips satisfactorily irrigated with water. The Neman, entering the province from the west, initially flows through a small part of the Slonim and Volkovysk districts, and then cuts through the entire Grodno district. The length of the river in the province is up to 140 versts, its width is from 20 to 110 fathoms, its depth is from 3 to 12 feet with a slight fall of the river from 1 to 1.5 feet per verst; the river freezes on December 9 and opens on March 28; ice-free for 256 days (near Grodno). The Neman is navigable throughout its entire area, but proper navigation is hampered by shoals. The river is of great importance for local trade traffic, which is facilitated by artificial connections - the Oginsky canal, a tributary of its river. Shchary from the river Yaselda, flowing into the Pripyat, and from Western. Bug - Augustow Canal. The left tributaries of the Neman are larger than the right ones; there are 13 of them, and the most important are: Shchara, which flows within the province up to 207 versts, receiving rafting rivers - Lokhozva (86 versts), Grivda (100 versts) and Nessa (84 versts); less significant left tributaries of the Neman: (150 versts), Kan (100 versts), Svisloch (120 versts) and Lososna (55 versts). Of the 8 right tributaries, the most significant are: the Kotor with its tributary Pyrra and Issa. R. Narev, flows from the swamps of the Pruzhany district, the length of the course is 248 versts, it receives on the right: Suprasl (95 versts) and Bobr (170 versts) with tributaries - Sidryanka, Lososnaya and Brzhezovka; Having accepted the Bobr River, the Narev becomes navigable; its left tributaries are insignificant. The Western Bug belongs only to the right bank for 252 versts of the Grodno province, separating it from the Privislyansky region. Through the Dnieper-Bug Canal, connecting the river. Mukhovets from the river Ninoy, is part of the water system of the Dnieper and Vistula. The Western Bug receives 11 tributaries within the province, of which the most important on the right side are: Mukhovets (83 versts) with the tributary Ryta, Lesna (100 versts), Nurets and Pulva; of these, the last one and Mukhovets are navigable. Yaselda, the left tributary of the Pripyat, originates in vast swamps on the western border of the Volkovysk district; the length of its course within the province is 130 versts; the most important right tributary is the river. Pina.

There are many lakes, but they are not big. Some of the lakes, such as Zadubenskoye, Beloe, Molochnoye and Lot, are connected to each other and to the top of the river. Pyrras with natural and artificial water canals (Tizengauzen or Royal) provide convenient rafting routes. All waterways in the Grodno province belong to the western system of artificial water communication connecting the Baltic Sea with the Black Sea, and the entire length of shipping routes within the province is about 1,400 versts. The most important piers enter the river. Neman - in Grodno and in places. Mostakh; on the river Shara - in the city of Slonim, on the river. Beaver - in pcs. Goniondzakh; on the Western Bug - in the city of Brest-Litovsk, on Mukhovets - in the city of Kobrin. Navigation on the Neman, as well as rafting on other waterways, begins in the second half of April and ends in October. The ships sailing along the rivers of the Grodno province are named: Vitin lifting loads up to 14,000 poods, baroque- up to 5000 poods, Berdin- up to 4000 poods, gauge(iron) up to 1500 poods; smaller vessels: dubass, ligives, komygas, or semi-barks, boats, boats, etc. Swamps occupy up to 1/15 of the entire territory of the province. The most swampy areas are located: in the Belovezhskaya and Grodno forests, at the confluence of the Bobr and the Narev, along the rivers Mukhovtsa, Narev, Nurtsa and others. Impassable swamps stretch along the left bank of the river. Piny, in Kobrin district, having up to 70 versts in length and from 6 to 30 versts in width; The Piotkovskoe swamp is remarkable in size, 22 square meters. verst, lying between pp. Narev and Liza. The saline-bromine mineral springs in the province, Druskeniki, are widely known.

The climate of the province is moderate; There are neither intense heat nor severe, prolonged frosts. According to observations in Bialystok, Grodno, Svisloch and Brest-Litovsk, the average temperature of the year is 6°.3. The prevailing winds are the westerly direction; the number of days with precipitation is 145 with an average annual amount of moisture falling of about 500 mm. The entire forest area occupies almost 18% of the province's space, namely 484,000 acres, and under artificial plantings - 1,584 acres. The forests are dominated by pine and spruce; then, in some places there are oak, birch, aspen, and alder as pure stands; Hornbeam, elm, ash and maple are even less common; The edges of the forest sometimes consist of hazel, wild apple, pear, etc. There are very few mast trees; There is enough construction and commercial timber, and some of it is rafted to Prussia and the Vistula region. Forests along the Western Bug are valued higher than the forests of the Neman; the districts of Grodno, Pruzhansky and Slonim are the richest in forests; and among the forest dachas, Belovezhskaya and Belovezhskaya Pushchas are remarkable.

The province is divided into 9 districts: Grodno, Sokolsky, Bialystok, Belsky, Brest, Kobrin, Pruzhansky, Volkovysk and Slonim; 39 camps, 185 volosts, 2233 rural communities with 7992 peasant villages in 112,663 households; 16 provincial cities and 62 towns.

Administrative division[ | ]

Administrative division of the Grodno province

No.	County	County town	Square, sq. verst	Population, people
1	Bialystok	Bialystok (56,629 people)	2551,8	187 531 ()
2	Belsky	Belsk (7012 people)	3130,3	175 855 ()
3	Brest	Brest-Litovsk (41,615 people)	4299,7	193 851 ()
4	Volkovysk	Volkovysk (7071 people)	3358,0	125 817 ()
5	Grodno	Grodno (49,952 people)	3770,0	137 779 ()
6	Kobrinsky	Kobrin (8998 people)	4645,3	159 209 ()
7	Pruzhansky	Pruzhany (7634 people)	3659,4	139 879 ()
8	Slonimsky	Slonim (15,893 people)	6359,2	233 506 ()
9	Sokolsky	Sokolka (7595 people)	2290,0	113 746 ()

Population [ | ]

Population of the Grodno province according to the 1897 census.

There were 12,581 marriages, born. 62,180, 38,812 died. In 1891, there were 1,167 educational institutions with 39,041 students, including 5,579 girls.

National composition[ | ]

County	Belarusians	Ukrainians	Jews	Poles	Russians	Lithuanians	Germans
Province as a whole	44,0 %	22,6 %	17,4 %	10,1 %	4,6 %	…	…
Bialystok	26,1 %	…	28,3 %	34,0 %	6,7 %	…	3,6 %
Belsky	4,9 %	39,1 %	14,9 %	34,9 %	5,9 %	…	…
Brest	1,8 %	64,4 %	20,8 %	3,9 %	8,1 %	…	…
Volkovysk	82,4 %	…	12,4 %	2,1 %	2,3 %	…	…
Grodno	65,7 %	…	19,9 %	5,7 %	6,2 %	1,4 %	…
Kobrinsky	…	79,6 %	13,7 %	2,2 %	3,1 %	…	…
Pruzhansky	75,5 %	6,7 %	12,8 %	1,4 %	3,0 %	…	…
Slonimsky	80,7 %	…	15,2 %	1,6 %	2,1 %	…	…
Sokolsky	83,8 %	…	12,2 %	1,2 %	1,8 %	…	…

Noble families [ | ]

Religion [ | ]

Orthodox - 827.724
Catholics - 384.696
Jews - 281.303
Protestants - 13,067
Mohammedans - 3.238

Economy [ | ]

Agriculture[ | ]

Agriculture is the main occupation of the majority of the population.

Of other rural occupations, gardening and horticulture are the most common - in the counties of Bielsk and Bialystok; although few estates do not have an orchard, this branch of the economy is now greatly neglected. Tobacco growing is insignificant; Mostly shag is bred; in 1890, there were 5,995 tobacco plantations in the province, occupying only 22.25 acres, from which only 1,101 poods of tobacco was collected.

