Empires are not nation-states, as much as historians know. Moreover, in the history of the Russian Empire, the historiography knows of no “emergence of the Russian imperial consciousness” as it does with the national one.^[1] As the research presented in Ab Imperio has demonstrated, there has hardly been at any point in Russian history a clear and unambiguous “language of imperial self-description,” voiced by a single subject of imperial authority, or, alternatively, by some oppressed imperial subject.^[2] The imagery of “empire” as the prison of nations, a multinational realm ruled by an enlightened multiethnic and cosmopolitan nobility, or a quasi-totalitarian dictatorship with a uniform-dressed emperor at the helm can hardly be considered reflections of self-description, for they first emerged with the rise of nationalism as a concept of political practice, and second as an analytical tool inspired by nostalgia (the third appears to be a projection of twentieth-century historical realities on the distant and not so distant past). Rather, the complex and shifting social, ethnic, and cultural configurations of identities and group solidarities within the empire generated diverse and often contradictory languages of self-description, spoken by individual or collective authors in dialogue with each other and in situations of unequal and asymmetrical power relations. These languages often drew on the very situation of multiple voices, appropriated what others had said, and reflected the circulation of concepts and words from one level of discourse to another. In individual cases, biographic contexts facilitated or complicated the coming together of different languages, as individuals made sense of imperial diversity and traditional practices in terms that they acquired in the course of their lives. Such is the document presented to our readers in this issue of the journal. Heinrich Fick’s Most Subject Propositions and Report Regarding Iakuts, Tungus, and Other Remote in Northern Siberia to the Russian Empire Submitted Iasak Peoples brings together the rationalist and universalist language of the early Enlightenment, a new self-representation of the Russian empire as a civilized and regular European state, and the ad hoc practices and workings of the “extractive empire” in North-Eastern Siberia. Written by a cosmopolitan bureaucrat and professional exiled to Siberia, this document oscillates between the didactic language of Puffendorff and that of the reports and complaints that seventeenth-century Cossacks and voevody sent to Moscow; it brings together the concepts of Polizey and Iasak – the former a legacy of German judicial and political thought and the latter a sediment of Mongol imperial rule in Central Asia and Siberia – in one seemingly natural, easy flowing speech of boundless rationalism; it foreshadows both the attempts to regulate the lives of the inorodtsy in the imperial borderlands in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and the often sympathetic and compassionate depictions of Siberian peoples by exiled opponents of the imperial state (thus giving a voice, albeit mediated, to the imperial colonial subjects, and establishing the ground for the Romantic celebration ethnic groups).

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Although there is a continuing debate among historians regarding the depth of Peter the Great’s reforms and the nature of the rupture in the fabric of Russian society produced by his illustrious reign, few would in fact doubt that in the first half of the eighteenth century the languages with which different groups and institutions within the polity described themselves experienced a profound transformation.^[3] The very medium through which such descriptions were enunciated – the written language – was undergoing a tectonic change.^[4] One only needs to compare Peter Tolstoy’s travelogue of 1697-98 or Vasilii Tatishchev’s or Ivan Kirillov’s writings to the smooth, elegant, and sophisticated language of Karamzin’s Letters of a Russian Traveler to sense the speed with which Western ideas were being absorbed and processed by educated Russian society and to understand the changes that took place in Russia in the course of the eighteenth century.^[5]
Indeed, as it has been argued before, the most important elements of that transformation were the monarch, the nobility, and the state’s administrative apparatus. The influx of Peter’s immigrants and the search for experienced administrators opened the way for the importation of the contemporary concepts of state and polity. As Marc Raeff has demonstrated, central to these new ideologies was cameralism, which developed in Western Europe toward the end of the seventeenth century, and which posited the mobilization of economic and military resources of the state as a way to ensure the peaceful and progressive development of the state’s subjects.^[6] Linked to fruhe Aufklaerung, cameralism was distinctly rationalist and maintained a strong belief in what we would call today “institutions.” The main instrument of change in society, according to the cameralists, was law. Appropriate and timely legislation combined with streamlined, structured, and efficient administration would ensure the achievement of a perfectly functioning state machine, the regulierte und ordliche Polizeistaat, in which the rule of law, the Rechtstaat, is a universal obligation and the absolute condition for the common good. Heinrich Fick’s notion of improvement in society was rooted in the German concept of Polizey, which in the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries had two related meanings: first, a state of good order in societal life, and second, a law whose main goal is to establish, maintain, or restore a state of good order in society.^[7] No doubt, this conception left a lasting mark on the Russian government’s attempts to regulate by legislation the lives of many ethnic, confessional, and social groups in the empire.^[8]
