Exile in the management of the Yakut regional head (first half of the 19th century)

The article contains a study on the issues of political and religious exile in the first half of the 19th century on the northeastern outskirts of the Russian Empire - Yakutsk Oblast in the management of the “owner” of the entrusted region - the regional head. The study was carried out on the basis of new archival data from the funds of the Russian State Historical Archive (St. Petersburg) and the National Archives of the Republic of Sakha (Yakutia) (Yakutsk); in particular, office-work documents were used - annual reports of regional heads, in which information on the exiles was presented to the highest authorities. Other sources - memoirs and letters of political exiles - Decembrists, who were in the settlement in the Yakutsk region. The issues of organizing links in Siberia and its problems are considered, for example, the lack of personnel and the need to increase the stages. In the absence of a duality of punishment in Yakutia, where they were sent only to the settlement, the local administration was also engaged in monitoring criminals sent to hard labor in other regions of the empire. Exiles begin to play a special role in the activities of the regional chief from the second quarter of the 19th century, which is associated with the Decembrist events of 1825 and the development of the movement of eunuchs across Russia. Despite the fact that Yakutia has become a place of mass exile for religious criminals since the middle of the 19th century, regional heads paid special attention to issues of control over this category of exiles. The article covers multi-level supervision over state criminals, which is associated with the dependence of the Yakut chief on the central and regional authorities (governors-general of Siberia and Irkutsk civil governors). The Yakut regional chiefs were obliged to deal with the placement of the exiles, the organization of their registration, isolation, the creation of control over correspondence, however, other cases were observed in the process of supervising the exiles. Thus, between the regional head N.I. Miyagkov and the Irkutsk civilian governor I.B. Zaydler, to whom the first should have been directly reported, there was a conflict over the supervision of the Decembrists. The author links this phenomenon with the personal qualities of the Yakut chief, his liberal views, loyalty to the Decembrists, and, on the other hand, with the complexity of the governance structure of the Yakutsk region, its remoteness from political centers. The author declares no conflicts of interests.

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