Volosts

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. A historical administrative division in Russia typically used in rural areas during the Tsarist period
2. A local government unit in the former Russian Empire responsible for managing communes or villages
3. An organizational entity that governed a collection of villages, often involving local leadership and community matters

Etymology: "Volosts" is simply the plural of "volost," so the real story belongs to the singular. The word was borrowed into English from Russian "volost'" (and the closely related Ukrainian form), which in turn descends from Old East Slavic "volost'." Its meaning in those languages was a territorial district or administrative unit, the kind of area that could be governed as a whole, and the English term carries that sense into historical discussions of Russian and Ukrainian rural administration. The Slavic word belongs to a family of terms for power, authority and dominion, which is why it came to name a region under a shared authority rather than simply a place. The English usage is mostly confined to historians and writers on Eastern European history, where the plural "volosts" refers to several such districts at once.