yeah, no, it's the former, Russian maps before the 1850s or so were not very good. Ive been using a map from David Rumsey's archive for my version, and it's been a bit of a headache.
Trying to get accurate Governorate & Province boundaries from an old Russian map, as you are doing, would be a major challenge (that I wouldn't even attempt: I congratulate you on doing so...).
Trying to mark all of the cities & towns listed as falling within each Governorate & Province -- if I could even find lists for all of them -- and then trying o get accurate boundaries from their relative positions would be a major challenge... especially as this map's scale would place some of those marks in direct contact with each other.
All that I have done, however, is mark the capitals for the 12 out of 16 Governorates whose boundaries I couldn't fix from context (i.e. except for the Vyborg, Reval, Riga, & Kiev, Governorates, each of which consists of only a single province) and the 34 [or35: One's status is unclear from my research so far...] other cities or towns that are capitals of Provinces, and then draw verrry approximate boundaries -- in the shade for 'disputed or unknown' ones, dotted rather than solid as my way of showing that they're only sub-national rather than national -- just to show which Governorates contain which of the other cities & towns.
Anyway, here's the latest version of the map with all of those details for Russia -- and some other features, as well -- added. I need to do some more work on the description of all the changes that I've made since the last version posted, and don't have enough time to complete that tonight, so I'll just place the section about Russia under it for now and then [hopefully] add the rest of those notes at some point this weekend.
Russia: So, having added the rest of those high-level administrative boundaries for the PLC, it seemed illogical not to do so for Russia as well given that it's an even larger country... but I ran into a problem. When the original set of 'Governorates' were established by Peter the Great in 1708 he didn't define them in terms of boundaries on a map, just in terms of lists of cities with their associated territories: By 1749 the number of Governorates has doubled, and they now consist of anywhere from one to eleven provinces each (with a total of 50 or 51 provinces, so a mean number per governorate of just over 3...), but as far as I have been able to find out so far
most of them are still defined in that same way... and I don't even have up-to-[that]-date lists of the cities included for each of those, let alone clear guidance on where their actual boundaries should be. The only governorates for which I've been able to draw boundary lines so far are therefore the four exceptions to that policy, all of which are single-province governorates who owe their existence to international treaties that defined the borders: Vyborg Governorate is the bits of south-eastern Finland that Russia had taken from the Swedes (in two stages, after two separate wars) by 1749; Reval Governorate [with Reval being the name then used for the city we now call Talinn] is 'Estland Province', i.e. northern Estonia; Riga Governorate is the province of 'Livland' [i.e. southern Estonia & all but the southern end of eastern Latvia], and 'Kiev Governorate' covers the same area as the 'Cossack Hetmanate' but with jurisdiction over the non-Cossacks resident (even though the Hetman is also its Governor
ex officio). For the boundaries of the first three of these I am using the shade for 'Exists above/outside of normal admin. divisions', which was already being used here for the Hetmanate. Also, as the 'Sloboda Ukraine' autonomous area that's situated just east of the Cossack Hetmanate is outside of this system (answering directly to the national authorities in Moscow), I've recoloured its boundaries from the shade for 'Normal administrative divisions' to 'this one as well and have reinstated the boundaries for its next level of administraive units down -- which are the areas whose people are assigned to form different Cossack regiments -- too.
Estland and Livland have both been recoloured from 'Tsarist Russia' to 'Tsarist Russia with more autonomy' because that's actually the appropriate description of them (with government through their own pair of 'Landtags' [i.e. Provincial Diets], and some other privileges) all of the way from their acquisition by Russia through to WW1.
For the rest of the country, where my only guide to where the boundaries should be is the positions of various cities, I am
NOT going to try marking the positions of ALL the cities listed as being in each Governorate or Province -- even if I
could find appropriately-dated lists for each of them, which I doubt -- and then draw accurate boundaries as best I can based on those (and perhaps on later administrative boundaries that are mapped, where those seem relevant): I am just marking the positions for the capitals of the Governorates & Provinces, and placing dotted lines in the 'borders disputed or uncertain' colour where I think that viewers might need guidance about which Governor's jurisdiction a particular provincial capital falls under.
