The preparation and implementation of the inventory reform in the provinces, the territory of which was ceded to Russia under the third partition of Poland in 1797, served as prerequisites for the abolition of serfdom in the empire in 1861. The inventory reform that started in the mid-1840s was more successfully implemented in the South-Western Territory (SWK). But in the North-Western Territory (SZK), the reform was eventually postponed due to the differences in the order of compiling inventories and carried out already under Alexander II. In the South- Western Territory the inventories of individual estates were compiled based on the general norms fixed in the decrees of the Governor-General D.G. Bibikov and the Minister of Internal Affairs L.A. Perovsky. And the distinctive feature in the SZK was compilation of inventories for each individual estate, which greatly delayed the reform process. Nevertheless, it was precisely with the “initiative” of the SZK nobility that the public discussion of the conditions for peasant liberation began.
Irina Vladimirovna Ruzhitskaya (Mon,) studied this question.