Current problems associated with the search for the most effective orms and methods of regional administration, the most efficient allocation of local self-government facilities in the political system of the Russian Federation, as well as the conflicts existing in the regions between the heads of local self-government and the bodies of State authority show the relevance, necessity and importance of an objective analysis of the theory and history of local government. The recourse to the pre-revolutionary practices of local self-government, a thorough examination of which predetermines the emergence of a modern democratic system, becomes a priority. It seems that this is where we can find answers to many questions put on the agenda by the modern development of regional administration and local self-government in Russia. Using the Taurus Provincial Zemstvo as an example, the authors attempt to generalize local self-government organizational activities on the territory of Crimea, their peculiarities and practical output, their interaction with provincial state authorities, income and expenditure of the budget, justification of the expansion of the number of people included into the pension provision scheme, determination of legal grounds for the increase in costs of maintenance of the road infrastructure. In the Provincial Zemstvo, commissions were set up to elaborate a decision-making procedure and without their affirmative conclusions the issues would not be subject to any consideration. When writing the paper, the authors used the collection of the Rare Books Department of the Chekhov Central Yalta City Library.