In the Russian language - as it has developed historically - quite a lot of borrowings from Turkic dialects. This word is not an exception . What is yasak? Like many terms of our "great and mighty" with you, it has several meanings at once. Which ones? Let's get it right.
What is yasak in history?
From the languages ​​of Turkic tribes, this word is literally translated as “tribute” or “tax” (and in Mongolian “zag” means “power” at all). A similar filing was collected for a rather long time - from the 15th to the 19th century (at the very beginning) - from the peoples of the North and Siberia, and in the 18th - also from the peoples living in the Volga region. What is yasak? This definition has passed into the Russian language since the conquest of Siberia. And then it was actively used by the people and in the public service.
How was the collection?
What is yasak, and how was it charged? He was paid as usual in kind, that is, not in cash, but mainly with fur, “soft junk” (this word meant at that time not only goods - mined skins of fur animals, but also monetization for settlements with the treasury, for “salary” "Civil servants). Tribute was paid to the treasury: sables and foxes, martens and beavers, other fur (in some cases, even cattle). Furs represented a very important source of income for the state treasury, as well as a rather serious article of trade export.
Tax conditions
At first, the assembly was in charge of the so-called Siberian order. And already from 1763, fur-junk began to enter the Imperial cabinet - an institution that was in charge of the personal property rights of the royal family in Russia from the beginning of the eighteenth to the beginning of the nineteenth century. What is yasak for those times? Tribute was assigned to each tribe / clan separately, looked at hunters and their crafts. The payment of tribute was a heavy burden, and “service people” (tax officials) collected it with a “profit”, that is, they allowed various abuses and oppressed the foreigners, allowing, for example, replacing one furs with soft junk of other types (as a rule, sable skins were highly valued ) What did the word yasak mean for representatives of many northern tribes? Of course, the tax in some cases was simply overwhelming, leaving the fur producers themselves below the poverty line.
Money equivalent: “Three rubles for sable!”
Constant complaints from foreigners to the appropriate authorities in 1727 served as the basis for the issuance of a decree that permitted the replacement of furs with the corresponding monetary equivalent. The northern miners were delighted, but soon the replacement of this bribe with money was recognized as unprofitable for the state treasury. And in 1739 a resolution was adopted by the then Cabinet “to take yasak with sable.” It was written: “If the sable (meaning the skins of the extracted animals) is not enough, it’s necessary to get another soft junk.” Also, the well-known proverb “Three rubles for sable” came from there: in places where it was impossible to find sables or other junk, it was ordered to take in monetary terms - 3 rubles per skin.
Continuation of a story
The abuse of the so-called "yasachniks" - collectors of this tax - did not stop. Northern peoples suffered from robbery and ruin from their superiors. By the way, another famous expression - “Fight in three skins” - according to some scholars of the Russian language, also has “linguistic” roots. The Russian government in 1763 considered it necessary to introduce a strict report and order into this service. For this purpose, a military official Shcherbachev was sent to Siberia. The people under his leadership should have compiled a general census and henceforth more properly tax the inhabitants of the North. The special commissions formed by Shcherbachev developed the following taxation rules: each of the genera (or uluses) was taxed with certain types of furs, once and for all evaluated. As an option: in cash. In case of “non-production” of “salary animals”, it was allowed to replace them with other types of furs or money at the cost specified in the directory.
And already at the beginning of the nineteenth century, again had to change the size of taxation yasak. The reason was simple: both the financial situation and the number of “tribes of foreigners” forced to pay tribute decreased significantly. The compilation of salary books on yasak was taken up by the corresponding commissions formed in 1827 in Eastern and Western Siberia. The division of tribes into settled, nomadic, and vagrant tribes established by the charter was adopted as the basis for the taxation procedure worked out again. According to this charter, some tribes continued to pay furs (or money for each animal skin) until the beginning of the twentieth century.
Conditional cry and church bell
And what is yasak? According to Dahl's dictionary, this is a conditional identification (or watch) cry. A similar sign was used to sound the alarm. Or the signal. For example, the Statute of the Warrior prescribed “all care” —that is, watchmen and yasaks. And also: yasak - a small bell in the church, which signals the bell ringer - when to stop and when to start ringing.