This volume presents archival documents from the administrative records of state authorities and institutions of the Russian Empire, reflecting the government’s response to the Ukrainian movement in education, public life, and literary culture. The materials reveal the background, implementation, and consequences of the Valuev Circular of 1863, the Ems Ukaz of 1876, and other legal acts that regulated the language issue in the Ukrainian provinces from the second half of the nineteenth to the early twentieth century.

A separate section focuses on the work of local censorship offices and the enforcement of restrictive measures against the Ukrainian literary language—one of the key factors in the formation of Ukrainian identity. Lists of manuscripts banned from publication, along with works printed abroad and illegally distributed in Dnipro Ukraine, demonstrate the scope of the educational and literary corpus of the Ukrainian Word, which for decades continued to reach its readers despite censorship barriers.

Most of the documents are published here for the first time.