The project focuses on a professional group of attorneys in a boundary region of Sloboda Ukraine during the period when the local Ukrainian Cossack traditions were broken and the imperial Russian bureaucratic mechanisms were introduced instead (1730s-1830s). The goal is to examine the personal composition, social origins and career trajectories of the attorneys, as well as to analyse their strategies in court and in civil affairs. The profile of the clients is to be reconstructed too. Special attention will be drawn to that time juridical procedures (investigations, interrogations, court hearings and appeals). The methodology includes methods of social history, microhistory, history of everyday life, textual analysis and deconstruction. The project will be conducted on the broad basis of the archival sources explored in the Central State Historical Archive of Ukraine in Kyiv.

A full-length study is available here.