Kazan. Kazan University Publishing House. 1982. 223 p. The monograph of Associate Professor of Kazan University, Doctor of Historical Sciences I. P. Ermolaev is devoted to the history of management of the Kazan region in the second half of the XVI-XVII century. But the book's problems are much broader. Having set as its immediate task to study the creation and activity of voivodeship administration in the Middle Volga - "Ponizovsky" - cities (mainly in Kazan), the author seeks to simultaneously highlight many issues of economic and political development, colonization and class struggle in the Middle Volga region, and connect them with the general problem of the formation of a multinational Russian state. I. P. Ermolaev writes that "the novelty of this work is that the author studies the complex socio-economic and political elements of Russia's development in the second half of the XVI-XVII centuries through the prism of state bodies and institutions of this time" (p. 5). In essence, the work consists of two parts: Three chapters (I, III and V) deal with social and political history and the history of class struggle in the Middle Volga region in the XVI-XVII centuries, while the other three (II, IV, VI) are devoted to the main topic-the study of the formation and activity of voivodeship authorities in the Middle Volga cities, as well as the Order of the Kazan Palace as the central a government agency in charge of the Middle Volga region. The book has an extensive source base: the sections on local government are dominated by archival material; the political struggle, especially in the middle of the 17th century, is covered to a greater extent by documentary publications and literature. The sections of the book that characterize the socio-political situation of the Middle Volga region in the first decades after the conquest of Kazan are of decisive importance for the entire research. In the 50s of the XVI century, such a vast territory with a multi-ethnic and predomin ... Читать далее