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.
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 4.0 Unported License, permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.