Beekeeping is poorly developed and is most concentrated in the Slonim and Brest districts, where mainly bee hives are found.

Forestry [ | ]

Industry [ | ]

In 1843, there were already 59 factories processing wool, with production worth 1,521,498 rubles.

In 1891, there were 3022 factories and plants with a total production of 7,545,216 rubles. and 14,041 workers, including 9,660 men, 3,870 women and 511 minors. There were 2,709 factories with 4,754 workers, with production worth 2,286,456 rubles; There were 313 factories with a production of 5,258,760 rubles. The first place belongs to cloth court factories, of which there are 146 with 4,772 workers, with a production amount of 3,306,837 rubles; in products of this kind, the Grodno province is second only to Moscow and Simbirsk. The goods of its cloth factories are required in St. Petersburg, Moscow, Odessa, Warsaw, etc., and some even go abroad. There are more of these factories in Bialystok and its district. In recent years, however, there has been a noticeable decrease in cloth production. Second place belongs to 13 tobacco factories, which by 2030 will have workers. proceeds: 814,517 rubles. Then there are 17 wool factories with a turnover of 805,100 rubles. at 390 work; 5 silk - 214,980 rub. with 237 workers, 12 spinning machines - 102,165 rubles. at 217 workers, and 2 rags - 94,800 at 106 workers.

Among the factories, the first place is occupied by distilleries and yeast ones, numbering 73, with the production of anhydrous alcohol worth 740,989 rubles. with 540 workers. There were 57 breweries with 227 workers and a production of 502,839 rubles; at 150 brick factories there are 478 workers, the amount of production is 81,789 rubles; at 1926 flour mills with 2139 workers, the output was 505,636 rubles. There are 29,481 artisans, including 20,703 masters, 5,486 workers and 3,292 apprentices; of the artisans there were 12,220 Christians, 17,183 Jews and 78 Mohammedans, and in the cities Christians make up 22%, Jews 78%, and in the counties - Christians 49%, and Jews 51% of all artisans.

Trade and transport[ | ]

The Bresto-Kholmskaya, Warsaw-Terespolskaya and Vilno-Rovno railway lines touch only the edges of the province.

Leaders of the province[ | ]

Governors [ | ]

Provincial leaders of the nobility[ | ]

FULL NAME.	Title, rank, rank	Time to fill a position
	count, actual privy councilor	1798-1801
		1801-1807
	collegiate advisor	1808-1809
	collegiate advisor	1809-23.03.1817
		1817-1819
	graph	1819-1825
	prince, actual state councilor	1825-02.09.1834
Gouvald		02.09.1834-1837
		1837-1839
Job vacancy		1839-1840
	court councilor	16.02.1840-1846
	guard lieutenant	1846-1847
	titular councilor	1847-1853
	with the rank of chamber cadet, court councilor	16.05.1853-21.10.1861
	count, retired centurion, etc. d.	21.10.1861-10.09.1863
	actual state councilor	10.09.1863-02.01.1867
Davydov Vladimir Alexandrovich	chamberlain, actual state councilor	01.12.1867-26.05.1878
	with the rank of chamber cadet, collegiate councilor (privy councilor)	24.11.1878-04.04.1900
Verevkin Pyotr Vladimirovich	with the rank of chamber cadet, collegiate adviser	12.04.1901-13.05.1904
	actual state councilor	13.05.1904-15.12.1906
	court councilor	15.12.1906-1917

Davydov Sergey Ivanovich prince, chamberlain, state councilor 17.06.1832-10.1833 collegiate advisor 06.10.1833-15.03.1835 Baron, collegiate advisor 15.03.1835-01.01.1838 Yanevich-Yanevsky Feodosius Semenovich collegiate advisor 27.03.1838-1849 State Councillor 1849-18.05.1854 actual state councilor 18.05.1854-30.08.1861 prince, collegiate adviser 26.09.1861-12.10.1861 chamber cadet, court councilor, etc. d. 14.12.1861-15.03.1863 actual state councilor 22.03.1863-22.03.1868 Enakiev Valerian Alexandrovich actual state councilor 22.03.1868-21.04.1878 State Councillor 12.05.1878-25.04.1880 actual state councilor 25.04.1880-10.05.1890 actual state councilor 10.05.1890-19.12.1896 Dobrovolsky Nikolay Alexandrovich State Councillor 08.02.1897-02.04.1899 chamberlain, state councilor 17.04.1899-29.04.1905 Oznobishin Alexey Alexandrovich collegiate advisor 29.04.1905-25.06.1906 actual state councilor [ | ]

Links [ | ]

The data in this article is as of the end of the 19th century.
(requires conversion to modern units of measurement).

In 1866, I was transferred to the Grodno province, to the 4th world section, newly formed from three volosts of former landowner peasants and from three volosts of state peasants (whose annexation to our department had just been followed by a government order). In the forever abandoned, unpleasant Vilkomir, some said goodbye to me - very kindly, others, from whom I did not expect, quite good-naturedly, so that one could think: “the ill-fated Artemy Petrovich Volynsky was wrong when he said that the Russians are too inclined to eat each other.” friend..."

A Polish landowner family said goodbye to me, also kindly and sincerely. During that farewell I remember with kindness the especially venerable old lady Mrs. Suzanna B-va, her smart daughter Mrs. Franetta and the old man Mr. Sokolovsky. And at the same time, I remember a small circumstance that more than once made me think!

Mrs. Suzanna B-va, by the way, said then that in the Grodno province the “philistines” (that is, Polish landowners) speak pure Polish speech, not so, they say, as in the Kovno province, where Polish speech is quite distorted an admixture of words and phrases not only Lithuanian, but even Russian.

But in fact, it turned out just the opposite: in the Grodno province, in general, they speak Polish much worse than in the Kovno province. Only in Warsaw, partly in Dresden and Carlsbad, among the Poles living there, and partly in Bialystok, did I hear pure Polish speech, which I had never heard before either in Kovno, or in Wilkomir and its district, or in Telshi, also in its district , nor in four, well-known to me, districts of the Grodno province: Grodno, Volkovysk, Sokol and Bialystok. From here I drew the conclusion that the strongest Russian influence, namely the influence of language, has always acted on the “Poles” of the North-Western region - and, of course, it came, without fading, from afar, even from the time when Lithuanian Rus, even after its union with Poland, it still lived independently, preserving its Orthodox religion, albeit under the form of a union, while preserving, at the same time, its folk language and most of its folk customs. However, there are just as few “Poles” in the North-Western Territory, as, for example, there are Germans, and perhaps even Great Russians. In general, the vast majority of the Poles here are descendants of purely Russian people and Lithuanians; and it is no wonder that Russian speech, with its firmly, naturally pronounced words, with its diverse, broad, strong turns, imperiously invades the local, artificial Polish speech.

But no matter how strong the influence of the Russian language, it seems that for a long time the “intelligentsia” of the North-Western Territory, represented here by the most crimson gentry and urban classes of the Catholic faith, will consider themselves purely Polish. There is so much that is forced, unnatural, and false in the Polish tendencies of the people here. Their zealous Polonism is extremely strange, and sometimes too naive. As an example in the latter respect, I will give here a small but typical case:

At the beginning of 1864, with me, a landowner and a native of the Vitebsk province, a very smart, educated man (in one of our highest privileged educational institutions), a man with practical activities, answered the passionate question of the late Mikhail Petrovich Pogodin: “is it really possible, being a native of Vitebsk , does he consider himself a Pole and not a Russian?” - instead of a direct answer, he told the following anecdote:

In 1818, Emperor Alexander Pavlovich was returning from the Warsaw Sejm - and the narrator’s father, at that time the leader of the nobility, in a town where there was a stop for evening tea along the route, introduced the nobles of his district to the sovereign at the post station. Leaving the station to get into the carriage, the sovereign noticed that the horses were no longer harnessed in the same way as they had harnessed him from Warsaw to this very station: before, everywhere only two horses were harnessed to the drawbar and in front of them were three carryouts with a postilion in the middle, here four horses were harnessed to the drawbar side by side, with two carry-away horses in front. "A!" - the sovereign allegedly said, “here is the Russian harness, but I thought that Poland was still here...” - and with that he left.

