Production and sale of handicraft toys by Russian Zemstvos

The activities of the zemstvo self-government bodies to support handicrafts occupied a special place in many territories of pre-revolutionary Russia. Through the creation of workshops for the production of handicrafts, special schools, creative associations, museums and connections with individual handicrafts, the zemstvo productively established the production of artisanal domestic toys. Individual zemstvos were actively engaged in advertising the toy, its sale both domestically and abroad through regional, Russian and European exhibitions. The organization of sales outlets and a specialized Moscow store, coordination of packaging and shipment of individual toys or their batches were also included in the scope of activity of the zemstvos. The subject of this study is the activity of Russian zemstvos in organizing the production and sale of handicraft toys in the second half of the XIX – early XX centuries. The main methodological foundations of this research are the principles of scientific objectivity, consistency and historicism. The center, of course, is the method of searching for archival documents, and a retrospective method of studying the activities of individual zemstvos in organizing training in the art of creating toys, its production and sale on domestic and foreign sites. During the research, the author discovered, analyzed and for the first time introduced into scientific circulation documents containing data on the organization of production and sale of handicraft toys by the zemstvo authorities, which were deposited in the fund of the Moscow Provincial Zemstvo (both in the cases of structural divisions of the zemstvo, the Handicraft Museum, and in individual cases of the county zemstvos of the Moscow province) and are stored in The Central State Historical Archive of Moscow (TSGIA of Moscow), various reports and indexes of handicraft, industrial and art exhibitions. Of course, the main centers of the appearance of handicraft toys, in the production and marketing of which the zemstvo participated, were the Moscow province with handicrafts from Sergiev Posad and S. Bogorodsky, Nizhny Novgorod, Vyatka, Tambov, Perm and Kazan provinces.

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