Reports of the Minister of Education P. Zavadovsky as a source of the history of the Ministry

This article analyses Count P.V. Zavadovsky’s policy as Minister of Education in the Russian Empire in the early 19th century. The aim is to evaluate Zavadovsky’s contribution to the formation of the system of public education and his role in increasing the number of educational institutions. The task of the minister was not only to promote the transformation of gymnasiums, provincial schools and parish schools according to a new plan and try to increase the number of educated people in the country, but also to be in charge of the reasonable spending of state funds allocated to educational institutions. The article shows the stages of Zavadovsky’s civil service, his great administrative experience in the fi eld of education, which impelled Emperor Alexander I to appoint Zavadovsky head of the recently established Ministry of Education. The author of the article has revealed a full set of the minister’s reports to His Imperial Majesty, a signifi cant part of which is being made public for the fi rst time. The reports consisted of the minister’s presentations to the emperor and a large number of documents that refl ected the main activities of the ministry over the past year. In addition to his signifi cant success, Zavadovsky also mentioned the diffi culties that had to be faced in the process of the educational reform. The article pays special attention to the activities of the Committee for the inspection of reports to His Imperial Majesty, which examined in detail the documents submitted by the minister to the emperor. The conclusion of the article is that Zavadovsky’s yearly reports to His Imperial Majesty allow us to study in detail the stages of the activity of the Ministry of Education in the first years of its existence, during which the minister played a key role