The lack of bureaucratic funds in the state, especially in the outskirts, remoteness from the center, imperfect means of communication led to a forced deconcentration of power at all levels. The only force capable of keeping the local authorities from arbitrariness and abuse were traditional potestary organizations that arose spontaneously, as a result of the natural desire of society to self-organize. The central government was forced to rely on local societies and traditional institutions of self-government, using them as a lower level of power, endowing them with powers of power and retaining for them a certain degree of independence and basic principles of formation. The situation was aggravated in the conditions of the Asian border zones, where the low density, sparseness of the local indigenous population was combined with rather mobile and caste-diverse groups of newcomers. By the beginning of the 18th century. the rural population of the Tara district, more than a hundred years after the founding of the military, border center, retained the features of a frontier community. Moreover, the frontier zones or zones of contact between the indigenous and newcomers here remained not so much on the external borders, but inside the territory. The difference between the “forest frontier” and the “steppe” (conventionally, Omsk) was that the “flow” or “interspersion” of immigrants led to an interlacing arrangement of ethnically, confessional and class diverse groups. The steppe model assumed the delimitation of internal, inhabited and colonized territories and external only annexed, Cossack lines. Land contact and communications on this issue between settlers and indigenous people determine not only the complexity of delimitation of land, natural conflict situations, but also affects the emerging institutions and mechanisms designed to resolve disputes on the ground. As a source for identifying the problems of the emerging rural society in the Tara district, the Patrol book of the Tara district of 1701 was used. The research methodology is based on the main provisions of the institutional-regional approach proposed by A.V. Belt concept “geography of power”, covering the administrative-territorial and institutional structures of the region
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