„Privilegiaţii” – boiernașii, mazilii, ruptaşii, ruptele şi negustorii – în sursele documentare de epocă [Articol]

Abstract

The „privileged” – boiernaşi, mazils, ruptaş and traders – in documentary sources of the time. In this communication, the author discusses the problem of the privileged categories of the population of Bessarabia in the first half of the 19th century – boiernaşi, mazils, ruptaşi, ruptas and merchants – reflected in the documentary sources of the time, coming to the conclusion that the success of any scientific investigation is conditioned by several factors, one of which is the presence of unpublished documents of the time, put into the scientific circuit and the way of interpreting them. The analysis of the privileged social categories of the population of Bessarabia in the 19th century requires the use of the most diverse and varied historical sources, which the author has divided into documentary nd narrative sources. The documentary sources analyzed in this presentation have been conventionally divided into the following groups: 1. official government documents; 2. unpublished archival documents or special funds; and 3. various materials from the periodical press. The first group of sources includes numerous laws and edicts issued in the first half of the 19th century by various government institutions, published in different collections of documents from different periods, which contain a rather rich, varied and valuable material reflecting the tsarist policy in the field of administration, agrarian relations, land use etc., as well as various documents related to the Tsarist social and fiscal policy: decisions on the regulation of social relations, the adoption of various reliefs and privileges for various categories of the population, attempts to solve various social problems, including the peasant problem, certain provisions on the organization of the guild system and the granting of various reliefs and privileges to merchants etc. The importance of these documents lies in the fact that the records published in these collections allow us to get to the very essence of the problem, to understand and orient ourselves in the diversity of views and opinions within the imperial and regional circles on issues related to the social and fiscal policy of Tsarism in Bessarabia, to argue the different views and opinions of representatives of the regional administration, departments and central institutions. The archival documents, mainly unpublished ones, which represent the second group of sources, are distinguished by their size, specific nature and informative value and contain varied and valuable data on population censuses as a whole (1817) and tax censuses in particular (1824, 1835, 1850, 1858-1859) on various decisions taken by the regional and imperial administration concerning different social cate- gories, including the privileged ones, various statistics for different years, compiled by regional institutions at the insistence of the imperial administration and containing valuable information on population dynamics by county/county and locality, social composition, in some cases ethnic composition, taxation, religious status, legal status, wealth, land ownership etc. These documents, as well as the statistics compiled by various institutions for different occasions and purposes, reveal important aspects of the situation in the province, such as demographic trends, population density and mobility, social and ethnic affiliation, taxation, the material status of the inhabitants, the distribution of obligations and privileges, the share, social and legal status of the various social, ethnic or confessional groups, onomastics, etc. All these documentary sources will enable us to solve the scientific problem of the privileged social categories, to understand more deeply and clearly the social changes that took place in Bessarabia during the Tsarist regime, and to research, on the basis of modern methods, emphasizing general human concepts, the problems related to the metamorphoses that took place in the Bessarabian village and town during this period of time, the privileged social categories – the boiernaşi, the mazils, the ruptaşi, the ruptas and the merchants – being the focus of the investigation.