Ensuring Fire Safety at Industrial Facilities in accordance with the Legislation of the Russian Empire in the 19th — beginning of the 20th century

An attempt to generalize and systematize the practices of regulatory management to ensure fire safety at industrial facilities during the period of active development of industrial production in Russia from the 19th — to the beginning of the 20th century has been made. The role of technical and legal norms in the system of management of such relationships that must ensure the necessary specification of firefighting requirements has been marked. Based on the analysis of a significant amount of historical and legal documents, a classification of regulatory provisions determining fire safety requirements at industrial facilities by the criteria of their action, i.e., general, specific, or industrial, is proposed. The codification of the Russian legislation carried out in the first half of the 19th century did not result in the systematization of fire safety rules at industrial facilities. The basic industrial laws contained mainly blanket or referential norms as to the firefighting requirements at industrial facilities; their abstract stipulation required a specification, considering the peculiarities of production activities. Therefore, a significant amount of the respective technical and legal norms was implemented in various rules and instructions determining procedures of certain types of jobs. The analysis of such documents helped to determine the main fields of fire safety legal management: requirements for the elimination of circumstances directly conditioning the occurrence of uncontrolled combustion; regulatory provisions aiming to provide conditions for efficient localization and elimination of fires; rules to ensure evacuation of personnel to safe locations; requirements to minimize adverse consequences and potential ignition during process operations at production. The specification of legal management allowed for the development of mechanisms to protect the rights of employees by formulating a measure of work behavior for all participants of such violations, including owners of plants of factories, to ensure fire safety. The necessity of further investigation of legal management practices of a given period as well as fields and methods of systematization of multiple fire safety requirements that can help to identify vectors for the improvement of the contemporary legislation system as to ensuring fire safety in industrial facilities is under substantiation.