SIBERIAN POLICE BUREAUCRACY IN THE STATE APPARATUS OF ABSOLUTISM IN THE FIRST HALF OF THE 19TH CENTURY

Based on the pre-revolutionary legislation and archive materials, the article comprehen-sively considers the process of the formation of the Siberian police bureaucracy in the early 19thcentury. The objectives of the article are as follows: the reconstruction and comprehension of both positive and negative experienceaccumulated by the prerevolutionary regional govern-ment bodies, as well as of the peculiarities of the Siberian police bureaucracy; the explanation of the nature of the interrelations between the government and the population of the outskirts of the Russian Empire; the identifi cation of those aspects in the activities of local authorities, which for various reasons rarely come into the view of researchers. The author concludes that in the fi rst half of the 19thcenturythe State administration was not separated from police activi-ties, the administrative and police authorities in the region were de facto merged. A specifi c feature of the Siberian administration was the greater autonomy of the political machinery rather than in the country’s centre. It was conditioned by the remoteness from the centre and by the absence of nobilityassociations in the region.Due to this, the controlling,judicial and trustee functions,exercised by the nobilityin the centre,in Siberia were assigned to civil ser-vants. The mainconclusion is that the powers of the administrative and police authorities in the region had their own features and were much wider than in the central provinces of the Russian Empire.