As Marc Raeff pointed out, cameralist thought was universalist, which was reconciled with the increased knowledge of human cultural diversity through the notion of stages of development.^[9] Where human societies, for one or another reason, lacked what would amount to rational knowledge and administration and the rule of law, it would become the task of the “regular” European state to introduce and maintain legislation to ensure the emergence of these crucial elements of a modern state. Heinrich Fick himself stated in his famous memorandum to Peter on the education of Russian youth (which, among other things, inspired the Tsar to establish the Academy): “it is to be noted that all European peoples laid the beginning of the happy condition in which they now find themselves through Academies and schools; in particular it is known that 300 years ago in England, Denmark and Sweden, there was semi-barbarity, people were hardly aware of studies and moral scholarship.” For Fick, this state of affairs was supported by the Papacy’s attempts to maintain its grip over superstitious peoples. “The Germans,” Fick continued, “were considered by the Romans to be as wild as the savages in America are considered today. And now we find the German nation liberated from the Papacy to be more learned and civilized (polirter) than those who are still under its yoke.” And so, Fick believed, would be the fate of the Russians: “Now it is well known that already for a hundred years the former glorious rulers in Russia have gone through great labor to introduce good laws and regulations (gute Gesetze und Ordnungen ein zu fuehren), just that this labor could not bear the desired fruit to the people because the education of the youth could not be pursued due to forbidden travel, studies of foreign languages, and books…”^[10] Siberian Iakuts and Tungus, Fick argued in his memorandum published below, are “good and orderly subjects,” “they correctly pay their iasak,” and even while their “evil customs,” such as leaving the sick in the forest or killing illegitimate children appalled Fick, he was certain that this state of affairs could be “corrected through good Policey and justice.”
It is with these ideas in mind that the author of the document published in the first issue of Ab Imperio in 2006, Heinrich Claus Fick, entered the Russian service in 1715.^[11] By that time, the young Holsteiner had acquired significant military, administrative, and bureaucratic experience in the service of several European courts. Heinrich Fick was born, according to A. R. Cederberg’s calculations, in Hamburg in 1678. Little is known about his education, but Fick himself reported later that he had spent his youth “with feathers [in hand].”^[12] In 1699, again according to Fick’s own report, he traveled to Stockholm. Most probably, Fick’s family moved to Stralsund or Ruegen, both of which at the time belonged to the Swedish crown as part of Swedish Pommern. What kind of service, if any, he performed prior to 1700 is not known for certain. We do know, however, that in 1700 Fick entered the Livland regiment of Wilhelm Magnus Freiherr von Nieroth, a well-known Baltic aristocrat who later became the president of Kammer-kollegiia in St. Petersburg (and thus Fick’s immediate superior in the Russian service). In Nieroth’s regiment, Fick reached the rank of Quartiermeister by 1704, and often traveled to Stockholm to request and arrange supplies and munitions. Fick’s own memo suggests that in 1710 he left the regiment and the Swedish service altogether and returned to Germany due to family circumstances (of which nothing is known).^[13]
Apparently, Fick decided to seek employment with the court of Charles XII, but he could only secure a position in a small German principality under the Swedish sway. Armed with references from the Swedish royal family and ministers, Fick presented himself to the Bishop of Luebeck, Christian August, who ruled the Duchy of Holstein-Gottorp in the name of his disabled nephew Karl Friedrich.^[14] Although the ruler of the Duchy treated Fick kindly, his minister, Baron Goertz, did not, and Fick ended up as the appointed buergomeister of Eckernfoerde, a small but important trade town in the Duchy. As an appointee of the court, his official title was that of a Commissar. For some three years, Fick worked on “restoring the orderly civilized life” of the town destroyed by the Great Northern War, promoting trade and industry and securing public works.^[15] As the Swedes began to lose battles after 1713, Fick lost his service with the Duchy. He went to Stockholm to unsuccessfully seek employment, returned to Holstein and was arrested by the Danes. After a brief imprisonment and yet another petition to Charles XII, Fick finally became the Privy Secretary (Geheimsekretaer) of Holstein. One member of the Holstein Privy Council, Friedrich von Bassewitz, who valued Fick as an expert on Swedish administration and law, recommended him to General Adam Weyde.^[16] The latter was recruiting experts in administration on Peter’s orders. In 1715, Heinrich Fick switched allegiance from the King of Sweden and the Dukes of Holstein and entered the Russian service.^[17] By that time, Fick was undoubtedly a very experienced and learned man, well versed in systems of government of several European realms, and he proved this to his new sovereign.
