Discussions on the Organization of a Small Zemstvo Unit in the Russian Empire on the Basis of a Church Parish at the Turn of the 19th–20th Centuries

Alm . The purpose of the study is to identify the essence and content of discussions about the possibility of organizing a small zemstvo unit on the basis of an Orthodox parish in late Imperial Russia. Methodology . The research is based on the corpus of works by a number of Russian publicists of the late 19 th and early 20 th centuries, as well as on materials from periodicals and the writings of local committees of the Special Meeting on the Needs of the Agricultural Industry. The formulation of the problem led to the application of an interdisciplinary approach and an appeal to the historical and legal method. Results . The analysis allows us to conclude that the authors of the reviewed projects considered the Orthodox parish to be the most natural unit of self-government, in contrast to the parish. It was established that the proposed projects were based on the idea of uniting all parishioners, and therefore a number of projects lacked the requirement of a property qualification. Research implications . This study is the first to examine in detail the place of an Orthodox parish in the concepts of organization of a small zemstvo unit in late Imperial Russia.