ABSTRACT
Aims and objectives The history of the Russian Empire has recently been extensively reappraised and the role of imperial expansion has been reconsidered to explain Russia’s historical development since the reign of Ivan IV the Terrible.1 The empire has been reinvestigated from the multi-ethnic and ceremonial point of view, and from the perspective of international relations and power politics.2 However, the question how this large empire functioned internally, how the frontiers, the centre, and other parts interacted in the seventeenth century, and how, under early modern conditions, the huge territorial gains were sustained institutionally is still largely neglected.3 Writing about international relations, Alfred Rieber has pointed out that, besides the multicultural society and cultural marginalism, it was particularly the frontier conditions specific to the Russian context that have confronted the empire’s ruling elites and the mass of the population over long periods of time with both a range of possibilities and a set of constraints.4 In Siberia, these possibilities and constraints were taken to the extreme in that it was made up entirely of overlapping frontiers of the north and the steppe where the state’s authority was limited to a few fortified places, an enormous challenge and a bounty of opportunity to the newly arriving, their main reason for conquest being the soonflourishing international trade with furs and luxury commodities. Siberia therefore is particularly well suited for studying how the empire’s institutional culture adapted to social change, since persistent expansion and the specific forms of organization required by the perilous and porous trading frontiers both challenged and highlighted imperial culture as the tsar depended much on their revenues. Moreover, the regions beyond the tax border at Verkhotur’e in the Urals, which will broadly define Siberia in this study, are interesting, since they permit to examine how the autocratic empire managed to fuse its organizational power and the forces of individual initiative necessary to establish communications throughout a rapidly expanding territory that remained dangerous and threatened by a break-down of communications with Moscow.
