The Siberian Land Survey and the Politics of Spatial Approximation

Empire–building in Asiatic Russia in the late Tsarist empire encompassed a complex set of measures. Yet its most fundamental component was about surveying and allotting land to both native residents and incoming settlers, a procedure called zemleustroistvo or “land organization”. A 1896 law regulated this procedure in the four Siberian governorates. It was the Russian counterpart of a process common to other settler societies. Despite its technicalities, land surveying can be regarded as a point of intersection between political/intellectual and social history, that is the locus where political design met complicated social realities and tried to transform them, most often with mixed results. Rules about tracing spatial boundaries reflected ideas about the rational use of resources or about justice, as well as social and cultural hierarchies to be implemented. This essay examines what Siberian land organization was supposed to accomplish and why it was conceived in its particular form, using a wide range of printed and archival sources both regional and central. Questions about legal title, survey scale, and allotment standards are discussed in order to better understand the logic of imperial rule. The article explains how and why Tsarist decision makers constructed a procedural framework marked by information deficiency, quantitative approximation and administrative ambiguity. It suggests that this approach was intentional and produced a fluid, semi–authoritarian, semi–negotiated dialectic of petitions and administrative responses, rather than a modernizing utopia imposed from above. By 1905, however, the politics of spatial approximation showed its limits and gave way to perceptions of an increasing administrative impotence in managing population and resources. This helps explain the urgency of the mobilizing, technocratic effort that marked the final years before the First World War.