Human Resources Potential of Yakutia: Formation of a Local-born Administrative Corps in the Late 18th – First Half of the 19th Century

Abstract

The historical academia still lacks a comprehensive study on the formation of the local-born bureaucratic corps in the Yakutsk Oblast during the late 18th and first half of the 19th century. Personnel policy on the northeastern periphery of the Russian Empire has remained outside the focus of researchers, who have concentrated primarily on legislative reforms or the activities of the region’s highest administration. The aim of this article is to reconstruct, through the analysis of service records and other archival documents, the process of replacing non-local officials with local personnel in the administration of the Yakutsk Oblast and to identify the role of native-born officials in the governance system. The study demonstrates that over the course of several decades, the share of locally born officials in Yakutia’s administrative apparatus grew from a fairly small percentage to 70 percent, a level that was maintained in subsequent years. The author associates this shift with the administrative reform that gave priority to local specialists; the natural reproduction of the bureaucracy on site, as the Yakut children of officials formed a hereditary bureaucratic class; and the opening of a school that trained personnel for the regional administration. The article also highlights the response of the higher administration of Eastern Siberia to the dominance of “native Yakut officials” in the bureaucratic apparatus in 1836 and their impact on the governance system. The article is addressed to historians studying the administration of the Russian Empire’s peripheries, as well as the social history of Siberia, and to researchers dealing with personnel policy issues in multi-ethnic regions.