The paper presents the results of the retrospective study of the border region of Russia in the 15th — 17th centuries based on a set of written sources and the geoinformation technologies using the example of the city of Belaya with its volosts, located on the Russian-Lithuanian border in the 14th — 17th centuries. Based on scribal books of the 17th century and act material of the 16th — 17th centuries, the mapping was performed, and a spatial analysis of the administrative-territorial division, land ownership and rural settlement was carried out. The study showed that the initially relatively small territory of the volosts of Belaya on the watershed of the great rivers of Eastern Europe — the Volga, Dnieper and Western Dvina — underwent significant changes in size and internal structure. Repeated additions to Belaya increased the territory related to the city. The land distributions of both the Lithuanian and Moscow periods led to multiple transformations of the volost structure, which included changes not only in borders, but also in names. At the same time, еру land policy influenced the development of the settlement structure, facilitating the emergence of new settlement centers. The assessment of population indicators showed a slow development of the territory, demonstrating low indicators even in the second half of the 17th century. The boundaries of the volosts were lost in the vast forest and wetland areas on the periphery. The example of the Belsky district shows the comparative instability of the administrative borders of the peripheral region. The obvious variability of the volost composition, associated with both the formation of land ownership and economic development of the territory, and the change in political status, combined with the continuity of a number of land holdings. This can be traced between the estates of the russian nobility of the second half of the 16th — early 17th centuries and the estates of the polish nobility (shlyakhta) in both the first and second half of the 17th century. The data obtained significantly supplement the concept about the historical geography of the Russian borderland.
Iuliia Stepanova (Wed,) studied this question.