Tobolsk Mills: Siberia 1912
06. Feb, 2010 
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Mills in Ialutorovsk district of Tobolsk Province. Photographed by Prokudin Gorskii, 1912.
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Tobolsk was founded by Yermak Timofeyevich’s Cossacks in 1585-1586 during the first Russian advance into Siberia near the ruins of the Siberia Khanate’s capital, Qashliq. It became the seat of the Viceroy of Siberia and prospered on trade with China and Bukhara. It was there that the first school, theatre, and newspaper in Siberia were established. In The Further Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, Daniel Defoe made his Robinson Crusoe character stay in Tobolsk from September 1703 to June 1704. After the Swedish defeat at Poltava in 1709, large numbers of that war’s prisoners were sent to Tobolsk. They numbered perhaps 25 % (sic) of the population. This probably has to do with the Swedish Chamber, see below. Many POWs were not repatriated until the 1720s, and some of them settled permanently in Tobolsk.
After administrative division of the territory, Tobolsk remained the seat of the Governor-General of Western Siberia until the seat was moved to Omsk in the 1820s or 1830s. Bowing to the city’s authority, many Siberian towns, including Omsk, Tyumen, and Tomsk, had their original arms display the Tobolsk insignia. Omsk honors the legacy to this day.
Until the Russian Revolution of 1917, the city served as the capital of the Tobolsk guberniya. The chemist Dmitri Mendeleev and the painter Vasily Perov are the most famous natives of the city. Some of the Decembrists were exiled and lived there as well. The city’s importance declined when the Trans-Siberian Railway bypassed it in the 1890s. In August 1917, after the February Revolution, Tsar Nicholas II and his family were brought here to live in relative luxury in the former house of the Governor-General. After the White Army approached the city in spring of 1918, the royal family was moved to Yekaterinburg and shot there, ending the imperial Romanov dynasty.
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