Raion

Below the oblasts come cities of oblast subordination and raiony. At the bottom we find rural and settlement soviets. We should note that certain very small cities will be subordinate to the raion level. In larger cities there will also be urban raiony. In the republics of Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaidzhan and Moldavia, there are no oblasts and thus the raiony and cities here will be subordinate to the Republic level.

Suffice it to mention that several thousand raion papers were replaced by “territorial administrations” organs, and that all transport papers were closed.

In Kirgiziia, which had thirty-four registered mosques in 1957, there were in that same year thirty-one raiony with none, and the ones which did exist did not answer the needs of the believer population either from the purely numerical standpoint or from that of their geographical distribution, and not only in raiony with no mosque.

In 1923 Soviet Ukraine’s 102 povity were replaced by 53 larger okruhy (sing. okruha), and its 1,989 volosti by 706 raions.

On the eve of the twentieth century, Veniamin Semënov-Tian’-Shanskii, Pëtr’s son, popularized the idea of dividing the Russian Empire into agricultural and industrial raiony.