The earliest mention of the tax is found in a letter sent by Ismail (a ruler of the Nogai Horde and ancestor of the Yusupov family) to Tsar Ivan IV in 1559, three years after Ivan's conquest of the Volga Delta and Astrakhan. The border between the two polities was not yet established, and Ismail complained that Ivan's governor of Astrakhan demanded yasak from those inhabitants of the delta that Ismail considered his subjects, "in grain from those who farm and in fish from those who fish".
When the Tsar failed to deliver due compensation or his presents were deemed insufficient or too cheap, the yasak-payers would voice their discontent. According to one 17th-century report, not only the yasak-gatherers were beaten, but the natives proceeded to "throw the sovereign's presents, and tie them onto dog's necks, and throw them into the fire, and they pay yasak with no courtesy, they kick it with their feet and throw it to the ground and the call us, your servants, bad people". On several occasions, such conflicts prompted the natives to rise in rebellion against the Muscovite government.
It was against this volatile background that the Tsar's officials worked to transform yasak from an exchange of items (the centuries-old concept inherited from the Khanate of Siberia and Golden Horde) into a fixed and regular levy, but the process took centuries to complete. In many frontier areas it turned out that "the regular supply of... presents to the local ruler and his nobles was, in fact, the only way to secure the natives' cooperation". In the basin of the Volga, yasak was replaced with a regular tax in the 1720s, and most of Siberia followed suit in 1822. A largely symbolic form of yasak continued to be levied from the nomadic peoples of Eastern Siberia (Yakuts, Evenks, Chukchi) until the Russian Revolution of 1917.
Most peoples of Siberia paid tribute on a house-to-house basis, but the Yakut people delivered it based on the number of cattle in each household, while the Bashkir people paid yasak on the basis of a land census. Yasak was payable in sables, red foxes, beavers, martens; cattle was also allowed as payment in some circumstances. Yasak payments formed the basis for Russia's fur trade with Western Europe.
The Siberian Prikaz was responsible for yasak collection in Muscovite Russia. In 1727, an ukase decreed that yasak could be paid in cash, but this measure was found to be less than profitable for the imperial treasury and, twelve years later, it was revoked. The Cabinet of Ministers then decreed that yasak be paid in sables, or, in the absence thereof, in other furs.
Catherine the Great undertook a reform of yasak collection by instituting a number of "yasak commissions", with the head office located in Tobolsk. In 1827 the task of yasak collection was entrusted to two principal yasak commissions, one for Eastern Siberia and another for Western Siberia, whose activities were regulated by a special statute.
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Category:Russian Empire Category:Taxation in Russia Category:Economic history of Russia Category:History of Siberia Category:Fur trade
es:Yasak fr:Iassak nl:Jasak ru:Ясак fi:Jasakki zh:牙薩克This text is licensed under the Creative Commons CC-BY-SA License. This text was originally published on Wikipedia and was developed by the Wikipedia community.
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