Professor of the Imperial Moscow University Ivan Dmitrievich Belyaev, having studied the history of the Zemsky councils, which considered the most important state issues, concludes that no council in Russia was convened not by the will of the tsar. But this will was not the arbitrariness of this or that royal personality, but only a "historical form" - history worked, laid the seed, and this life grew seed, and from it grew fruit, which was an urgent reason for convening a Zemstvo council. Thus, Peter the Great worked tirelessly for almost thirty years to ensure that Catherine the Great, forty years after his death, convened a Zemstvo council in Moscow. At the same time, the Russian land never demanded Zemstvo councils, but always considered only its duty to send its representatives to the council when the tsar demanded this duty. This, according to the author, the covenant of our ancestors to descendants, repeated for more than three hundred years.