ABSTRACT
In the last years of the seventeenth century, a huge scandal rocked Siberia; extensive investigations were conducted into the financial machinations and fraud surfacing in the east. The voevodas in particular were under scrutiny, yet among those who had transgressed the law, some survived investigations with impunity, in particular M.P. Gagarin and S.I. Durnovo of Krasnoiarsk. The head of the Siberian chancellery since June 1695, A.A. Vinius, who regularly corresponded with Peter I, covered up for them, kept in touch with them and was their ‘patron’.1 Neither Gagarin nor Durnovo were descendants of boyar families; but those were the days of favouritism early in Peter’s reign, when the tsar was trying to establish a counterweight to traditional boyar power.2 Yet Krasnoiarsk Cossacks opposed Durnovo because he tried to cover up for his predecessor. He had little time to perpetrate any misdeeds himself but he had a hard time, since he was confronted by Krasnoiarsk Cossacks, who became so alienated that they travelled forty versts to prohibit the official investigator, duma secretary Polianskii, from entering the town and district. In Moscow, Polianskii was accused of abetting the voevodas and was ousted as a side effect of the revolt.3 This indicates that the investigation was indeed thorough, and could only be thwarted by a voevoda like Gagarin who, as a client of the tsar’s favourite, Menshikov, was high on the social ladder of patronage.4 The question raised by these observations is how they can be reconciled with the obvious fact that bribery in Siberia was commonplace and widespread.