I vividly remember how excited Mikhail Petrovich was with this anecdote instead of an answer to his question, and with what ardor he then went through many historical facts to prove that Vitebsk, Polotsk, and, finally, the entire North-Western Territory are Russian from time immemorial, purely Russian land. The Vitebsk Pole refrained from arguing and did not even make the slightest objection, but, of course, our historian did not convince him.

By the way, I’ll say this: the local Poles, despite all their deep-rooted faith in Polish traditions and tendencies, still somewhat feel the falsity of their position, which stems from the pursuit of supposedly patriotic goals - and often speak out about the need for “reconciliation "between them and us. The idea, to be honest, is quite strange, even if we admit that it is quite sincere and does not have any special lining. To begin with, “reconciliation” is even unthinkable due to the non-existence of quarrels and discord between us, as the initial reason for all subsequent struggles. In the mutual relations between our people and those here, there is only a misunderstanding, but only on their part, due to their persistent and unreasonable desire to be Poles.

In the Grodno province, which so strongly strikes the eye with its main and now still very tenacious Russian element, I saw too closely, during my long stay there, the deep traces and sad results of the just ended struggle, a struggle that arose due to a frenzied powerlessness its revelry of pseudo-patriotic illusions.

My farewell to Vilkomir did not last long; I left soon, but with sorrow in my soul. I was so sorry to leave my site, in which - I can boldly say - I worked a lot and with love for the work. The impressions of everything that caused the change in the place for my official activities were heavy, too strong. And that’s why the Grodno province didn’t attract me. And besides, rumors have reached that in the Grodno province the peasant business is completely over - verification commissions are closed everywhere in the districts, and there is simply nothing to do there except sort out small cases about felling and weeding, and besides also monitoring the peasant management in volosts and rural communities. (I was very mistaken here, but then all the world “figures” thought that, with the end of verification operations, the peasant business in the region was completely over). Finally, I must admit that, probably due to my mental mood at that time, it seemed unpleasant to me that I would have to deal with the Belarusians, with the people, by all accounts, beaten to the point of complete stupor.

I stayed in Vilna for two weeks, without a specific purpose, only to have some fun and drown out the feeling that was tormenting me; I would have stayed even more if I had not had to rush to my new site to receive the state peasants of my new site into the department of world institutions. However, Vilna, other than the beauty of its surroundings, did not then represent anything that could calm or just entertain spiritual anxiety. The mood of Russian society in Vilna was somehow gloomy and vague; it was felt that everyone was restlessly waiting for some kind of change.

I mentioned this to a good friend.

And feel free to notice! - he answered grumpily: - well, let them worry about a possible change. After all? the concern is not about the direction of Russian affairs here, but about the individual, or, better said, about the situation of everyone around this individual...

In fact, by the end of that same year, 1866, it turned out that the Vilna premonitions about a change in the main person in the administration of the region came true...

In Vilna, however, my time was not fruitless: from the stories of another good friend, I collected a lot of interesting and completely reliable information about the events in the Grodno province before the start of the last Polish rebellion.

Despite the beautiful June morning, almost the entire journey seemed boring and unpleasant to me; short journey from Vilna to Grodno. From the Landvorovskaya railway station and all the way to Porechenskaya, all non-picturesque places flashed by and, in agricultural terms, were very meager. There were no longer the hilly areas of the Kovno province, so often conspicuous by their productivity, here the sandy, miserable plain stretched in all directions, tiring to the eye. Instead of densely overgrown paddocks (fields), along the slopes of the hills and in the shallow valleys between the hills, carefully cultivated fields with extremely sparse vegetation could be seen everywhere, and they were often intersected by large wastelands covered with heather, completely unsuitable for agriculture. Moreover, there were few rivers, streams, lakes and even swampy areas, which seemed strange, since the North-Western region always imagines itself to be abundant in water. Finally, the forests here were not like those in Kovno: of course, on sandy soil, they were all coniferous forests, but not pine, with tall, straight and slender trees, but mostly spruce, with squat, disheveled, gloomy-looking trees.

So it was to the Porechye station on the Petersburg-Warsaw Railway.

Vast, with many different buildings, by the way, probably intended for large warehouses, the second-class Porechenskaya station was built in a completely deserted area; Adjacent to it is only one fairly passable, and only in the summer, dirt road leading to the town of Druskeniki, famous for its mineral waters (also in my area); and around, for long distances in all directions, there are no significant villages, but only two or three miserable villages, of course, not with an industrial or commercial population.

The wide dimensions of the Porechenskaya station seem even more surprising when compared to the minuscule dimensions of the railway station in Grodno itself. Why, you can’t help but think, would a large second-class station be needed in a deserted, unproductive, almost deserted area, when in a provincial city located on a navigable river (the Neman), they considered it necessary to have only a third-class station? But this curiosity can now be explained simply: at the time the St. Petersburg-Warsaw railway was being built, secret plans for the planned Polish uprising were already in full organization and in part were even being carried out, and for this very reason it was built on a vacant lot, in thirty-three versts from Grodno, this famous Porechenskaya station.

I must mention here a fact that seems unknown to us. Among the engineers and various organizers of the St. Petersburg-Warsaw Railway there were a lot of French subjects from Poles-emigrants after the uprising of 1830-1831, or from their descendants; It was they who built this road in connection with the new rebellious enterprise. A completely reliable witness of the then Grodno events told me about this, and that this really happened, by the way, is clearly hinted at by the sudden departure from Grodno of the head of the local railway station with a whole train of people who had gathered to become rebels (the matter, however, was completely unsuccessful). But I also heard that at the Porechenskaya station, openly and always unhindered, meetings of participants in the preparing rebellion took place and that there were supposedly some warehouses there for various things the rebels needed for their enterprise. It was possible - the place was very convenient: at a distance of five or six miles from the railway near Porechye, the huge forests of the Bershtovsky volost of the Grodno district began in one direction, and in the other - the equally huge forests of the Lida district of the Vilna province, i.e., such areas on which the leaders of the uprising especially counted for their military operations.

The same calculations that guided the organizers of the railway in Porechye acted during the construction of railway stations further beyond Grodno, towards Warsaw. So, in Bialystok, a large district city with a population of thirty thousand - the center of a highly developed factory industry and trade - a third-class station was built, and twenty-five miles beyond Bialystok, just on the border of the Grodno province with the kingdom of Poland already within its borders, and again However, in an area that is not at all insignificant for railway traffic, there is a vast second-class Lappa station. Of course, it was not built here for nothing.

However, at that time, in relation to Poland and the Poles of the Northwestern Territory, our administration missed a lot between the eyes; It is no wonder that she did not pay any attention to the construction of railway stations carried out by a company of private entrepreneurs, who were supposed to have their only monetary benefits in mind.

Eight to ten versts from the Porechenskaya station, the nature of the terrain on both sides of the railway line began to change. Although I stretched across a plain, almost everywhere without hills, intersected by not very large, still spruce forests, the soil of the cultivated fields between the copses was already much better than the deserted and barren soil that brought melancholy from Landvar, and especially from the town of Oran and up to Porechye - here one could see the earth, already gray, in other places clearly loamy, and, judging by the good grain on it, quite productive. Moreover, there were often meadow spaces here, the greenness of which seemed to be brighter than the greenery of the Kovno meadows.

