Abstract

At all times Yakutia was particularly concerned with the issues of territorial structure and management due to the enormity of its territory, ample natural resources and its geographical and geopolitical location. Taking into account the changes in the territorial organization of the region in the XVIIth century allows us to trace the growth dynamics of its settlement network, the relationships between individual settlements and their totality, as well as to identify the differences between the existing settlement network and the problems related to the future development of the region.

The article discusses the changes in the territorial and organizational structure of the region and its internal parts within the context of general changes in the administrative division of the Russian state as a whole, and Siberia, in particular. Literary publications, historical documents containing the information about the basic changes in boundaries and structure, cartographic and descriptive materials served as the sources for studying this issue.

The use of the above mentioned sources allows us to determine that the territorial and organizational structure of the region at an early stage (before the service class people came there) was a location of tribal groupings and corresponded to places of locations of clans and tribes. Only with the introduction of the yasak tax the territory of inhabitance was divided into volosts (small rural districts). At first, that division was only a fixation of social structure of the Yakuts pursuant to the words of Yakut kniaztsy (elders of Siberian clans). First groups of service class people had neither time nor favorable conditions for exercising any administrative division. Initially, they were dealing with kniaztsy who occupied certain regions called volosts or uluses. Those were the first administrative units of territory management of the region in the XVIIth century.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.