Applying the Siberian administration model in the Turkestan Governor-Generalship

The article studies the legislative acts issued to administrate Siberia and Turkestan in the 1820s-1860s. The author made a comparison of the legislative documents that regulated various aspects of administration in the outskirts of the country. These were the Statute on Administration of the Siberian Provinces and the Project of the Statute on Administration of Semirechenskaya and Syr-Darinskaya Oblasts written by M.M. Speransky in 1822 and in 1867 respectively. Based on the comparative analysis, conclusions demonstrate the similarities and differences in administration of the territories. The administrative, military and diplomatic competences of the local administrations in the person of a governor-general are in the focus of the paper. The outskirts of the Russian Empire had always been under a special control of the Russian authorities. It was determined by the exceptional position of these regions that comes from their remoteness from the central part of the country; their location in the border territory; the Russian citizens were a minority both in Siberia and in Turkestan; the system of the civil service there had its specificity too and, as the contemporaries said, public officials went there to earn ranks and privileges. There were differences determined by the ethnic and confessional composition of the population, relatively developed economy and international trade, by the fact that there were such formations as the Khanate of Khiva, the Emirate of Bukhara and the Khanate of Kokand in Turkestan. The created Governor-Generalship model of governing resembled the administration of the British India. But Russian legislation in this field had its own peculiarities and remained in force (with some changes) up until the fall of the Empire in 1917. The analysis of sources shows that the Siberian administration model was applied in Turkestan. This model was used by the Government in the Caucasus as well. The paper is based on the legislative acts, research works of Russian prominent historians, archival sources from the funds of the Central State Archive of the Republic of Uzbekistan. The author studies the administrative, military and diplomatic competences of governors-general of those regions. It is worth mentioning that some of the directions of their activities were not provided with clear instructions. When the rules were infringed by these officials or they were accused of corruption, governors-general only had to prove their rightness and adduce reasons and evidence of their innocence. The research helps to determine the role of the Siberian experience in administration of the Central Asian outskirts and the competences of governors-general that were weakly regulated by law, so governors-general had almost unlimited rights.

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