The Judiciary of the Right-Bank Ukraine (the End of 18th – the First Third of the 19th Century) in Memoir Literature

Abstract

Abstract. The purpose of the article is to determine the conditions of functioning of the judiciary of the Right-Bank Ukraine during the imperial policy of seeking compromises with the gentry for the sake of establishing itself in a socio-ethnically complex border region in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The methodology of the research is based on a combination of general scientific (analysis, synthesis, generalization) and special historical (historical-genetic, historical-systemic, historical-typological) methods with the principles of historicism, systematicity, and scientificity, which allowed us to focus on assessing the position of judicial structures in the memoirs of visiting officials and local gentry. The prosopographical method made it possible to study the personalities of memoirists and individual court officials in the aggregate of their individual qualities and relationships with others. Scientific novelty of the work lies in the study of the activities of the judicial structures of the right-bank provinces in the context of the imperial policy of granting concessions to the local elite in the memoirs of visiting Russian officials and representatives of the local gentry. Certain provisions set forth in the memoirs are confirmed / refuted based on the use of a set of published and archival sources. Conclusions. The judiciary was not properly reflected in the memoirs and assessments of contemporaries. To increase their appeal, memoirists focused more on describing private life, and court cases, by and large, seemed uninteresting, confusing, and perhaps not always fairly resolved to the authors. For visiting Russian officials, it was important to show the negative side of the Rzeczpospolita judicial procedure to embellish the imperial judiciary; they did not always understand the intricacies of imperial policy and the peculiarities of the functioning of the judiciary in the region. Local memoirists mostly did not delve into judicial procedures, not wanting to show dissatisfaction with the work of institutions, which would undermine the authority of the local gentry. Their focus was on judicial officials. The authors' assessments differ, but they make it possible to understand the importance of holding elected positions for nobility, the social capital they acquired, and the struggle for power between parties. E. Felinska understood the devastating consequences of the interference of the imperial authorities in local judicial proceedings, which led to the removal of the nobility from the judiciary. The study of memoirs and assessments allows us to "feel the era" and understand that in everyday life there was a demand for social stability and a sense of security, which could not be achieved without an effective judiciary.