"Prameny k nevolnickemu povstani v Cechach a na Merave v roce 1775". Praha. "Academia". 1975. 890 s.

The uprising of 1775 in the Czech Republic is one of the largest peasant revolts in Europe during the transition from the feudal formation to the capitalist one. It had a huge impact on the subsequent Czech history, accelerated the reforms that legally formalized the elimination of personal dependence of peasants in the Habsburg monarchy.

By its nature, the uprising of 1775 differs from a number of previous class revolts, including major ones, in the Czech Republic. The main features of the insurrection were revealed in its first phase, which began-after extensive preliminary agitation - with a corvee strike over a large area and demonstrations outside the panhandle (local) chancelleries. These actions were led by village elders and other influential people of the village. The peasants set themselves the goal of eliminating the corvee system. This is the main feature of the uprising: all the actions that had taken place before were aimed only at limiting corvee exploitation. In the course of the insurrection, the activity of the masses of the people increased considerably, and they did not confine themselves to demonstrations, but created detachments that, passing from the panstvo (estate) to the panstvo, turned the strike into a movement for the complete abolition of corvee. The peasants heard rumors that the emperor had already issued a patent. From this it was concluded that the local feudal lords do not want to fulfill the emperor's will only because of their malice, and therefore it is necessary to obtain the text of the patent from the emperor's own hands and present it to the lords.

It was for this purpose that numerous columns of rural subjects moved to Prague. During the march on Prague, which began between March 20 and 24, 1775, a new tactic was applied. The main forces of the peasants were divided into detachments marching along different roads in order to cover as much territory as possible and quickly receive reinforcements. To participate in the campaign, one representative was mobilized from each yard in all the villages through which the detachments passed. In front of the pans ' residences and towns, the detachments joined up. The development of such tactics was not the work of any one leader: the people at the head of the units changed, but the system remained the same. It is clear that it was developed by the masses of the people. The organization of marching demonstrations and elements of revolutionary tactics were a new phenomenon in the history of peasant movements.

Government forces were deployed against the rebels. The detachment that approached Prague was completely defeated, and local demonstrations were suppressed by armed forces. The second phase of the uprising - in the summer of 1775-took place mainly in traditional forms - refusal of corvee and obedience to feudal lords in general, spontaneous attacks on estates, etc. But the uprising was so massive (it covered the whole of the Czech Republic and Moravia) that the government, having issued a corvee patent in August 1775, made great concessions, but and it did not completely destroy the corvee. The war hastened the complete elimination of the personal dependence of the peasants, which was formalized legally in 1781. People's revolutionaries are widely promoted in Czechoslovakia.

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revolutionary traditions of the uprising, and in 1975 its bicentennial was celebrated.

In fact, only Czechoslovak Marxist scholars have begun to study the history of the peasant uprising of 1775 in recent times .1 In 1964, at the initiative of a major specialist in Czech history, Professor V. Husa, a research group was created at Charles University to find and study sources about the uprising. In 1975, the results of many years of activity of the collective (which naturally changed and expanded) were summed up by publishing a peer-reviewed volume. The main work on its preparation was performed by M. Tegel, J. Petran and I. Obrshlik. Scientific editing was carried out by y. Kochi.

The volume includes the most important sources about the uprising, stored in almost three dozen state and local archives and other repositories in the Czech Republic and Moravia. Some materials are borrowed from the archives of Vienna. The publication also reflects responses to the uprising outside the Czech lands, and contains materials from the archives of Paris, Dresden, Merseburg and Munich. In total, the book contains 1,906 documents arranged in chronological order. The location is based on the date of the event being described (not the origin of the source). The selection of sources was determined by the richness of the information contained in them.

From the point of view of completeness of reproduction, published documents can be divided into three categories. Some of the texts are published in full (only introductory titles and final formulas are omitted). These are the most important orders of the emperor and central state bodies: rescripts, decrees, patents that were not previously published .2 The full list includes documents of a military nature drawn up in higher instances - general reports on the situation in the country and operational plans, as well as some materials published by local authorities that supplement information about the course of the uprising, and individual entries in local chronicles. In a number of cases, publishers have rejected the shortened presentation of documents, considering themselves not entitled to change their language and style and fearing that the position of their authors is not quite correctly conveyed.

All listed documents are published in the original language, with the date of compilation indicated. If the original version was available in two languages, the primary version was published. Each document is provided with a brief introductory description, followed by the storage location. As an example of a complete publication, we can cite the description of the course of the uprising in the panstvos of Brom and Politsa, compiled by the official of the chancellery of these panstvos Mikulas Patz (doc. N 12, pp. 26-33); an entry in the chronicle of Gorzhits about the uprising in the Gorzhitsky panstvos (doc. N 51, pp. 50-56); a report from the manager of the panstvos Psherov nad Laba on the course of the uprising of March 22-24, 1775 (doc. N 137, pp. 108-110); excerpts from the diary of J. F. Opits, testifying to the course of the uprising and measures to suppress it (doc. NN 193, 198, 270, etc.). Opits was the secretary and librarian of the " highest purkrabiya", that is, the imperial viceroy in the Czech Republic, Prince Furstenberg.

The second method of publication is a detailed or brief presentation of the content of the document, depending on the importance of the information, carried out, of course, in modern Czech, but in many cases with quotations from the original. This is how, for example, the information provided to Countess S. Waldstein by Count W. Waldshtein's secretary, I. F. Boehm, is set out; the document, among other things, states that the rebels near Prague are waiting for reinforcements from 6 thousand German peasants (doc. N 362, p.361).

