Burmistr

Burmistr

 

(Polish burmistrz, from German Bürgermeister), the name in Russia for members of the Burmisterskaia Palata (Burmister Office)—officials elected by the posadskie liudi (merchants and artisans), former zemstvo (district assembly) elders, and customs and public-house heads. The name was introduced by Peter I when the Burmisterskaia Palata was created (1699). At the end of the 18th century and during the first half of the 19th, a burmistr was the manager of an estate or an elder appointed by a landlord to supervise the fulfillment of obligations by bonded serfs and to perform other administrative functions.

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References in periodicals archive ?
The personnel in communal governments varied from one estate to the next, but most had a headman (burmistr), clerk (zemskii), and one or more selectmen (vybornye).
Both Andreian Osokin and Vasili Voronin had earlier served as headman (burmistr) of the Baki commune, but this was not the basis of their power.
(133) The assembly singled out Voronin for a high assessment; initially, it assessed him only seven hundred rubles, but then added an extra three hundred because, as the report put it, "this same Vasili Voronin, with capital of twenty five thousand, was at one time our headman (burmistr), and [then] conscripted from small households while sparing his own." (134) It must have been doubly humilating for Voronin that the commune levied no assessment at all on Andreian Osokin, even though he was, by all accounts, the richest peasant on the estate.
Household economies and communal conflicts on a Russian serf estate, 1800-1817

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