Dazed and Confused: Russian Provincial Administrators vs. Rental Contracts for Kazakh Land, 1868–1916

• In Event: Local Agency and the Limits of Imperial Knowledge in the Kazakh Steppe and Beyond

Abstract

The Steppe Statute of 1868 transformed all land in the Kazakh steppe into state land and conferred upon the region’s Kazakhs user rights in perpetuity to their designated as their summer and winter pastures. However, this new arrangement, conveyed with a few lines of legislation, soon became a legal nightmare for imperial officials and subjects alike. As settlers and industrialists poured into the steppe and cut deals with Kazakh auls for access to land, provincial bureaucrats scrambled to create a legal framework for managing how land usage rights, mineral rights, water rights, and hunting rights could be transferred among the steppe’s indigenous and newly arrived inhabitants. But officials always lagged several steps behind the subjects they were trying to regulate. Rather than a tidy story of colonial conquest and dispossession led by a strong, centralized government, the case of rental contracts in the Kazakh steppe reveals the Russian imperial government pursuing contradictory goals while being overwhelmed by myriad independent, unsanctioned actions undertaken by its subjects. This case challenges historians to redirect their focus from studies of imperial policy as dictated from St. Petersburg to local initiatives that allow for exploration of the limits of autocratic power.

This paper is based on archival documents from the chanceries of Turgai, Akmolinsk, and Semipalatinsk oblasts held in the Central State Archive of the Republic of Kazakhstan.

Author

• Danielle Ross, Utah State U