"Instruction estates" in the territories of the former Grand Duchy of Lithuania

The so-called ‘instruction estates’ were created in the western lands of the Russian Empire as a result of the ‘Instruction on the Rules of Sale of the State Lands in the Western Gubernias by People of Russian Origin in Service there or Wanting to Permanently Settle in These Gubernias’, issued by the Ministry of State Domains, which came into force on 23 July 1865. Landed estates selected for sale belonged to the State Treasury and in part were confiscated from participants of the January Uprising. ‘Instruction estates’ were sold at very low prices as awards for Russian civilian and military officials who were serving in the Western Gubernias and had specially contributed to the suppression of the January Uprising of 1863–1864. The problem of the genesis and development of this type of property in the Northwestern province did not attract the special attention of historians in the period of the partitions or in the interwar period. Usually, both the Instruction of 23 July 1865 and estates sold under its regulations were mentioned succinctly, in the context of the policy of Russification pursued by the Tsarist authorities after the fall of the January Uprising. The term of ‘instruction estates’ appeared in the works by, among others, Stanisław Krzemiński, Adolf Suligowski, Józef Kaczkowski, and Franciszek Rawita Gawroński. Only the publication of Wacław Schmidt (1922) on Russian landed properties in three Western Gubernias: of Minsk, Vil’na (Vilnius) and Grodno (Hrodna), is an invaluable source of information about the structure, area, number, and first owners of the estates sold under the Instruction of 1865 in these three governorates. As much as Schmidt’s study presented a statistical, cross-sectional analysis of the ‘instruction estates’, an article by Jerzy Szumski entitled ‘Instruction estates in the District of Sokółka in 1867–1914. Legal and ownership problems’ (1988), focuses on the development of the ‘instruction landed properties’ in the District of Sokółka. Apart from this study, in the post-war literature on the subject the Instruction itself and its legal and ownership consequences were of little interest to, among others, Marcin Drewicz, Stanisław Wiech, or Bogusław Gałka. The purpose of further research into the so-called ‘instruction properties’ is to fill in the gaps in the present knowledge about the subject and to put forward new hypotheses on the development of this type of landed property in the western parts of the Grodno Gubernia. Further study of Russian private properties will enrich and complement the current knowledge about the policy of Russification pursued by Russia towards Polish landowners