The closer we got to Grodno, the busier the surrounding views became. Wastelands, sandy and swampy places were no longer visible at all. The forests moved much further away, stretching along the edges of the horizon like a blue-foggy stripe. Frequent villages flashed by, as it seemed to me then, better built and more populated than in the Kovno province. A rapid change in the character of the entire area - a pleasant view of sown, well-cultivated, grace-ripening fields, bright green meadows, a lively view of the peasants. populations - all this greatly influenced the disposition of my spirit. I approached Grodno already calmly and cheerfully.

Here is the meager Grodno railway station. Here, the old, almost thousand-year-old Grodno is undoubtedly a Russian city both in its historical origin and in all the characteristic features that lie on its face.

The persistent insistence of the liquid factor forced me to stay in a nondescript Odessa hotel, in which, however, subsequently, I almost always stayed. This hotel was kept clean and in order, thanks to the diligence of the hostesses, decent and kind two Jewish sisters; there were few “rooms” and servants in it, and therefore there was no confused, noisy bustle, so common in large hotels in provincial cities; moreover, for some reason, Polish landowners never visited it and the nasty gentlemen's servants never crowded around there; Finally, I also liked the fact that the Odessa hotel, a wooden and one-story building, looked, in general, like a decent landowner's house.

From the railway station to the Odessa hotel there is a long, rather wide street, Sadovaya. There are few stone houses on it (less than ten, it seems), and then, as befits the outskirts of a city, there are all small houses, between which, from the very first time, I noticed a row of houses of the same shape, unique architecture, plastered on the outside, low, but apparently two-story, for each had two windows in the lower compartment and another in the upper one under a semicircular pediment. These were already old buildings, left over from the last century; They once housed workers at various factories established by the notorious “reformer”, the treasurer of the Lithuanian Count Anton Tyzengauz.

Speaking of this tycoon, who really was up to a lot.

Lelevel especially, followed by Yaroshevich, and other also Polish writers, represent Count Tyzengauz not only as a reasonable patriot who tried with all his might to transform the economic life of his fatherland, but also as an enlightened, humane guardian of the entire peasant population of the region. He lived in Grodno, managing all the “royal estates” in Lithuania, and his reform activities, about which those writers tell so many truly outlandish things, continued here for a long time (more than ten years). And he didn’t do something, as if he did! So, for example, in relation to the state economy, he is said to have brought state-owned lands and forests into awareness, established order in the forestry department, built canals, cleared rivers, and summoned foreign colonists to populate the sparsely populated region. In Grodno itself and in its environs, he set up a variety of educational, charitable, industrial, trade and entertainment institutions: there was a cadet corps, and schools: accounting, architecture, surveying, midwifery, theater, and a medical faculty (with a botanical garden, library and natural history room); there was a hospital and an orphanage here; various factories (for the manufacture of cloth, linens, silk fabrics, muslin, hats, pins, carriages, writing paper); resin, tar, potash, iron and sawmills factories; some kind of merchant's office; and, finally, a permanent theater with a permanent orchestra. To manage and manage factories and factories, as well as to train workers from local peasants, Tyzenhaus recruited many craftsmen from Germany, France and Holland.

Following the Polish writers, and those of our Russians who had occasion to mention Count Anton Tyzengauz - except for one. Kostomarov, - they speak of this Polish magnate in the highest degree sympathetically, recognizing him as a man of genius, a great reformer, - and they are very sorry that his activities were allegedly hampered by the intrigues of the Jesuits and various envious gentlemen. That Polish writers flaunt Tyzenhaus so much is understandable: they would like, at all costs, to find among their magnates from the time of the final fall of Poland at least one who would clearly understand why the fatherland is perishing, who would willingly and wisely want to eliminate the -possibility of the cause of this death; but why our writers are trying to glorify him - I really am perplexed. In any case, one should not at all trust the Polish evidence and it would not be difficult to treat it critically.

I do not believe in the benefits of the illustrious reforms of the Lithuanian treasurer; I do not allow that these reforms were undertaken by him as a result of a rationally conscious plan: how to act to stimulate the productive forces in his native land. However, let us assume that Count Tyzengauz vividly felt that Poland lacked something, that these shortcomings constituted a social evil that could lead to disastrous consequences; By. In all likelihood, as a noble and very rich gentleman, he traveled a lot around Europe, saw a lot, noticed, compared, and this opened his eyes, gave him some insight, inspired a good desire to benefit his fatherland, to act to educate it, to develop its productive means . But the point is how he acted. From the list of schools he founded, it is clear that almost all of them were designed to satisfy the needs of the upper strata of society, and not to satisfy the essential needs of the common people. This can all the more be said about Tyzengauz’s factories, since they were unlikely to provide any benefit even to landowners living on their estates and busily employed. And, however, the most important evidence of the futility, the complete insignificance of the undertakings and efforts of the Lithuanian treasure is precisely the fact that of all its institutions, of which so much glory has been dissolved, not the slightest trace remains in Grodno; Of course, the people whose liberation Count Tyzengauz allegedly sympathized with “and even improved their situation” have no memories of them, which I can positively assure.

Grodno made a pleasant impression on me, but I will not describe the city. There is absolutely nothing remarkable about it. Even the buildings of an ancient appearance do not have a beautiful, impressive, or original appearance (however, their antiquity, except for the Kalozhin Church, which is actually outside the city, this beautiful monument of purely Russian antiquity, is not very old, no further than the 16th century); on everything ancient, of course, still outstanding from the mass of recent buildings (especially stone ones), there is a clear imprint of the insignificant state of the city of Grodno in which it was during the time of the Polish state. But one characteristic feature of Grodno, which was strongly reflected in my eyes when I first met him, is worth pointing out with particular insistence.

The city of Grodno seemed to me very similar to many of the Great Russian provincial cities that were not important in terms of industrial and commercial significance. They reminded me of them: the simple, rather miserable appearance of most of the wooden houses, despite the fact that they had some originality in their facades, tiled and shingle roofs; and long, long fences, and an abundance of gardens, and littered squares, and most of all, the absence almost everywhere on the streets of that movement that is involuntarily expected in any city with several tens of thousands of inhabitants. I knew in advance that here, as in all cities of the North-Western Territory, there are a lot of Jews, that they even make up a significant majority of the local population, and this alone should have given Grodno a sharp characteristic feature and thus distinguished it from the cities of Great Russia; but it turned out that the Grodno Jews were far from being similar - in one very noticeable feature - to their co-religionists living in Vilna, Kovno, Dinaburg, even in small Vilkomir: in these cities, from early morning until late at night, every day, except for the Sabbath days, Jews move, crowd, quickly dart everywhere, but here you couldn’t see their fussy errands - they increasingly looked out from shops, from the windows of houses, and from behind gates. (The latter circumstance also indicated to me that Grodno is neither an industrial nor a trading city, despite its fortunate position on a large navigable river and between such cities as Vilna and Warsaw, despite the fact that a significant majority of its population , that is, Jews, according to all the conditions of their life, are only engaged in trade).

