Municipal Self-government of Dnipro Ukraine if the Last Quarter of the 18th - Early 20th Century in the Historical Discourse of the Empire Era

Abstract

The extent of scientific development of the history of municipal self-government in Dnipro Ukraine of the last quarter of the 18th – early 20th century has been analyzed. An essential condition for the establishment of civil society in Ukraine is effective local self-government. Municipal self-government plays a key role as one of its subjects in today's urban world. It has been determined that the historiography of this problem is represented by a considerable historiographic massif. During the imperial era, many scientific and popular educational works of local, reference and historical, and journalistic nature were accumulated. They presented the problems of the history of municipal self-government with different levels of completeness. It was found out that in the centre of attention of scientists, first of all historians and jurists, were various issues of history of creation, formation and activity of municipal self-government, reasons of changes of legislative acts concerning self-governing institutions, relations of municipal government with state authorities, the main of which were in the sphere of power distribution. It was found that a specific feature of the first chronological stage was the dominance of the formal legal approach and a constricted source base of research. That did not allow authors to go beyond comments and descriptions of legislative acts. A characteristic feature of the research approach of the authors of works on the history of municipal self-government of the second and third stages is, firstly, the predominance of legal and specific-historical approaches to the coverage of the topic. Secondly, there was certain ambiguity and fuzziness of conceptual and categorical apparatus which conditioned insufficient depth of theoretical analysis of the problem. At the same time, scholars of the imperial era laid a solid scientific foundation for the study of this institution by modern authors.

Keywords

• historiography
• dnipro ukraine
• city self-government
• state power
• russian empire