Fick’s first assignment in the Russian service amounted to one of the earliest cases of technological espionage in Europe. Under Peter’s orders, he traveled to Stockholm disguised as a Swedish officer, and brought back to the Russian emperor a detailed description of the Swedish state apparatus, which included data on institutions, ranks, decision-making processes, salaries of bureaucrats and military and naval officers, etc.^[18] Together with memoranda by Pott von Luberas, Fick’s works suggested a model for Peter’s sweeping reforms of the Russian state apparatus and for the introduction of colleges. Not surprisingly, Fick became Vice-President of the College of Commerce (Kommerts-Kollegiia), and, perhaps more importantly, a personal associate of the emperor. In the years following 1715, he bombarded Peter with notes and memoranda regarding postal services, hiring of foreigners, the treasury, appointments, taxation, trade, manufacture, and so forth. Arguably, one of the most important contributions by Fick was his memorandum to Peter on the issue of the Academy and schools for Russian youth, upon which the emperor acted with his usual persistence. It should be noted that unlike many other of Peter’s hirelings, Fick did possess real and diverse experience in administration and government. At the same time, the Holstein seeker of adventure, as he was often described by less sympathetic historians, was a cosmopolitan man: a German by birth and a Swede by subjecthood, he most clearly identified himself with the new rational approach to managing human polities, and he found a promising realm for the application of his ideas and experience in Petrine Russia, and, therefore, his “sensitive love to the Russian Empire” (chuvstvitel’naia liubov’ k Rossiiskoi imperii) might have been more than just an expression of the need to justify the German’s judgment of things Russian. On more than one occasion, Fick (often unsuccessfully) urged Peter to exercise tolerance and open-mindedness when dealing with foreigners in his service.
Fick’s service to Peter paid off: in 1717 he acquired Russian rights of nobility, and Peter granted him the castle, village, and parish of Oberpahlen in Livland. In 1727, already after his patron’s death, Fick’s name was inscribed in the Ritterschafft of Revel, which extended to him the rights and privileges of the Baltic nobility.^[19] Moreover, Fick, who apparently was not of noble or illustrious origin, arranged for his daughters’ marriages with Livland’s most established families, such as the von Marienfelds, Lilienfelds, and so forth.^[20] From 1728, Fick became de-facto president of the College of Commerce and had the rank of the Counselor of State (statskii sovetnik). Although Fick seems to have been patronized by Peter himself, in the turmoil following the death of the emperor, Fick managed to survive quite well and it is not until 1730 that his political views and connections brought him into trouble.
Although little is known on the details of Fick’s participation in the events surrounding Anne’s ascension to the throne, it appears that he was in good relations with Prince Dmitrii Golitsyn, to whom he allegedly suggested the Swedish model of constitutional monarchy.^[21] Hopefully, future research will help uncover Fick’s role in these events. What we do know for certain is that in 1731 the career of Heinrich Claus von Fick, the Councilor of State, President of the College of Commerce, and the lord of Oberpahlen, came to an abrupt end. He was arrested, his properties were confiscated, and he was exiled, together with his two sons-in-law, to a remote Zhigansk fort (zimov’e) and later to the settlement of Verkhneviliuisk in North-Eastern Siberia. Fick spent just over 10 years in the company of several Cossacks and soldiers, visiting tax collectors, and Siberian natives, the Yakuts (Sakha) and the Tungus (Evenk).^[22]

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The area in which Fick was to spend almost 11 years had been part of the Russian imperial domain for almost a century. Interestingly, we have strikingly more sources on the history of Eastern Siberia in the seventeenth century than we have on well-established Russian possessions in the West of Transuralia, a phenomenon that might be explained by the shift of the center of fur extraction to the basins of first the Enisei and later the Lena.^[23] The century that had preceded Fick’s arrival to the place of his unschuldige Exilio was by far not the one of regulated peace and harmony prescribed by the notion of Polizey.
