Officials of the Foreign Office of Stavropol Province in the System of the Imperial Power

The aim of this article is to consider the bureaucracy of the Foreign Office of Stavropol Province. Early in the second half of the 19th century, the highest imperial authorities in fact established a legal framework regulating the process of organizing administration structures of Stavropol Province which supervised nomadic peoples: the Nogais, the Turkmen and the Kalmyks. Each of these peoples was under the direct control of a private bailiff or a trustee subordinate to the Chief Bailiff of the nomadic peoples. The research is based on the principles of scientificity and objectivity. The research methods were bibliographic, which allowed to trace the trajectory of the life path of officials, and reconstructive, which allowed to restore individual facts and the structure of the Foreign Office. In the course of the research, on the basis of the analysis of legislative acts, office documentation and official lists of the Foreign Office officials, the author focuses on the corps of Chief Bailiffs of the second half of the 19th - early 20th centuries, their official activities and facts from personal biography. The transition to settlement was one of the main tasks of the Foreign Office, it was solved thanks to the officials who cared for people: first settled communities began to form. Despite the attractive conditions for service in the Office, there was a frequent turnover of officials at the posts, which was largely due to a certain extreme life. Practical experience shows that among the officials there were so-called "random" people who only wanted to become rich, often by criminal means, and used their official position and illiteracy of the population they supervised. It is natural that people aspired to go to places with more comfortable living conditions and with opportunities of further career growth. Throughout the 19th and the beginning of the 20th centuries, officials saw the North Caucasus, especially its steppe part, as a springboard for promotion. In conclusion, the author states that the imperial government was interested in the effective integration of the borderlands of the state and sought to employ decent personnel familiar with the traditions and customs of the peoples, including those of the Steppe Ciscaucasia. In addition, there was a trend of synthesis of traditional and imperial administration systems, which was expressed in the titles of the positions, which preserved ethnic features, e.g., the Trustee of Bolshederbetovsky Ulus.

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