Home – Home – Jornals – Humanitarian sciences in Siberia 2014 number

The paper examines the practice of recruiting the Siberian aboriginal people in the economic system of the Russian state. The author considers these practices as political and juridical instruments of aborigines’ legalization as subjects of the Russian state in the late XVI - early XVIII centuries. Having scrutinized a large array of written sources of the XVII century the author proves that the imperial administration didn’t have the aim to use aboriginal labour resources on regular basis. On the contrary, the imperial administration tried to impose taxes (“yasak”) on the majority of indigenous people of Siberia in order to make them pay taxes in the form of precious furs that were in high demand in European markets. The tsarist government was always trying to maximize the number of yasak-payers. However, Russians used indigenous people of Siberia in some kinds of economic activities and sometimes resorted to them in emergency circumstances such as fires and floods. Aborigines used to cut wood, clean roads and waterways. They performed these tasks without any signs of resistance. However they reacted negatively when the authorities recruited them, for example, to work in the salt mines which can be explained by the fact that aborigines were taken away from their usual environment for such activities. Besides, the government often used the natives as guides to lay the routes and roads through the forests. Cossacks and natives sometimes were engaged in military conflicts during the Russian colonization of Siberia. As a result, captives from indigenous people became citizens of Siberian towns. Most captives were baptized and became slaves. Such captives (yasyri) became household servants, their owners actively involved the captives in agricultural work in their villages and homestead. Further life of such house-serfs among aboriginal people depended on a number of factors: the owners’ will, gender etc. But more often they merged with the peasant population of the agricultural region.