THE FIGURES OF ODESA MAYORS IN THE SECOND HALF OF THE NINETEENTH AND THE EARLY TWENTIETH CENTURIES IN PREREVOLUTIONARY, SOVIET AND CURRENT RESEARCHES

The given article deals with the historical period: from the second part of the nineteenth to the beginning of the twentieth centuries when there was the “silver era” of Odesa city development. The article provides the initial analysis and classification of major historical publications that are basic for the creation of prosopographic portrait and related to the life and work of nine Odesa mayors such as: Semen Vorontsov, Mykola Novoselsky, Grigory Marazli, Valeryan Ligin, Petro Kryzhanovsky, Pavlo Zelenyi, Vasyl Protopopov, Mykola Moiseyev and Borys Pelikan who held the self-government office from the beginning of the City Regulations of 1863 until the turning points in the first half of the twentieth century – World War I. The material for the investigation was singled out from the works of mayors’ contemporaries, Soviet researchers, modern Ukrainian and foreign historians. 45 published papers were analyzed. In the research, the following methods were used: the methods of synthesis and analysis and the method of critical thinking. Also the biographies and activities of Odesa city mayors were presented in the reviewed works. The findings have suggested that the history of city self-government and the role of city leaders in this process should be the subject of a special systematic and comprehensive study.