The comparison of activity indicators of municipal self-government in different
regions. With the purpose of better illustrating regional-individual specifics of self-
government it is necessary to give comparative indicators of self-government institutions’
activity in different regions. As a result, the following criteria were chosen: estate
representation of self-government, financial possibilities, land property, engineering-
technical facilities and education.
Estate representation in all the branches of municipal government depended directly
on the vector of towns’ social-economical development. Intensive trading activity
facilitated broad representation of merchants in the municipal government‘s bodies. The
Granted Chart and administrative development of towns determined the main positions of
merchants’ representation in civil government.
During the studied period strong positions in the bodies of self-government of towns
in the south of Ukraine were taken by representatives of merchant estate. In the majority
of provincial towns middle-class representatives prevailed. Artisans were always in the
minority amid the deputies from a town’s population; representatives from honorary
townspeople and intelligentsia were nearly absent – they were rare examples [1; 11; 25].
In other regions the correlation in regard to social, national and religious
indicators had another picture. In particular, in municipalities of Chernigiv Province
the noble estate prevailed. In 1898 in the whole province there were 353 – deputies
from the nobles, 34 – from the middle-class and 10 – from the merchants [29].
However, the nobles and the merchants in the municipalities were in the majority.
Persons with university and secondary education were in the minority, instead there
were a lot of uneducated people, which permits to estimate the qualitative composition
of self-government bodies and understand the tasks they set.
In towns of Pskov province the majority of municipalities’ representatives were
merchants, the minority – middle-class [29]. Everyone was Russian by nationality, and
by religion – orthodoxies. The same distribution was in self-government of the
following regions: Simbirsk [21], Orenburg [16], Orlov [17], Tambov [23], as the
population in the majority was Russian-speaking and orthodox.
Financial possibilities were rather differentiated. For example, in the southern
Ukrainian region there were more towns with a million incomes; rates of growth of
budgets were higher. Land property, commercial activity and enterprises gave most of
the incomes to towns’ budgets in the southern Ukraine. Instead, the incomes of towns’
budgets in other cities of the empire consisted mainly of valuation duties and taxes
from local population. Among the duties in the southern Ukrainian towns there were
mostly expenditures on municipal maintenance, town improvement, engineering-
technical innovation, education, medico-sanitary services. In other regions of the
empire the expenditures on state, administrative, municipal institutions, police and fire-
fighting commands dominated. The city of Odessa was the most distinguished in regard
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