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Abstract. The article is devoted to social interactions research, particularly to dependency relations in the Kalmyk society of the 17 th -19 th centuries in the context of a discussion about social structure of nomadic people. The scientific relevance of the research is due to the fact that these problems remain understudied and controversial. Nomadologists disagree on many issues of nomads' social organization in general and individually that of the Kalmyks. There still remains some influence of former methods and social formation in the study of the Kalmyks' social system. The analysis of law sources, especially the Mongol-Oirat laws of 1640, is particularly important. A given assessment of these laws served as the basis for ideas of many researchers. During the operational period of Ministerial committees, which were preparing the draft law on the abolition of dependency relations in the Kalmyk society, a consensus was formed: the essence of mandatory dependency of common Kalmyks is expressed as the right of Kalmyk upper classes to collect money from their dependent Kalmyks. As long as this law had the nature of a property, it could be concluded that its abolition needed to be rewarded. Obviously, the government understood and emphasized the difference between "mandatory relations" in the Kalmyk society from serfdom in the Russian countryside. Some researchers have turned their attention to the role of the Russian government in legal arrangements of Kalmyk privileged classes' possessory interest, which in our opinion, resulted from its attempt to organize relations in the Kalmyk society by using "familiar" means and methods.
The article describes the trends of the development of Kalmyk nomadic economy in the late XIX -early XX centuries. Based on the degree of the scrutiny of the problem, the authors have implemented the following tasks: they described the changes in the development of Kalmyk nomadic economy, revealed their causes and analyzed their consequences. The article is based on the use of a large range of literature and sources, many of them are archival materials. The most important among them are the materials of annual reports of the Administration of the Kalmyk people of the Astrakhan province and the chief police officer of nomadic peoples of the Stavropol province. In some cases, the authors used observations and notes of the researchers, contemporaries of the described events. An analysis of the specific material revealed that in the late XIX -early XX centuries the most significant changes related to the transition to a settled way of life and to market conditions occurred in nomadic Kalmyk economy in the process of integration of the region into all-Russian market. During the period under study the number of animals increased, species content of the herds changed (there was an increase in the number of cattle and fine-wool sheep and stabilization of the number of camels and Kalmyk breed sheep). Kalmyk population was engaged in laying in fodder for the winter, breeding animals, building reservoirs for livestock. In some areas of Kalmykia, an intensive transition to agriculture took place.
The development of the Kalmyk farming in the late 19th-early 20th centuries is analyzed in the present article. Special attention is paid to the problem of effective management in arid climate and marketization of the region. The article considers the indicators of Kalmyk nomadic farming development, estimates stocking level in the period under review and establishes the impact of market conditions on nomadic farming development. The article employs a wide range of sources and literature. The results demonstrate that the Kalmyk cattle-breeders ran their farms efficiently in arid climate taking market fluctuations into account. That was the indication of sufficient economic efficiency and ecological suitability of that type of economic management in the late 19th-early 20th centuries.
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