Lithuanian State Historical Archives

The Keggi-Berzins grant helped me discover the riches of the Lithuanian State Historical Archives (LVIA) and change the direction of my dissertation in a significant way. My research concentrates on the debt of the Polish nobility and the way it structured the imperial relationship between the Russian Empire and the territories of the former Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, in the post-Napoleonic era.  In LVIA, I was lucky to stumble upon extremely detailed and vivid stories from the Lithuanian magnate families such as the Radziwills and the Lubeckis as well as valuable data on the economy of the noble estates.  The breadth and depth of the material convinced me that the best way to proceed was to concentrate on a more micro-historical analysis of fewer but more in-depth cases. The material I collected this June in Vilnius is most helpful for this new direction. 

I looked at hundreds of individual cases, but the numbers in the archive are in the thousands and therefore in due course I will travel to Vilnius again. The concentration of this rich material allows me to creatively narrow down the focus on a my dissertation and simultaneously allows me to draw from a large number of themes in order to illuminate the legal and economic complexities of the incorporation of these territories into the Russian Empire. The files of the Lithuanian magnates are numbered in the hundreds of thousands and are dispersed among archives in Belarus, Poland, Lithuania, Ukraine, and Germany. I do not have access to Belarus at this stage, but I am building on my work in the other countries whose materials are available to me. Currently, the bulk of my research is taking place in Warsaw and my summer in Lithuanian proves very helpful. Gaps in the stories that I had collected in the past or new ones that I am finding now are being filled through the material I collected at LVIA.