Home – Home – Jornals – Humanitarian sciences in Siberia 2021 number

The article considers the influence of an ethnic factor of the autocratic domestic policy on the incorporation of the Siberian aboriginals into the empire’s political, administrative, and socio-cultural space in the XVIII - early XX centuries. The paper notes significant difference in such policy comparing it with the measures of the USA and European countries towards their colonies based on the chronological and comparative methods of historical research. Analyzing normative and procedural sources, the authors come to the conclusion on the reliance of the empire’s policy towards its peripheries on the national elite, that was traditional for the autocracy, and the essential importance of the aboriginal factor in the Russian advance to the Far East. The article analyzes this policy as manifested in measures taken in the agrarian, administrative, and fiscal spheres. It emphasizes that the policy of imperial regionalism proclaimed by M. M. Speransky’s Siberian reforms of 1822 was replaced by the policy of forced incorporation in the second half of the XIX century. This manifested itself in such ways as organizing land survey, introducing the passport system among the aboriginals, adopting the law on heads of peasants and indigenous peoples in 1898, starting the aboriginal conscription to the rear during the World War One, removing self-government of aboriginals, creating the volost system of rural government identical to the peasant system. The new administrative structure tasks of the Siberian inhabitants were closely related to the interests of the resettlement policy in the empire’s Asian part. The administrative aspect of Asian Russia pursued clearly expressed integrative features aimed at building the unified horizontal power in the administrative structure and management of the rural population in both the internal and peripheral regions of the empire.