Turkic inhabitants of Tomsk province at the turn of 19 and 20 centuries: administrative structure, ethnic and religious processes

This article raises the problem of administrative policy impact on ethnic and religious processes that were taking place inside the Turkic commune of Tomsk province aboriginal population at the beginning of the 20th century. The author makes a conclusion: all ethnic processes were omni-directional, several of them had led to the forming of contemporary Turkic ethnicities, others made it possible for Turkic ethnicities to enter the Russian old-timers population of Siberia. Turkic aborigines inhabited Biysk, Barnaul, Kuznetsk, Mariinsk and Tomsk districts of Tomsk province and formed 83 foreign boards that were divided into nomadic and settled. The base for such a division was founded by "Non-Russian peoples government regulation" (1822) where ethnicities were divided using the extent of their lifestyle as familiar to Russians lifestyle, peasant lifestyle. Aboriginal people were allocated not on the basis of cultural, ethnic or racial affiliation, but by including them into a special social class - "yasak-payers", at first, and from 1822 - "non-Russians". Criteria for the definition of this social class was a special kind of obligation in the form of natural (fur) tax. Close contacts between Russians and aborigines were accompanied by assimilation and acculturation. At the same time these contacts increased the importance of the confessional factor. The abolition of non-Russian social class "inviolability" during the Stolypin reforms (1906-1911) clearly defined the direction of ethnic processes: the Russified part of aborigines smoothly flowed into the Russian Siberians; aborigines who preserved the ethnic specificity became the basis of modern Turkic-speaking ethnic groups of southern Siberia; those who adopted Islam merged with part of the Tatar-Muslim world of Northern Eurasia. However, due to the agrarian and administrative reforms of the early 20th century the ethnographic map of Siberia lost numerous ethnonyms associated with its ancient and medieval history along with the ethnonymic names of non-Russian boards.

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