Territorial Aspects of Parish System Formation in Barnaul Spiritual Government's Rural Parishes (the Second Half of the 18th — Early 19th Centuries)

Abstract

This article examines the issues of the rural parish’s system formation of the Barnaul Spiritual Government (BSG) of the second half in the 18th — early 19th centuries. The work is aimed at studying the number and composition of settlements (constituent parts of parishes), the allocation of borders and the construction of parish territories.
 It is concluded that the network of the BSG rural parishes was formed by the end of the 1780s. According to the data for 1755, there were 157 villages in seven rural parishes (64.9% of the total number of BSG settlements). In 1820, with the maximum number of rural parishes (13) as well as the Spiritual Board as a whole (23), the figures increased to 536 (68.7%). By the end of the study period, after reducing the number of BSG rural parishes to seven, there were 316 settlements in their composition (58% of the total number of BSG settlements). Communities with the largest concentration of settlements stand out among rural parishes. These are, for example, such parishes with centers in the Beloyarskaya Sloboda and the Genghis village (numbering about 100 villages in their composition). Territorially small church units also existed in the BSG. The leading position in terms of the growth rate of the villages number was occupied by the Petropavlovsk parish of Genghis village: from 1755 to 1820 the indicators increased 9 times. Most of the BSG rural parishes were formed at the expense of the village population. The presence of settlements with the status of military fortifications was recorded by sources in two parishes. They belonged to the Kolyvan-Kuznetsk military line.