Specifics of settlement and numbers of armoured boyars in the Tobolsk Governorate in the second half of the 19th c

On the basis of the archival sources, for the first time an attempt is made to reconstruct settlement of the migrants from the Vitebsk Governorate - the armoured boyars - in the territory of Siberia. The armoured boyars was a category of servicemen who guarded the borders of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, and later - of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. After the an-nexation at the end of the 18th century of the eastern territories of the Commonwealth by the Russian Empire, the armoured boyars joined in the peasant estate. The resettlement to Siberia of separate groups of armoured boyars in the 1840s-1850s caused by the land shortage may be considered as one of the first experiments in organised peasant resettlements to the terri-tory of the Asian part of Russia. The foundation of the source base of this study comprises documents from the holdings of the state archives of Omsk, Tobolsk, Chelyabinsk, and St. Petersburg. Most archival documents are introduced into scientific dis-course for the first time. The main stream of the migrants was directed to the Ishim and Tara Uyezds of the Tobolsk Gover-norate. According to the statistical data, more than 3000 armoured boyars arrived in Siberia with the permission from the gov-ernment. The largest parties of the migrants were domiciled in Utchanskaya and Ilyinskaya Volosts of the Ishim Uyezd. In vari-ous developed places of their compact residence, the living conditions had significant differences. Different settlement models were implemented there, including co-settling armoured boyars with old-settlers, founding villages populated by different groups of resettlers, as well as a separate domicile. The most stable were the large groups of armoured boyars living in relatively fa-vourable conditions. Such examples include the places of their compact residence in the territory of the Ilyinskaya and Loktin-skaya Volosts of the Ishim Uezd. In the meantime, small groups of the migrants, who found themselves in less favourable condi-tions, were much quicker assimilating in the new ethnic environment

Ancient history · Archaeology · Commonwealth · Estate · Ethnology · Geography · Lithuanian · Peasant · Political science · Population · Residence · Sociology · Demography · History · Law · Regional Socio-Economic Development Trends · Social and Behavioral Studies