Documentary materials on the Lithuanian tatars in collections of the National historical archive of Belarus in Grodno (2nd–4th decades of the 19th century)

Abstract

The article is devoted to the possibilities of the documentary materials that are poorly known among scientific society but, on the other hand, they do reflect the social and legal standing of Polish and Lithuanian Tatars in the Russian Empire in the 2nd–4th decades of the 19th century. The main purpose of the research was to introduce into transaction scientifical manuscripts gathered in the city of Grodno National Belarus Historical Archives’s funds. All the work that refers to the preparation of documents’ texts for publication was implemented by their transcription, scientific and archaeographic elaboration (composing the titles, legends, notes and dating of manuscripts if necessary) and textological work based on xerocopies that were passed to the Head Archive Office attached to the Cabinet Council of the Republic of Tatarstan by the State Committee of Archives Clerical Correspondence of the Republic of Belarus. Six documents in the Russian language, composed in 1817–1838, became the main point of consideration. As for specific association, all of them turn up to be record keeping materials of three types: 1) authority correspondence; 2) internal documents; 3) deprecatory documents.
The first type is represented by four documents: 1) a report of civil servants of Tatar origin superscript to the Grodno district leader of nobility Carl Mikhailovich Borzhevsky (?), composed on the 2nd of March 1832; 2) the Grodno governor’s recommendation sent to the military governor of Vilnius on the 6th of May 1832 on the Tatar population, its rights, privileges, duties, and occupation; 3) a letter about Lithuanian Tatars, which was also written before the 6th of May 1832 by Ivan Tugan-Baranovski; 4) the report by the chairman of the Fiscal Office to the civil governor of Grodno, dated the 4th of July 1838.
We can also include into the second group two so-called “lists” of Tatars of the towns of Slonim, Zdzentsele, and Molchazd of the Slonim district, which emerged before the 6th of May 1832. A deprecatory document dated 1817 of the assessor of the Grodno county’s civil lower territorial court, Ivan Tugan-Baranovski, refers to the third group.
The informational value of these materials, which are published for the first time, is primarily defined by the reflection of Tatars’ social and legal standing in the hierarchic structure of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth and the Russian state and also their content of retrospective information about the rights, privileges as well as directions of the Tsar government and decrees of the Governing Senate given to this social category.
Secondly, the source value of these documents lies in the fact that they do reflect a new phase in the history of Lithuanian Tatars – their inclusion or introduction into the social and legal field of the Russian Empire. These documents also allow us to judge about the Tsar government policy features and about the fact that Russian laws had a legal relationship with this category of population. They do help to introspect the “conflict” in the legal sphere that had emerged in the first decade of the 19th century and its constructive solution in the fourth decade of the same century. Finally, these documents give information about mental features of Lithuanian Tatars.