Farm lists and farm books of the 1920s-1940s as documents for the history of rural administration.

The subject of this study is household lists and household books from the 1920s to 1940s. The object of the research is defined as the characteristics and technologies for developing and introducing document forms for accounting residents and farms at the level of rural territories into the administrative activities of rural councils. The main aspects of the study included the characteristics and conditions for the emergence of household lists and household books in the system of rural administration during the initial establishment of local authorities, collectivization, and war. The starting chronological date was set for 1927, when household lists appeared in the rural management system, which were officially replaced by household books in 1935 by the government. The final date of the study was the end of the war and the transition to administration in the conditions of establishing peace. The main sources used by the author included government materials and books from the Ust-Nitsin rural council in the Sverdlovsk region, as well as other territories of Russia. The author employed special methods of document science and source studies: the method of unification and standardization of documents; the method of form analysis; the method of document value appraisal; the chronological method; and the method of source analysis. A main limitation of the study was the lack of digitized materials at the official level, which complicated the search, acquisition, and processing of materials. The scientific novelty of the research lies in the first-time chronological analysis of the conditions and characteristics of the development, filling, use, and storage of such document forms as household lists and household books in the system of rural administration during the 1920s and 1940s in the territory of the USSR. Household lists and books were a unique and primary historical source for the history of villages, rural cooperatives, collective farms, state farms, rural schools, hospitals, and other institutions, as even indirect data provide us with a clear understanding of: residents and workers, family structures (kinship composition, guest composition, generational composition, numerical composition, age composition, children and adults, family leadership), the transformation of families over the years, including aspects of historical events; names of collective and rural farms, positions, and other related information, which became evident during the study of the household books of the Ust-Nitsin rural council.