conscription among the Buriats. While Russia continued to apply a politics of
difference model here, leaving most native institutions and practices intact, across
the eighteenth century it did attempt to eliminate slavery among native peoples, not
only for humanitarian reasons but also to bring ex-slaves into taxpaying status. As a
rule, central administration sat lightly on the vast Siberian lands; Siberia was ruled
as one gubernia from Tobolsk withfive provinces (Viatka, Solikamsk, Tobolsk,
Eniseisk, and Irkutsk) until Irkutsk was made a gubernia in 1764. The vast territory
had limited oversight from the center and notorious corruption. The 1775 admin-
istrative reforms were introduced into Siberia in 1783 in truncated form. In
European Russia, the reform created more gubernii of standardized size by popu-
lation and relied on local nobles to staff the new offices. In Siberia, a governor-
general was assigned (as in European Russia) for better oversight and a third
gubernia was created at Kolyvan for the demographically expanding Altai mine
region. In the absence of local noblemen and with a dearth of population in general,
however, in Siberia the 1775 reform’s judicial andfiscal agencies were simplified.
Heads of panels had to be appointed from a variety of officials, but the reform’s
lower level courts with native assessors and traditional legal practice were instituted.
All of Siberia encompassed only thirty-three districts (uezdy). Furthermore, six
regions at the underpopulated margins were labeledoblasti, maintaining traditional
native patterns of self-government. Siberia, then, became somewhat better inte-
grated into Russian control but local differences were respected.
This was a century of in-migration into Siberia. By 1795 East Slavic peasants and
other European settlers numbered 819,000, while the native population remained
an estimated 360,000 (half Buriats and Iakuts). But settlement was unevenly
dispersed. The taiga forest, particularly in the east, was particularly difficult to
settle. There Russian settlements were modest in size: the Lena valley in the
beginning of the eighteenth century recorded only 164 Russian peasant house-
holds, while on the lower Yenisei in 1702 there were 130 Russian households. The
entire Iakutsk province had an adult male Russian population of 1,222 in 1697 and
1,932 in 1775. A last major settlement effort focused on the Russo-Chinese border
in the 1790s, but failed to bring more than several hundred people to this far
outpost. Many more exiles were sent east than in the previous century as Peter I and
his successors increasingly avoided the death penalty in favor of forced labor. Exiles
were a varied group: criminals were sent generally to eastern Siberia to settle and
work mines; large groups of Old Believers (sent to the Irkutsk region in the 1750s–
70s) were allowed to settle; prisoners of war provided skilled knowledge and
expertise, most famously the approximately 1,100 Swedish officers, soldiers, and
sailors exiled to Siberia after the 1709 battle of Poltava who helped in urban
development and cartography. Famed political prisoners such as Peter I’s compat-
riot Alexander Menshikov (exiled to Berezov in 1728) and Alexander Radishchev
(exiled to Ilimsk in 1790) also made their way east. But exiles were not so numerous
as to greatly add to the population, and their numbers paled compared with what
followed in the nineteenth century.
While the state settled the heart of Siberia with difficulty, voluntary settlement
proceeded apace on the southern edge of western Siberia and northern Kazakhstan
86 The Russian Empire 1450– 1801