Material World of Ekaterinburg Offices in the Mid-1730s (with Reference to the Premises of the Siberian Oberbergamt)

Abstract

This article studies the material world of the office of the Siberian Oberbergamt in the 1730s. It aims to reconstruct the interior and decoration of the building to understand the conditions in which the clerks of the authority were working, as well as to find out what ordinary people who came to the institution on a particular issue saw. The analysis of monographs and articles devoted to the problem under consideration makes it possible to conclude that there are practically no studies of this kind. More often, descriptions of administrative buildings can be found in works on the history of architecture and construction, less often one can see them in works characterising the activities of the authorities or extant buildings of government bodies. The study is based on the methods of classical primary source studies. The author refers to such primary sources as documentary materials resulting from the activities of the Siberian Regional Office and several other regional offices. First, these are inventories which were compiled when the territory or bodies of the court and/or administration were transferred from one head to another. As a result of the analysis of primary sources and historiography, the author concludes that the furniture and appearance of the Siberian Oberbergamt corresponded to the requirements for equipping the premises of state structures formulated in the General Regulations (1720). Unlike many voivodeship offices, the building of the Siberian Oberbergamt was constructed according to the samples and technologies used in St Petersburg. Despite this, its furnishings combined both the “traditional” elements of the decoration of central and regional administrative bodies of the seventeenth century (icons, benches instead of chairs, chests for storing documents) and innovations (mirrors and clocks).