One of the Earliest Maps of the Kiev Guberniya

Rare separately published map of the Kiev region, published in St. Petersburg.

The map depicts the Kiev Guberniya in fine detail, perhaps more so than any prior map. The map is issued at the end of the period where Kiev continued to exercise some level of autonomous self governance.

On January 31, 1667, the Truce of Andrusovo was concluded, in which the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth ceded Smolensk, Severia and Chernigov, and, on paper only for a period of two years, the city of Kiev to Russia. The Eternal Peace of 1686 acknowledged the status quo and put Kiev under the control of Russia for the centuries to come. Kiev slowly lost its autonomy, which was finally abolished in 1775 by the Empress Catherine the Great.

Jakob Friedrich Schmidt (? – 1786) was a member of the Russian Academy of Sciences. Along with Ivan Truscott (1721 – 1786), he produced a number of maps of Russian and Ukrainian regions for the Academy.