Pankieiev O. Historical Sources of the History of Officialdom in Southern Ukraine in the Second Half of the18th Century

This dissertation establishes and analyzes the bulk of the source material on the formation of the Russian imperial bureaucracy in Southern Ukraine in the second half of the eighteenth century. As a distinct social class, the bureaucracy played a key role in the integration and unification of the territorial, political, cultural, and economic organization of the region according to the general legislative standards of the Russian Empire. It was not only the driving force of change in the region but also an object toward which the transformational efforts of the empire's central powers were directed. The dissertation reveals the historical context in which the formation and functioning of the bureaucracy took place and explains the production of basic documents that contain information about these processes. The basic channels through which documents were directed to central institutions and between local ones have been reconstructed. As a result, the basic archival collections on the problem under analysis have also been identified.