Finally, the third way to approach publication is to briefly identify the nature, place, and time of origin of the document and present the content in a few lines. This principle is used in relation to stereotypical sources (for example, circulars of local authorities, doc. NN 453, 454, 460, etc.) or evidence previously published. Example: report of the Russian Ambassador in Vienna D. M. Golitsyn to the Minister N. I. Panin on the events of 1775 in the Czech Republic, already published earlier (doc. N 1905, p. 819) 3 .

1 Most recent work: J. Petran. Nevolnicke povstani 1775. Praha. (1973) "Acta Uni-versitatis Carolinae". Philosophica et Historica. Monographia XLII, 1972. See also L. P. Laptev. The Uprising of 1775 in the Czech Republic and Moravia. "Yearbook on the agrarian history of Eastern Europe for 1965", Moscow, 1970.

2 A number of documents of this type (but not those included in the publication) were published earlier in well-known publications, for example, in Archiv Cesky, sv. XXIV (1908).

3 For an earlier publication, see: J. Vavra. Protifeudalni povstani sedmdesa-

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The original documents about the uprising of 1775 are written in different languages. All official correspondence between institutions and officials was conducted in German. In descriptive sources of ecclesiastical origin, Latin prevails, while German and Czech are less common. In Czech, there are city and community chronicles, entries in city books, letters and memoirs of peasants. In parallel, State patents and important orders were issued in Czech and German in a typographic way. In official documents, the Czech language is used when it comes to contacts with peasants (for example, interrogation protocols).

The main materials that inform about the uprising in Moravia are official documents that make up the archive of the Moravian Viceroyalty (province) and the archive of the Extraordinary Court, created in July 1775 to deal with the rebels. These are primarily documents of legal proceedings; there are also funds of regional and other local administrative institutions and owners of individual estates. The peculiarity of storing all these materials is that their originals are concentrated in one place, namely, in the State Archive of Moravia (Brno). This makes their use easier to this day: therefore, the main sources about the uprising in Moravia have already entered scientific use earlier - in the preparation of general essays, 4 as well as in studies on the history of individual panstvs5 . In the Czech Republic, the documents of the Extraordinary Court created by the decree of Maria Theresa of March 30, 1775, have not been preserved. Like the papers of the Czech Viceroyalty, they were destroyed as "unnecessary" in the 19th century, even before historians became interested in them. Many documents of the joint Czech-Austrian chancellery in Vienna were burned during the fire of the Vienna State Archives in 1927. The lack of information about the activities of the Czech Zemstvo province during the uprising is partly compensated by the diary of J. F. Opitz, who recorded all the speeches at the meetings of the province, including Furstenberg's speeches, and drew the prevailing situation there.

Unlike sources about the Moravian uprising, documents relating to events in the Czech Republic are often descriptive in nature. These are memoirs and chronicles written by various people (townspeople, cantors, priests). A unique source for the history of the uprising in the Czech Republic are works of folk literature - poems, songs, plays and even one opera, which appeared in 1775 or later as a response to past events. A special group of materials consists of statements that record losses incurred by landlords, as well as expenses related to the suppression of the uprising (maintenance of troops, court costs, maintenance of prisoners (see, for example, doc. NN 291-294, pp. 182-189). Scattered throughout many archives, documents about the Czech uprising have not yet been fully put into scientific circulation .6
Sources about the uprising of 1775 have a pronounced class orientation. Most of them strongly condemn the rebels. Instructions, appeals, and memoirs of peasants come from the rebel camp, which have been preserved only in exceptional cases and are often known only by descriptions. The authors of local chronicles (townspeople, priests) often sympathized with the situation of oppressed peasants, emphasized the severity of corvee duties and believed that the reason for the speech was the oppression of rural people. But they also condemned the methods of struggle of the peasants and the uprising as a whole. The same views were held by the authors of poems and dramatic works about the events of 1775.

The publication is provided with two indexes - named and geographical. The latter section contains German, Czech (18th-century and modern) names of geographical points. From the language point of view, the publication

tych let 18. stoleti v ceskych zemich a v Rus-ku ve svetle diplomatickych relaci a soudobe-ho tisku. "Acta Universitatis Carolinae", 1961, Philosophica et Historica 3.

4 See, for example: J. Fiser. Selske nepokoje na Morave r. 1775. "Casopis pro dejiny ven-kova", XXII, 1935, ss. 49 - 64, 107 - 127, 155 - 171.

5 J. Novacek. Protirobotni nepokoje v Bochovicich v cervenci r. 1775. "Vlastivedny sbornik Vysociny", 1956, ss. 173 - 174; J. Malek. Selske boufe na Telcsku v roce 1775. "Sbornik Matice Moravske", sv. 82, 1963, ss. 149 - 154.

6 In addition to the already mentioned monograph by I. Petranj, which is a kind of introductory volume to this publication, historians of Charles University published three more collections of articles about the uprising: "Prispevky k dejinam tridnich boju v Cechach", I. Praha. 1955; II. Praha. 1962; " Prispevky k dejinam rolnickych hnuti v 18. stoleti". Praha. 1969.

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carried out in accordance with the rules developed at the XVII Congress of German Historians in 1930. As for typefaces, the authors decided to abandon the reproduction of Gothic ("schwabach") and publish all documents placed in full, regardless of whether they are written in the original, antique, that is, in the usual Latin alphabet. Italics are used to describe the content of sources, and petit is widely used. All this allows the reader to quickly navigate the text. In terms of printing, the publication is exemplary.

L. P. Lapteva

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