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Russia

Guide to Russia ancestry, family history and genealogy: parish registers, transcripts, census records, birth records, marriage records, and death records.

NOTE: If researching before 1918, see Russian Empire.

Information

Russia is a country in Eurasia bordered by Norway, Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Belarus, Ukraine, Georgia, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, China, Mongolia, and North Korea. It was known as the Soviet Union from 1922 to 1991. The official language is Russian.

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Jurisdictions

Imperial Russia (Russian Empire) before 1917 was divided into governorates (gubernias or provinces). These were sub-divided into several uyezds or districts. Russia and Ukraine and other former Soviet republics were, and are still, divided into oblasts/provinces which were and are divided into raions/districts. Peripheral areas like the Caucasus sometimes use krai instead of raion for district. It is generally good to know both the old and the new jurisdictions in which a smaller place is located, because currently the FamilySearch Catalog uses the new jurisdictions for Ukraine, but the old ones for Russia. Archives all over the former Soviet Union concentrate their holdings according to oblast borders. Old documents refer to the old jurisdictions, and most of our Russian and Ukrainian microfilms are from the old Imperial time.

List of the governorates created in 1708:

• Archangelgorod (Архангелогородская)
• Azov (Азовская)
• Ingermanland (Ингерманландская)
• Kazan (Казанская)
• Kiev (Киевская)
• Moscow (Московская)
• Siberia (Сибирская)
• Smolensk (Смоленская)

Current administrative division consist of 46 oblasts (oblastey, singular - oblast), 21 republics (respublik, singular - respublika), 4 autonomous okrugs (avtonomnykh okrugov, singular - avtonomnyy okrug), 9 krays (krayev, singular - kray), 2 federal cities (goroda, singular - gorod), and 1 autonomous oblast (avtonomnaya oblast') as follows.Although retaining a lot of similarities, administrative-territorial division and regions boundaries undergo substantial changes during the 20th century, affecting the records storage sites.

Oblasts

• Amur (Blagoveshchensk)
• Arkhangelsk
• Astrakhan'
• Belgorod
• Bryansk
• Chelyabinsk
• Irkutsk
• Ivanovo
• Kaliningrad
• Kaluga
• Kemerovo
• Kirov
• Kostroma
• Kurgan
• Kursk
• Leningrad
• Lipetsk
• Magadan
• Moscow
• Murmansk
• Nizhniy Novgorod
• Novgorod
• Novosibirsk
• Omsk
• Orenburg
• Orel
• Penza
• Pskov
• Rostov
• Ryazan'
• Sakhalin (Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk)
• Samara
• Saratov
• Smolensk
• Sverdlovsk (Yekaterinburg)
• Tambov
• Tomsk
• Tula
• Tver'
• Tyumen'
• Ul'yanovsk
• Vladimir
• Volgograd
• Vologda
• Voronezh
• Yaroslavl'

Republics

• Adygeya (Maykop)
• Altay (Gorno-Altaysk)
• Bashkortostan (Ufa)
• Buryatiya (Ulan-Ude)
• Chechnya (Groznyy)
• Chuvashiya (Cheboksary)
• Dagestan (Makhachkala)
• Ingushetiya (Magas)
• Kabardino-Balkariya (Nal'chik)
• Kalmykiya (Elista)
• Karachayevo-Cherkesiya (Cherkessk)
• Kareliya (Petrozavodsk)
• Khakasiya (Abakan)
• Komi (Syktyvkar)
• Mariy-El (Yoshkar-Ola)
• Mordoviya (Saransk)
• North Ossetia (Vladikavkaz)
• Sakha [Yakutiya] (Yakutsk)
• Tatarstan (Kazan')
• Tyva (Kyzyl)
• Udmurtiya (Izhevsk)

Autonomous Okrugs

• Chukotka (Anadyr')
• Khanty-Mansi (Khanty-Mansiysk)
• Nenets (Nar'yan-Mar)
• Yamalo-Nenets (Salekhard)

Krays

• Altay (Barnaul)
• Kamchatka (Petropavlovsk-Kamchatskiy)
• Khabarovsk
• Krasnodar
• Krasnoyarsk
• Perm'
• Primorsk (Vladivostok)
• Stavropol'
• Zabaykal'skiy (Chita)

Federal Cities

• Moscow (Moskva)
• Saint Petersburg (Sankt-Peterburg)

Autonomous Oblast

Yevrey [Jewish] (Birobidzhan) Note: Administrative divisions have the same names as their administrative centers (exceptions have the administrative center name following in parentheses)

References