In the first decades of the seventeenth century, brigands of Moscow servitors, Cossacks, trappers, and merchants began penetrating the greater basin of the Lena river from the three bases of Mangazeia (the northern route via river Viliui), Tobol’sk and Tomsk (via the Enisei and Tunguska onto the upper Lena and Aldan).^[24] Despite the established myth of the “Russian conquest of Siberia,” the sources clearly reveal the diversity of those groups and individuals who pursued new lands and peoples in search of fur. Thus, we encounter Samson Novatskii (Nowacki?) and Anton Dobrynskii (Dobrzinski?), Polish prisoners exiled to Tomsk, leading the first expeditions to the upper Lena, a cherkashenin (Ukrainian Cossack), exploring the basin of Aldan, and numerous references to Litva (servitors and Cossacks from the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth) taking part in these expeditions, alongside with people from Novgorod and, especially, Ustiug in the Russian North.^[25]
The nature of the conquest of Eastern Siberia – the search for fur by semi-independent brigands supported by local officials – defined the course of events. As competing groups of servitors, trappers, and Cossacks from Mangazeia, Tobol’sk, and Tomsk began converging on Iakut and Tungus settlements, the native populations suffered brutality, extraction, and complete lawlessness. The documents of the first decades of conquest reveal stories of extraction, double and triple taxing, and fighting between the groups of conquerors and their native allies.^[26] The newcomers, whose task was to collect iasak for the Tsar’s treasury “by caress and kindness,” helped themselves to the fur before they collected for the Tsar; native women and children were kidnapped; and the payments of fur were ensured by the military defeat of the natives and by hostage taking. Almost three decades of robbery, disorder, and lawlessness ended in relative stabilization as Moscow appointed the first voevoda to Yakutsk fort in 1638 and established the Yakutsk district (razriad). Corruption and extortion did not, however, and virtually every single voevoda from 1639 to 1767 ended his tenure with an investigation of abuses, including extortion, bribe-taking, enslaving natives, usury, and theft of fur destined for the treasury.
To be sure, there was widespread resistance and fighting against tribute-seeking expeditions and sieges were even laid against some forts. Many Tungus clans attacked iasak collectors and trappers, while in 1633-34 and in 1638-39 Yakut toions gathered between six and eight hundred warriors and besieged the Lenskii fort for several months.^[27] This resistance was successfully diffused by Moscow servitors through the policy of incorporating the native elite, who acquired the hereditary titles of “princeling” (kniazets) and were increasingly involved in collecting tribute and given some judicial authority on the ground.^[28] Although some toions continued their resistance well into the 1640s, most realized the promise of the new situation. By the 1670s, a new regime was taking shape in North-Eastern Siberia, in which a small number of newcomers (never more than 10% of the estimated number of native population) coexisted with what can be described as an “estate” of “iasak people.” The latter, regardless of their personal wealth or ethnic origin, were supposed to pay a certain amount of fur to the treasury, provide certain (mostly transportation) services, and enjoy the autonomy of their customs, traditions, and penal systems. Although voevody were required to try cases of certain significance (large scale material disputes, robbery, and murder), the day-to-day administration of Iakut and Tungus clans and families was entrusted to their native “princelings.” We can safely assume that distance sufficiently prevented Moscow-appointed officials from seriously intervening in the day-to-day lives of the Tsar’s new subjects, even if at times we see voevody dealing with cases of common law (such as bridal payments).^[29] Russians (and others) were prohibited from trading with the iasak people individually (a prohibition that was always effectively evaded by powerful merchants), and settlement on their lands was forbidden by a special decree. Although initially the loyalty of the iasak paying population was ensured by taking hostages (amanaty), the gradual incorporation of clan leaders into the system of administration made hostage taking increasingly obsolete. Yet, when Heinrich Fick arrived in Zhigansk in 1732, there were still some Tungus hostages in the fort.
That system operated relatively efficiently from Moscow’s point of view, while supplies of fur continued to fill the Tsar’s treasury (even if more extracted fur remained in private hands than reached Moscow).^[30] However, resources were depleted by the end of the seventeenth century, and the iasak paying population found it increasingly difficult to fulfill their fiscal obligations.^[31] Debts mounted, and additional obligations to the state, such as transportation duties, burdened the fragile local economic life. The unwieldy system of iasak payment forced individuals to deliver tribute for their deceased or runaway relatives, with responsibility for collection entrusted to toions and collectors who visited settlements once per year. Moreover, the registration of the iasak paying population occurred rarely, and the expected amount of tribute never coincided with the number of payers. Although the government attempted on several occasions to forbid the Tungus and Iakuts to leave their communities, traditional practices and distances efficiently prevented this decree from making any inroads.
