Tomsk's voivode record - a chronicle or a departmental document?

A significant number of issues related to the history of the late Russian chronicles are still being discussed by historians. The objective of this paper is to study the following issues - definition of genre typology of The Tomsk's Voivode Record that accompanies a majority of manuscripts of the Tomsk's Version of Naryshkin's Edition of Siberian Chronicle Code. The tasks that are set in this paper are aimed at the establishment of the nature of The Tomsk's Voivode Record: whether it was a departmental document or a specific type of chronicle writings. A research technique used in this paper is based on the comparison of the list of the 17th century Tomsk's officials with the similar lists in registers from various editions of the afore mentioned chronicle code. Among them is a description of Russian towns and stockade settlements in Siberia. Dvina and Ustyug chronicles are also studied. Our conclusions prove that The Tomsk Voivode Record, like a register of Tobolsk administrators of the late 16th - first quarter of the 17th century that is preserved in the form of one manuscript only, cannot be regarded as an abstract from the Siberian Chronicle Code. It must be treated as an independent piece of writing. Therefore, it has to be compared with similar abstracts on Beryozov, Verkhoturia and Narym, which were well known to G. F. Miller. In all likelihood, the record was composed by Tomsk administration on the basis of official records. It was done to ascertain the succession and chronology of voivodes and deacons sent to serve in one of the major Siberian administrative clusters. Consequently, there are grounds to consider this work to be a piece of chronicle writings, though it should not be associated with the so-called town chronicles. As an administrative directory, composed in the 17th century as a typical form of annual entries, The Tomsk Voivode Record shows the ways in which late Russian Middle Ages documental sources influenced the contents and the style of chronicle writing.