ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the documents in principle and looks at the ways in which they were used in practice. Documents came to play a central role in the process of identifying and absorbing migrants, one important to St. Petersburg, to localities, and to individuals. Estate status also associated individuals with a specific geographical space and a specific community: nobles were members of provincial and district noble societies, peasants of village societies, and townspeople and merchants of separate estate-based societies in their towns. It was those estate societies that produced the documents that structured individual lives. These local societies, therefore, played a dual role, simultaneously acting as representatives of imperial authority and governance, and responding to the needs and demands of their local populations. The records of the multiple estate administrations in St. Petersburg capture migration and mobility in a number of ways.