The bloody rebellion of 1830-31, an oddity to the uprising of 1863, took place terribly in many regions of the former Polish kingdom annexed to Russia, and, among other things, in the Vilna province and in those of its districts, from which the Kovno province was subsequently formed; but the province of Grodno, despite its proximity to the theater of war, was little affected by it. Of course, this did not depend at all on the fact that Grodno was then governed by an energetic man, the future pacifier of the 1863 uprising in the North-Western Territory; but precisely because Polish tendencies were still far from being grafted onto the large and wealthy Grodno landowners at that time, and if they held out anywhere, then only in the gray gentry, which, after the previous “red” days during the diets and sejmiks, was now dragging out a miserable and close existence in their “outskirts”, in the districts of Brest, Belsky, Kobrin, Bialystok, Sokolsky and Grodno. In general, the Grodno “Poles” of that time (I’m actually talking about landowners of the above-mentioned categories) did not really care about the restoration of “old-time” Poland and sat quite quietly in their estates. Perhaps at that time they were somewhat calmingly affected by the bitter, humbling memories of the last Grodno Sejm, which ended the existence of the Polish state, and of the stay of the former king Stanislav Augustus in Grodno. Perhaps a special reason also played a role here, about which, on my last trip to the North-Western Territory, I heard a strange legend: they told me that, in the summer of 1831, some kind of movement of serfs against the landowners was formed, headed by , supposedly, a peasant who called himself Prince Gedroyets and assigned himself the rank of general. The narrators did not clearly and vaguely convey the actions of this man and told in detail only how he sought to hang a certain landowner Kolenkevich and how, one day, with his sudden appearance, he disturbed the “philistines” who had gathered in the Liberpol farm, a large landowner Bykhovets, located in the remote area of Volkovysk district. What happened to the imaginary Giedroyets, they told me about this extremely confusingly: some - that he suddenly disappeared unknown where, and others - that the landowners allegedly caught him and hanged him... I very much regret that the short duration of my trip did not allow me check the basis for this legend and collect more information about it. But one thing is certain: the Grodno landowners, during the rebellion of 1830-31, for some reason, were very afraid of the peasant uprising - and this, of course, should have stopped their movement towards the rebellion.

But be that as it may, the Grodno landowners during the rebellion of 1830-31 were, in general, meek, at least they did not differ in any special exploits. Because of this, during the uprising of 1863 they turned out to be ardent patriots. From them came: the last chief of the Rzhond of Warsaw, Traugutt, the “dictator” of Lithuania, Kalinovsky, as well as many Dovudtsy; From them came: a “politician” who planned to play a major role in the North-Western region as the Marquis of Velepolsky, Count Viktor Starzhinsky, and a particularly zealous, as they say, collector of “offyara” and taxes for the rebellion, Severin Romer, who allegedly collected and sent up to seventy million francs to the Hotel-Lambert. One of the district cities of the Grodno province (Pruzhany) was “conquered” for several days by a rebel gang - a unique case in the entire North-Western region. In the Grodno province, one of the outskirts of the gentry “became famous” for the treacherous slaughter of Russians. Popular rebel bands invaded this province from the Kingdom of Poland and sometimes fought fiercely with our troops, for example, near the town of Semyatichi. In it, with great zeal, rebellious demonstrations were organized, and “politicians and diplomats” from the world mediators, from the leaders of the nobility, cleverly set up evil intrigues against the just-liberated, humble Belarusian peasants. Finally, in Grodno itself, this purely Russian city, the rebellious movement began earlier than anywhere else in the North-Western region.

And to tell the truth: this stupid movement developed in its ugly manifestations, which certainly could not have been expected in Grodno, precisely because it did not at first meet with the proper resistance from our Russian side, which, however, had yourself for this, all the means.

In 1860, when Polish demonstrations began in Grodno, and until July 1861, the governor of Grodno was the actual state councilor Ivan Abramovich Speyer, who took this place from the directors of some Moscow gymnasium. One must think that the venerable Mr. Speyer had great merits, both as a person in general and as a teacher in particular, but as a governor, he was not at all due to the difficult circumstances of that time. True, in some other places, even in more significant points than Grodno, we found administrators, and not teachers, who were little in line with the importance of the events; but still one cannot help but be amazed that in the outskirts of our province, just adjacent to the kingdom of Poland, a nest of rebellion, where the rebellious movement began to manifest itself very openly since the middle of 1860, a man was elected governor who, by all his previous activities, was in no way prepared for very diverse administrative activities, moreover, completely unfamiliar with all the living conditions in the region entrusted to his management, finally, a person who, as the Poles said, even by his origin, could not have significance in their society...

Under Mr. Speyer, extremely violent demonstrations broke out in Grodno. Here, as if those tricks were tested, which were soon widely used in the kingdom of Poland and throughout the North-Western region. Here, back in 1860, in the churches, especially in the cathedral, called the faroya, patriotic hymns were sung, outrageous sermons were pronounced, and the collection of ofyara for the cause of the uprising was carried out by gentlemen and gentlemen, dressed in a characteristic complaint. But the experiments were not limited to this. I don’t know whether it was in the same 1860 or already in 1861, but still under the city of Speyer, priest Mayevsky (now, they say, located in the town of Druskeniki) organized a solemn meeting in Grodno for the procession from Ruzhanago-Stok, a town in Sokolsky district , where there was once a Jesuit church. Then, in 1861, but, it seems, already in the period of time between the departure of the city of Speyer from Grodno and the appointment of a new governor, a celebration of the union of Lithuania with Poland took place in Druskeniki - a demonstration organized by the landowner of the Kingdom of Poland, the blind Count Volovich and some Mr. Ostromentsky , - the demonstration was very ceremonial and spectacular: in front of a crowded gathering of lords, gentry and common people, first a mourning service was held, followed by a solemn service; and after that, all day long and until late at night, Polish ladies, in white dresses decorated with flower garlands, walked arm in arm with clapping hands, kindly assuring them that old-time Poland had been resurrected, and that with its resurrection came freedom, equality, complete well-being. And there was all sorts of entertainment for the people, the music of two large orchestras thundered continuously, gentlemen, panenkas and gentlemen merrily intervened in the folk dances, in the intervals between dances, each clap received gifts in win-win lotteries. The demonstration was cleverly arranged: right on the border of the Grodno province with the kingdom of Poland, on the banks of the picturesque Neman, which flows here in an area densely populated by people of the Lithuanian tribe, people who are very lively in their usual occupation of drink smuggling. All these fun varied in Grodno itself with the frequent appearance of various people at the governor’s house, as usual, following the example of Warsaw, with women and children in front. There was a lot of noise and rowdiness here. Starting with the patriotic anthem, they immediately moved on to curses against the governor and against all Russian authorities. And it’s strange: although the gatherings did not look at all menacing, simply because they were always sparsely populated. Mr. Speyer never coped with them. They say the guy never even went out to see the brawlers...

Of course, the unfortunate teacher-governor wrote a lot and complained greatly to the highest authorities about these incidents, which worried him extremely and completely confused him, but that was all that was limited on his part. However, there was an opportunity to stop the arrogant and stupid riot of the Grodno rebel rabble, and without resorting to particularly drastic orders, as will now be seen from the actions of Mr. Speyer’s successor.

Governor Speyer failed to act as circumstances required - and, of course, the evil began to intensify every day: the calm of public life was constantly being disturbed and at many points in the province (for example, processions like the one that was started in Ruzhany-Stok were sent from district to district, from town to town), the mass of rebels, in view of the impunity of obvious rebellious tricks, grew and grew... Finally, Mr. Speyer was dismissed from office. But even then the Grodno rebels did not want to leave him alone.

On the day of his departure from Grodno (I think it was in June 1861), a crowd of singers of revolutionary hymns, organizers of absurd demonstrations (in which crowd, as always, at that time, the most prominent figures were officials of the Grodno treasury chamber) gathered in a large tavern on Pogulyanka, past which the former governor was supposed to pass on his way to Vilna; It was then that these insolent people planned to arrange a shameful meeting for him. But the boyish idea did not succeed: someone warned Mr. Speyer - and the Grodno police officer Magnus took him out of the city, along a roundabout road, under the apron of his chaise (a circumstance, as they say, that amused the Poles for a long time, but indeed, very funny ). Meanwhile, Mr. Speyer's crew, sent straight to Pogulyanka, with one of his lackeys, was stopped by the insolent people and they burst out with whistles and curses, however, they soon saw that the victim they had planned for desecration was not present. And then, when Speir’s crew was still lingering at the place where they were stopped, a company of soldiers suddenly arrived under the leadership of the divisional general Goldgoer himself. It would seem that the organizers of the party fun were in for a big trouble, but again the matter ended well for them: no one was arrested, everyone even dispersed very happily... (They say that the insolent people rushed to General Goldgoer with noisy greetings, shouting: hurray! - in a word they gave him a full ovation and even rocked him in their arms)...

