The reform of public administration in the cities of Volyn province on the basis of the city regulations of 1892.

The purpose of the study: The purpose of the study is to analyze the consequences of the urban reform of 1892 in Volyn province in the context of the elections to the Lutsk City Council in 1894 and subsequent years.          Research methodology. The study uses a set of principles, approaches and methods of cognition determined by the specifics of the research problem. They are based on the universal scientific principles of objectivity, historicism, comprehensiveness, systematicity and complexity. The article uses problematic and chronological, political and legal, biographical, retrospective, and other methods.          The scientific novelty. The reorganization of municipal public administration in Volyn falls within the period of the “great reforms” associated with the enactment of the city regulations of 1870 and 1892, the implementation of which, unlike in other provinces, had its own specifics. Within the boundaries of the Volyn province, the urban reform started later than in the Kyiv or Podil provinces, as a preventive measure of the central government against the perceived regional separatism of the Volyn nobility. However, studying the process of the elections to the Lutsk City Duma at the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th centuries remains practically outside the attention of researchers.          Conclusions. The socio-political direction of the reform of 1892 was to change the social composition of the city administration apparatus, to reduce the range of powers of the city public administration bodies, while at the same time strengthening the rights of the provincial administration. The new law was intended to weaken the position of the merchants, commercial and industrial bourgeoisie and to increase the role of the nobility as the social support of tsarism. Instead, the increase in the specific weight of large real estate owners in cities contributed to the fact that the number of vocal intellectual professions − persons with secondary and higher education − also increased, which, in the conditions of the growth of social and revolutionary uplift, could not but affect the opposition of city councils to the central government.