south of Ukraine was engaged, especially taking into consideration their regional-
individual specifics.
The existence of the monarchy and the decentralized system of self-government
as the basic element of democratic society was evidently incompatible.
Each town, depending on more or less extent of administrative, military or
commercial subordination and orders, had possibilities to carry out a fully individual
activity in medical, educational, engineering-technical and other spheres.
In particular, city councils and departments decided problems of medical activity,
organized special commissions and allotted funds from budgets onto improving sanitary-
hygienic conditions. Independently and individually each municipality decided
modernization of engineering-technical infrastructure, but only in the central areas of
towns, leaving suburbs without benefits of modernism. Self-government could not cope
with such problems at the expense of own resources, so they took credits (mostly for 30-
50 years), which made municipalities owe a lot to the state as well as to financial
institutions.
In the same way they individually and independently solved problems of
education and development of culture. They formed special commissions; allocated
budget funds that increased annually, established new schools, libraries, reading-
rooms, but it drew to cultural-educational lifestyle less than half town’s population
(approximate from 30 to 40 %, in provincial towns – less than 20 %). In ethnical aspect
the majority of educated population was the Russians, in social aspect – aristocracy
and public servants, merchants and middle-class groups.
In gender aspect there was a perceptible disproportion between man majority and
woman minority in educational institutions. The funds allocated by municipalities were
insufficient for development of the education sphere, low cultural level of the
population manifested itself and the well-to-do of richer social groups of town’s
population, as pay for education was not affordable for all groups of population,
whereas municipalities did not work out any program for supporting poor strata of the
population [1; 11; 25].
After 1870 the civil governments were capable of independent and individual
solving problems of budgeting policy. Speaking frankly, they had to use 20 % funds to
their own expenses and administrative measures, the part (20-30 %) to debts
reimbursement and the rest was individually allotted to towns’ important items of
expenditure. So, they always needed budget funds, and year after year not only incomes
and expense grew, but debts as well. Moreover, the most of measures to which
municipal funds were allocated, were not profitable, whereas municipal enterprises
were granted on lease, which accumulated less revenues to budgets.
That is why, in our opinion, the activity of municipal self-government should be
considered in the light of the regional-individual theory.
- 986 -