The agrarian question in the activity of the provincial nobility liberal front of northern Ukraine (80th ХІХ с.)

Abstract

The aim of the article is to introduce into international scientific circulation "Journals of Congresses of Farmers of Chernihiv Province" - an important source on the history of the Zemstvo liberal movement in northern Left Bank Ukraine.The methodological basis of the work was content analysis, principles of scientific synthesis, generalization and comprehensiveness. The scientific novelty of the work is that, in fact, for the first time in historiography, the question of the urgent need to study the agrarian question in the activities of the provincial nobility Liberal Party of Northern Ukraine as an organic and integral part of economic policy of this political current in the liberation movement of the Russian Empire Reforms Conclusions. The author of the article came to the conclusion that the found "Journals of Congresses of Farmers of the Chernihiv Province" reveal the essence of the agrarian policy of the opposition aristocratic front of the region. Content analysis of magazine protocols shows that congresses of farmers, in the conditions of extremely short liberalization of public life of the Russian Empire in the early 80s of the XIX century, became an effective tool in forming the foundations of agrarian policy and economic programs of the provincial nobility Liberal Party of Northern Ukraine. The agrarian question occupied, though not the leading, but a proper place in the coordinate system of the economic program of provincial nobility liberalism. It should be acknowledged that the opposition aristocratic front of the region before the provincial nobility counter-reform of 1890 considered it premature to pose the problem of fundamental modernization of the agrarian system of the Russian Empire: both because of the policy of industrial protectionism of the supreme power, and because of the financial incompleteness of the peasant reform of Olexander II.