Amtsbezirke (German: Amtsbezirk): the closest equivalent is the village soviets (selsovets) that existed until 1993; somewhat less similar are the rural okrugs (which existed in 1993–2008), which were usually larger than village soviets. A Landkreis (see below) was usually divided into 15–25 Amtsbezirke. The head of an Amtsbezirk was elected for six years from among the local residents, but sometimes (for various reasons) was appointed by the Landkreis as an inspector. The number of terms was unlimited, and the head of an Amtsbezirk was often re-elected many times until his death. Until roughly the 1920s–30s the post most often went to a member of the local aristocracy, and after that to farmers and the rural intelligentsia.
Gutsbezirk (German: Gutsbezirk) translates literally as "estate district" or "manor district". It was a special administrative unit created to give communes and landowners equal rights. A Gutsbezirk comprised a manor or estate and the land in the area belonging to the landowner. Because of this it often had a "patchy" structure, with different parts of a single Gutsbezirk lying at a considerable distance from one another, even in different Amtsbezirke, but usually within the same Landkreis (see below). A Gutsbezirk could also be a state domain (a plot of land) that was leased out. The Gutsbezirke in East Prussia were abolished in 1928–30. Their lands and settlements became part of the rural communes.
Several new Gutsbezirke were created after 1930. These were special institutions formed from land expropriated for the state, for example to set up a military training ground or an army stud farm. There were also forest and peat Gutsbezirke.
Forest Gutsbezirk: a structure that formed part of the Prussian forestry system. It was a forest area administered from a head forestry office (Oberförsterei) and consisting of the forests proper, ordinary forest districts, various logging enterprises and forest colonies, i.e. areas cleared of forest to establish farming villages there. Forest Gutsbezirke covered considerable areas, and their boundaries often did not coincide with those of the Amtsbezirke or even the Landkreise. The forest Gutsbezirke were likewise abolished after 1928. Their infrastructure (forest districts, logging sites, etc.) became part of the rural communes.
Peat Gutsbezirke ("bog" districts) were the counterpart of the forest ones, but comprised peatlands and peat-cutting enterprises.
Landkreise (German: Landkreis) are very similar to our administrative districts (now urban okrugs functioning as administrative districts). As a rule they were named after the towns that served as their administrative centres, but not always. From 1874 the Landkreise began to be divided into Amtsbezirke (see above).
Province (German: Provinz): the largest territorial unit. It corresponds roughly to a Russian oblast. The head of a province was the Oberpräsident, who from 1883 was at the same time chairman of the provincial government. Provinces were divided into administrative regions, the Regierungsbezirke.
Regierungsbezirk (German: Regierungsbezirk) has no equivalent in today's Russian territorial structure. There were usually two or three per province. On the territory of the Kaliningrad Region there were two Regierungsbezirke: Königsberg (Kaliningrad) and Gumbinnen (Gusev). The Regierungsbezirke were divided into Landkreise or simply Kreise (see above), i.e. rural districts.
Rural commune (German: Gemeinde): the lowest administrative unit. It consisted of the population of one village or of several neighbouring villages. The commune was headed by an elected village headman, the Schulze. Since the commune was responsible for maintaining a number of local infrastructure facilities (village schools, for example), communes often merged into one in order to enlarge their material base.
Folwark (German: Vorwerk): a detached farmstead, an outlying farm. Most often it was a complex of residential and farm buildings with adjoining land that allowed its owners to live fairly autonomously. As a rule, one family lived on a Vorwerk. Less often several families lived there, usually bound by ties of kinship. It differed from an estate or a village in that it had no administrative independence but formed part of a Gutsbezirk or a rural commune. In the 19th century some Vorwerke, having reached a certain size, could be separated off as independent estates. In the 20th century this process virtually ceased.
Freiheit (German: Freiheit). The concept of "Freiheit" has an equivalent in Russian: the sloboda, a suburb where people live an urban life, but somewhat more freely. "Frei" in German means freedom, and likewise sloboda is derived from the word svoboda, "freedom".
The emergence of the Freiheiten is linked to medieval town law, under which towns were limited territorially and had a number of houses strictly stipulated in their charter. This, accordingly, also limited the growth of a town's population.
Yes, one could add storeys, live more crowded together or even secretly build a few more houses, but none of this could radically affect the size of a town or the number of its inhabitants. Meanwhile, in those distant times, as today, people were driven by the understandable desire to live more prosperously and raise their standard of living. Everyone wanted more money: the ducal councillors in the castle, the town craftsmen, and the farmers and stockbreeders living outside the fortress walls. And although the system of commodity and money relations in feudal society resembled a socialist planned economy more than anything else, the basic economic laws were and remained the same.
The heads of the craft associations [guilds] understood that the path to prosperity lay in increasing the number of buyers of their products, which would then make it possible to increase the volume of production. The ducal treasurers realised no less clearly that revenues to the treasury depended directly on the number of taxable households and on the incomes of the craftsmen living in them. Rural farmhands saw how much better off people in the towns were, and so were not averse to becoming townspeople themselves. Hence literally everyone gained from the appearance of suburban settlements. The Freiheiten (slobodas) were devised precisely in order to distinguish such suburbs from villages that simply lay in the vicinity without violating the provisions of the agreements between the towns and the state. The Freiheiten were divided into two groups: the first comprised those belonging to the town municipalities, while the second were administered directly by the castle administration.
The town Freiheiten had little or no self-government and no urban attributes. People living in the town Freiheiten were subject to municipal laws but were not townspeople in the full sense. In this they differed from the inhabitants of the so-called town districts, the Stadtteile (Stadtteil). The castle Freiheiten (state, or ducal, ones) very nearly measured up to towns by these criteria: many of them had seals and coats of arms, and justice on their territory was administered by local courts. Yet the ducal Freiheiten had no charter of town rights and could not form their own church congregations: they were assigned to town parishes, in the case of Königsberg mainly to the Löbenicht parish. Even if a church was built on the territory of a Freiheit, it became a "daughter" church of the parish church located in the town.
Translated from Russian with the help of AI (Claude, Anthropic), October 2026.