The impact of this system (and of its crisis) on the native populations was manifold. The Iakut toions in particular benefited from increased power over their relatives in extended families and clans. Some entered the Moscow service as early as the 1680s, acquiring the ranks of boyar’s sons (syn boiarskii). They managed to convince the government in Moscow quite early that their participation in iasak collection and in judicial government locally would benefit the smooth payment of tribute. However, a mass incorporation of Iakut toions (and even less so of Tungus chiefs) into the Muscovite service nobility never occurred, and later in the eighteenth century the Iakut deputy to the Legislative Commission, Sofron Syranov, and the author of the Plan about Iakuts and head of the Borogonskii ulus, Semen Arzhakov, petitioned for the rights of the nobility to be confirmed to Iakut princelings.^[32]
On the other hand, the increased taxation pressure on the Iakuts in their traditional habitat in the area of the Middle Lena, combined with Russian punitive expeditions against the Tungus (the Iakuts’ “historical” enemies), led to the spread of Iakut-speaking cattle pastoralists to the basins of the Viiui, Aldan, Amga, Indigirka, and the other rivers of the greater Lena basin.^[33] The role of the Iakuts as the “coachmen” of the Russian empire in North-Eastern Siberia (the first Kamchatka expedition alone demanded more than five thousand horses)^[34] helped increase the Iakut presence in remote corners of the region. Iakut toions began to send trading expeditions (to purchase pelts for iasak no longer available in Iakut areas) and developed a taste for commerce, so much so that in the late eighteenth to early nineteenth century some wealthy Iakuts could make charitable contributions worth thousands of rubles.^[35]
In short, in the early eighteenth century North-Eastern Siberia represented a typical extractive colony, with activities of Moscow voevody, collectors, Cossacks and servitors aimed at securing the flow of fur pelts to Russian fortresses. Prone to widespread corruption and abuse, this system emerged ad hoc, and was based on what was possible and achievable rather than on some thorough process of governing remote and culturally alien areas. The terms and practices of that system were inherited from various historical epochs, and the very term iasak designating the fur tribute was derived from the Mongol era, when the native peoples of Southern Siberia paid taxes to the descendants of Chinggis Khan. Moscow servitors often referred to native population groups not in territorial terms but with the traditional steppe concept of ulus, designating a group of people loyal to a particular leader. That system, as reflected in the historical sources, gave space to different languages: the demanding voice of Moscow heard in decrees of the tsars and of the Siberian prikaz, which treated the lands of North-Eastern Siberia as the Tsar’s votchina, and the iasak payment as the due obligation of the native peoples; the often plaintive (and at times boastful) voice of explorers and iasak collectors, who described the wicked and dangerous peoples of Siberia to demonstrate the depth of pain and suffering they had undergone in the Tsar’s service (to the extent of devouring their own souls by eating horsemeat!); the voice of the local elite, the toionat, adapting to the new reality and attempting to derive benefits from it, at times accepting the terms of the new language and casting itself as a truthful class of servicemen; and, finally, through the rare complaints of the Iakut and Tungus communities, the voice of overtaxed and overburdened native populations placed in the hands of all of the above.

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Heinrich Fick’s memorandum from Siberia was not a novelty as regards the nature of the problems that it describes. Indeed, as early as the 1670s many Iakut complaints to Moscow requested various changes in the system of taxation. In particular, Iakut toions complained about the lack of furs and petitioned for the iasak to be collected in money. From time to time, the most outrageous abuses by local voevody generated collective complaints by the servitors, as was the case with voevoda Petr Golovin, who rampaged not only the Siberian natives but also the population of the fort, and tortured and executed people at will. Some voevody even suggested to Moscow minor changes in policies, always explaining these suggestions by the specific circumstances of a given year or location.
A brief look at the documents generated in the first half a century of Moscow rule in North-Eastern Siberia may help us understand the specific genres of writing available to Moscow servitors, officials, voevody and, through a translator, to the native peoples. Thus, instructions and memoranda (nakazy and nakaznye gramoty) given to voevody sent to Eastern Siberia contained simple step by step instructions (e. g., how to proceed from Moscow to Siberia, where to acquire provisions, when and what to built once there), and very specific policy guidelines (from treating natives with caress and mercy to a very detailed description of how oaths ought to be administered and rituals to be followed when accepting iasak). These documents left no doubt that the main (and the only) concern of Moscow was the timely arrival of fur tribute, while the treatment of native peoples was made subject to that overarching goal. Voevody often sent back to Moscow their reports (otpiski), in which most of the information concerned the amount of fur collected, the number of “uluses” found and added to the paying population, and the amount of fur the voevody received as gifts from the native peoples. Little to no information concerning the native peoples’ ways of life, let alone well-being, was transmitted in that exchange, based on the assumption that the Tsar’s new subjects constituted an item in the catalog of the sovereign’s “remote patrimony” and their sole function was to deliver fur and to help maintain, as far as possible, the existing order of things, as the texts of oaths of allegiance (shert’) clearly demonstrate.^[36] Although we can assume that in exchange for the delivery of fur to the Moscow treasury the native peoples would be treated as a special, fur producing estate, such a suggestion will not be confirmed by a more careful look at the natives’ position. Indeed, Russians were often forbidden from settling on the inozemtsy land, and their toions were involved in courts and tax collection. Yet, no clearly defined obligations and rights of that “estate” ever existed, let alone toward that “estate,” and even conversions, which began during the reign of Peter I, hardly led to the treatment of Siberian native peoples as “subjects.”
In contrast to these seventeenth-century documents, Fick’s memorandum proceeds from a series of general assumptions outlined in the beginning of the report. Fick notes that states and empires are similar to natural bodies, and prosper only when they follow natural laws and regulations. With respect to the state, or “fatherland,” Fick distinguishes between fatherly and step-fatherly policies. The former avoid unnecessary burdens on subjects and proportionally and orderly distribute the necessary ones so that no disruption of the subjects’ lives occurs and their well-being is maintained and protected. It is against this general view that Fick measured administrative practices in Northern Siberia. The most important innovation in Fick’s report, though, was that despite the distinction between the “natural ploughing Russian peasants” (prirodnye rossiiskie pakhotnye krest’iane) and the tribute-paying population, Fick merged these populations under an innovative concept of “subjects” (poddannye), all of whom ought to enjoy their natural rights (natural’noe pravo) within the limits prescribed by legally established regulations. All of them needed to be protected and defended against abuses, not just because they fulfilled functions in the state but because as subjects they were entitled to good and orderly treatment, which was the task of a fatherly government. The very use of the term “inozemets” to address the iasak peoples of North-Eastern Siberia seems controversial in this respect: apparently, in Fick’s mind the term itself did not imply any significant difference from the rest of imperial population. Although Fick never resolved the inherent tension in cameralism between the need to mobilize resources on the one hand and to protect and maintain the well-being of the subjects on the other, the importance of the latter in Fick’s propositions is clear.
Yet, with all Fick’s rationalism and concern for the well-being of the Tsar’s subjects, his enlightened ideas remarkably easily supplanted the existing regime in North-Eastern Siberia. “Everything can be corrected,” Fick maintained, and payments of iasak and organization of service can be streamlined, balanced, and regulated. At no point did Fick question the overall setup of the Russian extractive empire in Siberia; and the very terms which it generated, such as “iasak,” “uluses,” and “servitors,” were naturally interwoven with concepts concerned with “fundamental economic regulations.” Boundless belief in reason and “good legal order,” which allowed Fick to help introduce the Swedish system of government in the Russian empire, did not stop before the remainder of the Mongol legacy in Eurasia. This belief helped to absorb, incorporate, and rationalize relations rooted in a different tradition.
To be sure, Fick’s work was not inconsequential. Following the report, the Irkutsk governor Soimonov produced his own description of abuses in Northern Siberia in 1767 (apparently incorporating Fick’s ideas); the government responded by sending officers and controllers; moreover, Fick’s report and other voices from Siberia led to the establishment of the well-known Iasak Commissions (iasachnye komissii), which attempted to streamline and regulate the seemingly chaotic process of resource extraction.^[37] Many of Fick’s suggestions – the option of paying iasak in money, the more egalitarian system of taxation, the greater involvement of toions in administration – all found their way into later legislative acts. One can see Mikhail Speranskii’s Siberian reforms of 1822 as a continuation of the process that began earlier, in the eighteenth century.^[38] That process can be described as a rationalization of ad hoc practices of extractive empire in Siberia, and Fick’s report stands out as an early and striking example of it.
But during the term of Heinrich Fick’s exile, he was a prisoner, without many rights and privileges, even if as a formerly high-ranking official he could converse with representatives on the ground. We have an example of that conversation, transmitted by Fick himself: a miserably failed attempt to convince a local servitor to abstain from abuses. One wonders how many such attempts the author of the document undertook during his decade of exile. The document conveys a sense of desperation, for example when Fick exclaims that “theft and abuses are so omnipresent that… one can hardly describe it or come up with solutions as to how to prevent it…” Behind the rational language of the professional bureaucrat, a specialist in the exercise of regulated power, we discover an exiled prisoner, whose speech betrays powerlessness and weakness. At times this powerlessness leads Fick to imperial instincts that helped create Russian imperial institutions elsewhere: a good solution to the problems that plague this remote land consists in sending a plenipotentiary procurer or executioner, and good and orderly regulations need to be maintained by exemplary hanging.
At other times, though, that speech seems to incorporate the concerns and grievances of the native peoples among whom Fick had lived for almost a decade. There is little doubt that the inquisitive Holsteiner made acquaintances among the locals; that he understood well the local economic life (especially given the fact that he had participated in it before his departure);^[39] and that his cameralist concern for the well-being of the subjects went hand in hand with his sympathy toward these peoples. Fick describes them almost exclusively as good and loyal subjects, and against the background of official abuses and mistreatments, their deficiencies seem indeed minor. Their suffering is described by a man who clearly felt for the hardships inflicted upon these populations and possibly identified with them as he was guarded by the very same people who abused the natives.
Such an identification is not unusual in Russian history; indeed, most descriptions of Siberian peoples by scholars before the Revolution were produced by exiled opponents of the regime, who often belonged to oppressed nationalities (such as Jews or Poles). Many of them projected their ideologies, such as Populism, onto the Siberian native peoples the way Fick projected his cameralist ideas. What is striking about Fick’s report is his role in shaping the new language of imperial self-description in the first half of the eighteenth century and the fact that his memorandum is possibly the first in the line of texts on Siberian peoples written by the regime’s (sometimes temporary) opponents exiled to Siberia (with the probable exception of Križanić). The fact that Fick returned to the court in 1743 makes his position in this tradition even more unusual, since the text was written with his memories of life in exile still fresh in his mind, while his hope for a new government position (unfulfilled) was already high.
To conclude, the document that appears below is an interesting example of how a personal, even biographical, perspective played out in a complex time of cultural turmoil and change. A person quite influential in shaping the new language of self-description of the Russian Empire, Heinrich Fick produced a text that rationalized the practices of the imperial state in a remote and culturally alien area. By doing so, Fick appropriated terms of description inherited from the earlier era, and laid the foundations for a long process of transformation of the languages of self-description in Eastern Siberia, a transformation that eventually led to Speranskii’s reforms and shaped Russian imperial policies for decades to come. At the same time, Fick’s memorandum stands out as one of the earliest examples of a compassionate depiction of Siberian peoples written by exiled intellectuals professionals, thus marking the beginning of yet another imperial language.

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Heinrich Fick’s memorandum was originally written in German, and preserved in the archive of Tartu University with other papers of Peter’s associate, after he had retired to Oberpahlen. The German version was published in 1930 by A. R. Cederberg. The Russian version, published below, was clearly intended to be a word-for-word translation. It is impossible to establish whether Heinrich Fick translated the text himself. The Russian language of the document and its heavily Germanized grammar suggests that this possibility cannot be ruled out. Alternatively, the Russian language of the document might reflect the desire of the translator (who was clearly not a professional) to follow the German version as closely as possible. The document is dated 28 February 1744. However, we might be too quick to assume that this is the date of the translation: the German original is dated similarly, and the date on the Russian translation might have been copied from the German text, whereas the translation could have been written later. Heinrich Fick died in 1750, and it is hardly likely that the document was translated after his death. Given that he retired to his estate in Livland after 1745, it is most likely that the document was produced after the German version of 28 February 1744 and before Fick’s departure for Livland. At the same time, it should be noted that the Russian language version is written in eighteenth-century handwriting, and, uncharacteristically, the title is not in bold or underlined. The latter seems to be a much earlier practice, which points to the possibility that the translation was completed in Siberia or by someone experienced in Siberian institutions. The document represents a manuscript on 36 leaves. It was preserved in the palace archival collections and given to the Russian National Library as part of the so-called “Hermitage collection” (Ermitazhnoe sobranie).