Governorate capitals are shown as crosses in the shade for 'Exists above or outside of normal admin. divisions', and provincial capitals [that are not also Governorate capitals] as crosses in the 'Normal administrative divisions' shade. There is also one site, in Siberia, marked as a provincial capital but with the centre of the cross "cut out": This is Yeniseysk, which was a provincial capital at one stage but about whose status at this particular date I am unsure (as its province was merged into that of Tobolsk in 1736 but split off again at some point before 1764). So far I have marked all 12 of these Governorate's capitals, and all of the other cities that are also the capitals of Provinces. These Governorates are St Petersburg [single province, directly under the Governor], Novgorod [5 provinces, so 4 other cities], Archangelgorod [4 provinces, so 3 other cities], Smolensk [single province, etc.], Moscow [11 provinces, so 10 other cities... although the scale means that in some cases their symbols overlap each other], Nizhny Novgorod [3 provinces, so 2 other cities], Kazan [6 provinces, so 5 other cities], Belgorod [3 provinces, so 2 other cities], Voronezh [5 provinces, so 4 other cities], Astrakhan [single province, directly under the Governor], Orenburg [4 provinces, so 3 other cities], and 'Siberia' which covers all Russian lands east of the Urals except for a relatively small area in the south-west that's run from Orenburg instead and perhaps also -- although I'm not sure about this, yet -- a relatively small area in the north-west that's run from Archangelgorod [capital = Tobolsk, possibly then called Tobolesk; either 2 or 3 provinces, depending on Yenisesk's "current" status, so with just 1 other city -- which is Irkutsk -- in addition to those two].
Also, in Archangelgorodsk Governorate I have used a single dot in the 'Normal administrative divisions' shade to indicate the town that's capital of an
'uyezd' or district that was transferred from Siberia Governorate.
Now having marked the position of Astrakhan with reasonable accuracy, because of its role as a Governorate's capital, I have also tinkered a bit with how I show the distribution of the Kalmyks in that area.
You will also see some crosses in the 'Russia with more autonomy' shade, which show the home bases for the various Cossack "Hosts" & suchlike bodies that existed in Russia along & east of the River Don at this date: From west to east there are five in a line formed by Cherkassk (near Azov & Rostov) for the Don Cossacks, Dubrovka (a little way north of Tsaritsyn [ = Stalingrad/Volgograd]) for the Volga [or 'Povolzhye'] Cossacks, Yaitsk (now called Uralsk, Oral, or Opan), on the Yaik [now = Ural] River in what is now western Kazakhstan) for the Yaik [or 'Ural'] Cossacks, Orenburg (where the "Orenburg Non-regular Corps" was formed in 1748, although not organised as an actual 'Host' until 1755), and the area now called 'Nagaybaksky District' where a group of christianised Tatars (later known as the Nağaybäk) who had been granted "Cossack" status officially were settled as border guards. In the case of Orenburg the cross showing it as a Cossack base is placed directly south-east of the one showing it to be a Governorate capital, and it is the latter that is -- as best I could manage -- in the right position for the overall settlement. To the south of this line there is one more cross, beyond the effective border of Russia, where the Terek Cossack Host lives in lands that otherwise belong to the peoples of the northern Caucasus. I have not shown the Cossacks who have been settled along the lower Volga, from Astrakhan northwards for part of the distance to Tsaritsyn, who are not declared a 'Host' until 1817; and neither have I shown those in Siberia, where they comprise a significant proportion of the European settlers, because the 'Siberian Host' is not formally organized as such until 1808.
EDIT (next day): Oops! I forgot to mention yesterday that it turns out Yekaterinburg is
not the capital of Iset Province after all: That role was actually filled by the smaller town of Shadrinsk (situated some distance to its south-east, at a more convenient position on the [sparse] road network) instead, and this map had already been changed accordingly.