Grand Duchy of Lithuania

The collection marks the history of the emergence and main stages of development of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania in the 13th–16th centuries. It includes research, thesis, essays and notes on the western outskirts of Russia, collections of documents (scribal books, charters, monuments of diplomatic correspondence, genealogy, etc.), cartographic and visual materials.

The collection materials illustrate the history of the emergence of the Principality of Lithuania, the process of the Western Russian lands becoming part of it and the formation of the Lithuanian-Russian state. Separate materials spotlight the life, activities, history of the family of “zealots of Orthodoxy in Lithuanian Rus” - Prince K. K. Ostrogsky (1526–1608) and his ancestors, in whose printing house the first printer Ivan Fedorov published the so-called Ostrog Bible, which had enormous educational significance for Russian Orthodox Church.

The next section of the collection includes collections of documents about individual rulers of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania: these are letters of the Grand Dukes of Lithuania, and Lithuanian statutes, and genealogical paintings about princes Gediminas (1316–1341) and Gediminovich, about Vytautas the Great (1350–1430), Jogaila (1350 –1434) and Jagiellonian. Based on the presented publications, one can judge the development of the estate-representative apparatus of government in the Principality of Lithuania, for example, its Rada, Lithuanian-Russian povets, diets and sejmiks. Some research is devoted to drawing analogies between the Lithuanian Rada and the Old Russian Boyar Duma. The “Law” section also includes works on the study of parallels between the norms of Russian Pravda and Lithuanian law.

Socio-economic development in Western Rus' is characterized by studies and documents about the coins of Lithuania, the position of the gentry class, the forms of peasant land ownership, the agrarian reforms of Sigismund-Augustus in the second half of the 16th century and the attitude of different classes to them: the gentry, the clergy, the bourgeoisie and the peasantry. The collection concludes with documents about the historical and spiritual choice of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania - its final orientation towards the Roman Catholic Church after the signing of the Union of Lublin (1569) and unification with the Kingdom of Poland and the formation of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth.