Bureaucracy and Civil Servants of the Tobolsk and Tomsk Provincial Administrations of the late 19th – early 20th Centuries in the Spatial Dimension

Abstract

The effectiveness of the administrative apparatus in the frontier territories of the Russian Empire was among the most pressing issues. The functioning of any department largely depends on the staffing of its personnel. This article examines a broad group of civil servants at the regional level of two neighboring provinces: Tobolsk and Tomsk. By applying GIS technologies and constructing a multidimensional graph, the article provides the main characteristics of the civil servants, as well as migration trends during their service within the Russian Empire in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
 The analysis of historiography has revealed a tendency to examine civil servants of the highest rank. However, by including other full-time civil servants of lower positions into the sample, the representation appears somewhat different. Therefore, the obtained data requires new methods of examination, visualization, and verification. The database was compiled based on various published and unpublished materials, as well as collections from central and local archives.
 It was established that the portrait of the civil servant in the specified provinces differs due to the divergent ways of forming the personnel list. The geographical characteristics of the mobility of civil servants in the Tobolsk and Tomsk provinces also differ from each other. These newly found traits significantly affect the characteristics of the official apparatus.