Tasks of zemsky self-government bodies (March – October 1917) and ways to solve them

Background. In the context of the need to involve citizens in solving the prob lems of local self-government, there is a need to study the experience of solving problems by zemstvo councils, how local governments at the stage of the Russian revolution of 1917. An assessment is given of the manifestations and consequences of the unprecedented reor ganization of zemstvo councils in the form of an exacerbation of inter-party disagreements and the impossibility of implementing a huge number of tasks that were assigned by the state to zemstvo self-government bodies. The purpose of the work is to study the manifesta tions and results of the process of reforming zemstvo self-government in revolutionary Russia. Materials and methods. The implementation of research tasks was achieved on the basis of the use of articles of the journal “Zemskoe Delo” which was published under the editorship of prominent theorists and practitioners of local self-government of pre revolutionary Russia – Boris Borisovich Veselovsky (1880–1954) and Dmitry Dmitrievich Protopopov (1865–1934) in St. Petersburg (Petrograd) in 1909–1918. Methodological po tential includes: a relatively historical method, the use of which allows you to compare the methods of resolving various tasks by zemstvo administrations. Conclusions. An assess ment is given of the manifestations and consequences of the unprecedented reorganization of zemstvo administrations in the form of aggravation of inter-party disagreements and the impossibility of implementing a huge number of tasks that were assigned by the state to the zemstvo self-government bodies at one of the turning points in the history of Russian state hood. The study of the process of reforming zemstvo self-government in revolutionary Rus sia makes it possible to understand the facts of the impossibility of turning zemstvo admin istrations into full-fledged local government bodies, which was originally planned. The au thor concluded that the projects of the Provisional Government itself to turn zemstvos into schools of local self-government in the Russian province did not find their implementation, both because of the weak interest in the problems of self-government in Russian society, expressed in the growing apathy, and because of acute social class disagreements that arose when discussing any problems of local life.