Thus ended the reign of Mr. Speyer, it ended badly for him and even worse for the Grodno province. The rebellious movement here, already in the sense of final preparations for an armed uprising, now continued quite unhindered until the arrival of the new governor, which had disastrous consequences for many “ordinary people.” I was also told quite a bit about how this movement was observed on our part, but these stories are too fragmentary, incoherent, and at the same time, they contain such features of Russian compliance, even licentiousness, both in the face of any impudence and in the face of any temptation. that I hesitate to mention all this...

However, the Grodno spoilers were soon to calm down, at least for a while.

In the second half of September 1861, Major General of His Majesty’s retinue, Alexander Maksimovich Drenyakin, was appointed governor of Grodno and, exactly a month later, arrived in Grodno. Immediately upon his arrival, the police announced throughout the city that, before receiving officials from all departments, the governor would inspect the troops stationed in the provincial city.

And there were only two battalions of Russian troops in Grodno at that time; however, their viewing, behind the Vilna Gate, in the space between the outskirts of the city and the aforementioned Pogulyanka, made a huge impression on the large crowd that flocked to the spectacle. General Drenyakin, they say, during the training of the battalions, several times ordered to “take the offensive” - and this technique was especially noticed by the public. After the review, but on the spot, Mr. Drenyakin called the officers to him and told them “that they must clearly see the circumstances in which the area is located, where they are billeted, and therefore must be extremely careful at every step and always ready for whatever duty of service requires.” - The speech was laconic, but strong in its clear meaning, and moreover, it was said so clearly that the audience understood it perfectly.

During the entire period of the governorship of General Drenyakin (unfortunately, a very short one - until the beginning of March 1862), there were no public demonstrations anywhere - and there could not have been, because this governor, who at first produced such a strong impressed, and then tried to be as much as possible in front of everyone: he often traveled around the province, and always without any special precautions, and in the provincial city, every day, he walked alone and sometimes, in the evenings, even visited the tsukernii, especially one in which people gathered who were quite involved in rebellious plans.

However, these plans, as well as preparations for an open uprising, did not stop in the Grodno province even then; but it all happened very stealthily, with obvious timidity, and sometimes manifested itself only in petty attempts to somehow organize the cause of rebellion in Grodno. There was, for example, an attempt on the part of merchants, supposedly from the Kingdom of Poland, to establish large warehouses of various goods in Grodno “to counteract local Jewish exploitation.” But in view of the fact that the proposed warehouses were started for too many items of trade, and also because the construction of such warehouses could not at all be caused by the needs of such a poor city as Grodno, the main thing, one must think, taking into account the vague circumstances of the time and Besides where the proposal came from, General Drenyakin immediately rejected all the advances of these imaginary, probably merchants.

The quick dismissal of Mr. Drenyakin from the governorship did not arouse even the slightest attempts to send him off, similar to the farewell to Mr. Speyer.

The core of the last Polish rebellion in the North-Western region was in the Vilna and Kovno provinces. In Vilna there was a rzhond separate from the one in Warsaw. The most influential members of the Vilna rzhond started to carry out the cause of rebellion in the region independently, completely separately from the same thing in the kingdom of Poland. In the Vilna and Kovno provinces, the rebellious movement was widespread and found a lot of support among the peasant population - and the latter was facilitated by two reasons: firstly, the influence of the priests on the Catholic peasants, of whom there are many in the Vilna province and who represent a solid mass in the Kovno province; secondly, the extremely difficult situation of many landless, homeless and familyless farm laborers (especially those from Kovno), which attracted these unfortunate people to all sorts of temptations presented to them by the rebels. Yes! The Vilna and Kovno rebels did find support among one very significant part of the local common people, this is a positive fact. It was not for nothing, for example, that the entire gang of the famous priest Matskevich was made up of only peasants.

But it was not at all the same in the Grodno province.

The peasants of this province, with few exceptions, are Belarusians with a fairly significant admixture of the Little Russian tribe; Moreover, most of them, after the reunification of the Uniates in 1839, belong to the Orthodox confession. Already one last circumstance could determine the completely unsympathetic attitude of the Grodno simple people to the Polish rebellious undertakings: completely inaccessible to the influence of the priests, the Orthodox peasants were inaccessible to temptations from the landowners, for the Orthodox clergy, with their explanations and suggestions, supported in them both loyalty to the legitimate government and hopes only on him in improving their lives. However, the Catholic peasants of Grodno were not at all pliable; they remembered too vividly what old Poland was for them, with eccentric lords, with cruel lords’ stewards, with Jewish tenants of the lord’s estates, who disposed of the peasants with all the rights of landowners. The Belarusians and Little Russians were especially oppressed at all times by the Poles, and therefore in the Grodno province the Polish rebellion of 1863 did not find the slightest sympathy among the peasant population, even among the farm laborers, of whom, however, there were much fewer there than in the Kovno and Vilna provinces.

The Polish rebels knew this well; in the Grodno province they almost did not try to influence the people with seductive promises of all sorts of benefits from the restoration of Polyp, but acted mainly through terror. They even had a whole system for such actions. At first, the Grodno leaders of the uprising came up with the idea of intimidating the people through Russian power. And they almost succeeded, since the Russian administration of that time, not only in the Grodno province, but throughout the North-Western Territory, turned out to be quite susceptible to the influence of cunning machinations.

It must be said that, not without subtle calculations, the Polish landowners of the North-Western Territory created a lot of world intermediaries everywhere. Usually, for each district there were at least seven intermediaries - this was the case in the Grodno province. And so, soon after the peasant regulations were put into effect, from almost all the Grodno districts, especially from Bialystok, Belsk, Sokolsk and Grodno, representations poured in, from the intermediaries themselves, from the world congresses, from the leaders of the nobility, about various cases of disobedience, disobedience , the impudent and outrageous actions of the peasants, both in relation to the landowners and in relation to world institutions.

Perhaps there was some basis for ideas about the disobedience and disobedience of the peasants; in some places all this really showed up; but there were essentially important reasons for this. Many complaints from entire rural communities and individual peasants, as well as “a review of the volosts carried out by members of the verification commissions from the Ministry of Internal Affairs, during the production of new elections of volost and rural officials,” fully explain the situation of the peasantry in the districts of the Grodno province at that time .

Firstly, it turns out that the peasants complained (and quite rightly): “about the incorrect indication according to the charter documents of all the land allocated to them, as well as pastures and inconvenient places; to take away crops and crowd in pastures; for the transfer of peasant owners to farm laborers and the conversion of their plots into farm lands; on non-inclusion of lands that were in peasant use into the allotment until the approval of the Regulations; finally, to the incorrect calculation of duties and embarrassing assumptions for the peasants about the clearing up of land and the transfer of estates, as well as the inconvenience of the relocations that have already been completed.” Secondly, it turned out that during the Polish peace mediators and world congresses, the entire peasant business in the Grodno province was in the most unfavorable conditions: the rights of the peasants, granted by the Regulations of February 19, 1861, remained, almost everywhere, unknown to them; volost elders, appointed for the most part at the insistence of landowners and peace intermediaries, in order to protect the interests of landowners and restrict the independence of peasants, managed public affairs arbitrarily, under the leadership of clerks; volost and village gatherings did not have the proper significance; village elders were primarily contractors for the master's work and limited themselves to supervising the correctness of such work; the peasants, by order of their officials, supported by the landowners, were subjected to corporal punishment in a completely arbitrary amount; o the volost court, the peasants had no idea: controversial cases between them were decided by foremen or clerks, and the judges only applied their seals to the decision, which was recorded in the book of verdicts of the volost assembly; Often peasants also lost time and incurred unnecessary costs by turning to common public places in their disputes.

