Activities of the Сuratorship of Empress Maria Alexandrovna about the blind in the Belarusian provinces of the Russian Empire (late 19th – early 20th centuries)

Abstract

The Curatorship of Empress Maria Alexandrovna about the blind made a great contribution to the development of charity in the Russian Empire which at that time included the Belarusian lands. In the Belarusian provinces, the Office became the first institution to focus on giving aid to blind people. The purpose of the article is to review the activities of the Belarusian branches of the Curatorship of Empress Maria Alexandrovna about the blind and to show their contribution to the development of social assistance and the struggle with blindness in our country. This topic hasn’t been thoroughly studied in native historiography yet and thus it remains relevant for a research. Besides this, in modern Republic of Belarus the traditions of private charity which had been interrupted in the Soviet period began to revive, this obviously increasing the interest to the experience of charity institutions of the past. The article regards the formation and development of the branches of the Curatorship in the Belarusian provinces of the Russian Empire. The main forms and methods of their activity as well as the sources of financing are identified. The main achievements and results of their work are analyzed. The assembled material gives an idea of the condition of the charity system of the blind in the Belarusian lands in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The research is based on the materials obtained in national and Russian libraries, a number of sources being introduced into scientific circulation for the first time.