By the way, I note here that the picture of extreme disorder in the then public peasant government, as well as the complete defenselessness of the peasants against all sorts of illegal and malicious actions directed at them, could have been depicted much more clearly than in the above official document.

It does not mention the main feature of the then peasant “self-government”, namely, that everything in it was conducted, as they say, in the Polish way: the law that gave the serfs personal, property, and public rights was not respected, for example, to such an extent to the extent that the peace intermediaries themselves appointed people loyal to them, even those who were not peasants, to elective peasant positions, and the volost clerks from the gentry, “officialists”, in the landowner household administrations had a special, predominant role in the volost administration. I note, on the basis of positive data, this circumstance as extremely important, because it, eliminating all the power of public administration, which should have served greatly to protect the essential interests of the peasants just emerging from serfdom, contributed to the Polish landowners and world mediators in the most effective way, to all kinds of oppression - which oppression, according to the leaders of the uprising, was necessary to involve humble Belarusians in an open rebellion against the government.

In view of the incorrect and - to put it bluntly - maliciously drawn up charters by the landowners, in view of the landowners' inclination in general not to ease the life of the peasants, but rather to their final oppression, it is no wonder that the Grodno peasants, noticing where such actions are heading and not finding protection against them from the peace mediators, did not hide their displeasure, although they did not express it in unrest, but only in complaints to the provincial authorities, and sometimes in evading the adoption of charters introduced by the mediators. This is all that was presented by the district institutions for peasant affairs, as impudent disobedience of the peasants to various legal authorities, even as an outright rebellion.

Examples of this are striking, they must be given here, at least briefly, as they (in brief, and, of course, not for the same conclusions as mine) are shown in the journals of the Grodno provincial presence on peasant affairs, (unfortunately, the authentic reports of the world mediators, who must be especially remarkable, I don’t have one at hand).

The mediator of the 1st section of the Bialystok district, for example, reported that in the Zabludovskaya volost “there is no way to verify the fourteen statutory charters on the occasion of the self-will of the peasants, and henceforth until the permission of the highest authorities.” The mediator of the 2nd section of the same district reported about the non-introduction of eleven charters “due to the disobedience of the peasants”, and also pointed to the peasants of the Khoroschi estate “for giving the number of available souls.” The mediator of the 3rd section of the Belsk district notified about the non-verification and non-enforcement of forty-five charters “due to disobedience and resistance of the peasants.” The mediator of the 1st section of the Sokolsky district reported that at the volost meeting of the Makovlyanskaya volost, the peasants announced “that from the first days of 1863 they intended to refuse to fulfill the dues in favor of the landowners” and he also notified that six charters remain not certified for the reason “ disobedience of the peasants to appear to listen to them.” The intermediaries of the 3rd and 5th sections of the Grodno district also notified: the first, that the peasants of the estates: Radzivonovich, the Puslovskaya landowners, and Lunpa, the Chekhovsky landowners, resolutely refused to be present during the verification of the charter charter, which is why they asked for “a decisive order to stop such disobedience , which stopped efforts to introduce literacy; and the second, that the peasants of the Zablots estate, the landowners Pokubyatov, upon the introduction of the charter and after delivering a copy of it to the village headman, having seized this charter in a fraudulent manner, took it to the landowner, with the announcement that they did not intend to accept it,” why the intermediary, before restoration of order in the Zablots estate, stopped with the introduction of charters for the remaining estates.

I think the above examples are enough to show how the highest provincial authorities were incited to take “decisive” measures “against disobedience, disobedience, resistance, perseverance, outrageous actions of the peasants,” how all this generally seemed to be reasons that completely prevented the introduction of statutory charters. The Polish peace mediators thus achieved a double result, desired for them: firstly, the peasants, unsympathetic to the plans of the uprising, were intimidated by the Russian government, and therefore had to become hostile towards it and, in the end, seek protection from the Poles; and secondly, the peasant reform, so objectionable to the landowners in its final formulation by the government, if not suspended completely, then at least slowed down and became extremely confused.

By the time the Polish peace mediators were replaced by Russians (already in the second half of 1863), there were a lot of unintroduced charters; but there were quite a few letters that were not drawn up at all, because they avoided drawing them up under all sorts of pretexts. However, in the North-Western Territory all this was so natural. If only the Polish landowners had not resisted with all their might, which significantly affected their interests, the Regulations of February 19, 1861!.. But these landowners, as well as officials recruited from them and from the gentry, and in general, have long been accustomed to circumventing all Russian laws, settle everything that is unpleasant for them in the best possible way.

Desire for the Poles, the results that I pointed out above were achieved at the very beginning in relation to the Grodno provincial authorities. It completely succumbed to the influence of alarming tendentious reports about the supposed unrest of the peasants and about the obstacles thereby to the correct and successful progress of the peasant business. The deplorable orders of this authorities, “to restore order among the peasants,” are quite enough. But I will limit myself to only a few of them, and, except for one, they are not even particularly important.

Thus, the provincial office for peasant affairs presented the representation of the peace mediators of the 1st and 2nd sections of the Belostok district and the mediator of the 3rd section of the Belskaya district, “about the spreading disobedience of the peasants in the volosts of Zabludovskaya and Rudskaya,” submitted to the order of the head of the province, and he ( Haller, or Count Bobrinsky - I don’t know) ordered the local police officers “to restore order in troubled volosts and to subject the instigators of disobedience to punishment.” Of course, repeatedly in other places, the provincial presence in charge of peasant affairs and the governor gave orders in a similar way. For their part, the police officials (at that time all Poles) were very zealous. From the presence logs (January 19 and 22, 1863) it is clear that the police officers brought troops into the estates and quartered them, “in the form of an execution,” several soldiers per yard; that, at the same time, “according to the resolutions of the peace mediators, the peasants were punished with rods, arrest at the zemstvo court and fines (the latter were imposed on those who were conscientious “for not restraining the peasants from persistence”). In addition, about “inciting two rural societies” to disobey the election of representatives to verify the statutory

letters and from appearing to hear them,” the governor instructed the judicial investigator to carry out the investigation, and from the provincial presence it was submitted for permission from the Minister of Internal Affairs.

Meanwhile, in reality, there was no unrest, disobedience, or disobedience of the Grodno peasants at all - there were only cases, and then only a few, of deviations from the selection of those authorized to verify the letters, as well as from appearing for the hearing of the letters. But there is no doubt that the world mediators themselves, by their actions, inspired the people with complete distrust of themselves, and there is no doubt that all the institutions of that time for peasant affairs in the Grodno province were unable to dispel or weaken this distrust, or even act upon it as they had planned in advance stated by the Supreme Government.

On January 18, 1862, the position of the main committee on the structure of the rural state was approved at the highest level, which indicated that the evasion of peasants from electing representatives to hear the charter charter cannot hinder the actions of the peace mediator in verifying it, and equally cannot serve as an obstacle to approval and putting it into effect - it was only the duty to carry out verification in the presence of the assembly and read the approved document at the full assembly - and this, of course, was not at all difficult to achieve. In view of such a government order, all the confusion I described above should not have happened when the statutory charters for the Grodno province were put into effect, and especially there should not have been a suspension; in this matter on the part of the world mediators. But the Grodno provincial presence for peasant affairs did not seem to notice this trouble; it accepted those ideas about the obstacles to the introduction of charters as something indisputable, and not at all subject to verification, and did not point out to the peace mediators the Regulations of the Main Committee 18- on January 1862, as if they didn’t even know about him; Moreover, it presented, on behalf of the head of the province, with the permission of the Minister of Internal Affairs, some of its “general proposals for eliminating the difficulties encountered by intermediaries when verifying charters in the event of the peasants’ refusal to elect representatives and from meeting at a gathering to hear the charters.” But the minister, pointing, first of all, to the Regulations of the Main Committee on January 18, 1862, and, “without establishing from the presented

assumptions of the general rule,” he ordered “to take appropriate measures to eliminate the misunderstandings that have arisen in accordance with each individual case, and if, then, a difficulty is encountered somewhere, then enter with an understanding of that in all the details of a particular case.” At the same time, the following circumstance is curious: the minister noted in his order that the evasion of peasants from meeting at the gathering to check and listen to the charter and of conscientious outsiders from signing the act of trust (which is why the Grodno peace mediators complained so much) has so far occurred in one Grodno province"

But it was something else, and it was only in this then so ill-fated province.

The above order from the Minister of Internal Affairs followed at the very beginning of January 1863, and by the middle of this month armed gangs had already formed in the Kingdom of Poland and a real uprising began. Soon it penetrated into the Grodno province. There is no doubt that here, in the entire North-Western region, an armed rebellion appeared earlier than anywhere else - just after the beginning of the movement of rebel gangs in the Kingdom of Poland. There were several special reasons for this. Firstly, the districts: Belsky, Bialystok, Grodno and partly Sokolsky, for a considerable extent, border on the Kingdom of Poland, which, in 1863, was the main seat of the rebellion; moreover, these districts were farther from the center of Russian power, located in Vilna, much more than some districts of the Kovno province, which also bordered the Vistula provinces; in the Grodno province, and all in the same districts, gangs of rebels could find a fairly significant contingent for themselves both in the outskirts of the gentry, of which there are a lot, and in the population of both district and provincial towns, and finally, in all likelihood, in addition to all the above reasons , as well as strategic considerations, the leaders of armed gangs invaded the Grodno province from the kingdom of Poland as a result of hatred of its simple people of purely Russian origin, and, moreover, in the majority, of the Orthodox religion - and this is all the more likely that this people, with all the passivity of his character, clearly expressed his complete lack of sympathy for the rebellion.

The gentry will be divided among the Poles into crimson and gray; The first group includes lords, owners of populated estates, and officials of considerable rank, in a word, people who once had the right to wear a crimson zhupan; gray gentry are the inhabitants of the gentry's "outskirts" who own small plots of land and cultivate them themselves. In general, the proverb “a nobleman in a garden is equal to a voivode” was an expression only of the gentry’s exuberance.

However, M. N. Muravyov was appointed governor of Grodno at the end of the rebellion of 1830-31.

It began openly with a demonstration in Warsaw in June 1860 on the occasion of the funeral of the widow of the Polish general Sawiński, who took part in the rebellion of 1830-31. But here’s what we don’t know and what I heard about from D. M. L-a, an officer in the Old Ingermanland infantry regiment, which was quartered, before the mutiny and before the implementation of the peasant regulations, in the Grodno province: the company in which he was an officer, was located in the Volkovysk estate of Ros, Count Pototsky, (17 versts from the city of Volkovysk), and he himself was stationed in the village of Shovki, belonging to this estate. And then, one day, the mistress of the house, Orthodox, but went to the church for confession, (then this often happened, as it also happened that in the same peasant family, some of the family were Orthodox, and others were of the Roman Catholic confession), in great secrecy, I consulted with Mr. Lm: whether or not to take some kind of oath from the priest, to which he, the priest, forces both peasants and peasant women. Noticing from the hostess’s words that it was about some kind of oath of a particularly suspicious nature, Mr. L advised this woman to evade the priest’s insistence in the simplest way - not to go to church anymore. This case indicates that not only rebellious plans, but also rebellious actions were manifested in the Grodno province even before the start of the Warsaw demonstrations and that these actions were already widespread, and they were directly calculated to excite the common people to an uprising. Moreover, it was not for nothing that the priest of the town of Rosi Androtsky, when a stern military commander, Lieutenant Colonel Kazanli, was appointed to Volkovysk, suddenly disappeared somewhere. Isn’t it surprising that our provincial administration didn’t see any of this at the time?

One of them in the Bialystok district will be described in detail in another excerpt of my notes.

The chairman of this chamber was then the Grodno landowner Kersnovsky.

All large cities in the Northwestern Territory have such Pogulyankas. These are country places, two or three miles from the city, certainly with large taverns, where noisy people gather for drinking parties.

A rather minor, but still interesting, fact is the following: in the evening, on the day of the new governor’s arrival, Count Viktor Starzhinsky, who was then holding the post of provincial marshal of the nobility, visited him. He appeared, as they say, simply, in a gray jacket, however, with a Russian order in his buttonhole, and, from the very first words, with all the swagger) of a born Polish aristocrat, he began to talk about the political circumstances in the kingdom of Poland and the North-Western region. But the governor did not allow him to talk about a sensitive topic and persistently directed the conversation towards his impressions of the trip. Then, during the general presentation of the officials to the governor, Count Starzhinsky did not consider it necessary to be there. Of course, both the evening visit and the failure to appear on the day of the general presentation of officials were pre-planned demonstrations.

In the Grodno province, the Jewish tenants of the populated master's estates held out longer than anywhere else in all the western provinces, precisely until the thirties of this century, despite the strictest prohibitions from the highest government.

These elections were carried out, by changing Polish mediators, in the second half of 1863.

These decisions were decidedly illegal, because the Intermediaries could only inflict corporal punishment in cases of judicial-police proceedings.

Clashes between our troops and armed gangs began in the Grodno province even earlier than in the Kingdom of Poland - precisely on January 11, 1863; from this date until February 3, there were five battles with the rebels who invaded the Grodno province from the kingdom, where hostilities began in the second half of January 1863. It is remarkable that in the Vilna and Kovno provinces the first battles with the rebels occurred much later than in the Grodno province: in the Vilna province - on February 25 (the defeat of the gang near the town of Gudniki), in the Kovno - on March 15 (the defeat of the Shaika near the village of Novoberzhi). But, earlier than anywhere else, the rebellion in the Grodno province was pacified: on July 23, the last gang (of Vrublsvsky) was defeated, and in general, after a fierce two-day, January 24 and 25, battle near the town of Semyatichi, there were no serious military actions anywhere .

In the Grodno province there are nine district towns and sixteen provincial towns.

There were strategic considerations, of course: the above-mentioned five districts of the Grodno province, and especially Brest, Belsk and Bialystok, with their swampy rivers (for example, the Narev), as well as dense forests, represented many benefits for a small war, for partisan actions; - at least that’s what the leaders of the uprising thought; but they forgot one thing: guerrilla warfare can only be successful under the necessary condition that the cause for which it is being fought is sympathized with by all the surrounding people

215 years since the formation of the Grodno province. F.V

Plan:

Introduction

1. Historical sketch

2. Geography

3. Administrative division

4. Population

4.1. National composition

4.2. Noble families

4.3. Notable residents and natives

5. Religion

6. Economy

6.1. Agriculture

6.2. Forestry

6.3. Industry

6.4. Trade and transport

7. Governors

Geography

Administrative division

Population

National composition

Noble families

Religion

Economy

Agriculture

Forestry

Industry

Trade and transport

Leaders of the province

Governors

Provincial leaders of the nobility

Lieutenant Governors

see also

Write a review on the article "Grodno province"

Notes

Literature

Source

Links

An excerpt characterizing the Grodno province

Story [ | ]

Geography [ | ]

Administrative division[ | ]

Population [ | ]

National composition[ | ]

Noble families [ | ]

Religion [ | ]

Economy [ | ]

Agriculture[ | ]

Forestry [ | ]

Industry [ | ]

Trade and transport[ | ]

Leaders of the province[ | ]

Governors [ | ]

Provincial leaders of the nobility[ | ]

Links [ | ]

Password recovery