Whole caravans of country people and women intended for the Cossacks were sent to Siberia at government expense to promote agriculture and to accustom the Cossacks to a settled mode of life; this was accompanied by concessions in the payment of taxes.
In the interior of Siberia there was a great increase of the colonizing movement in the nineteenth century; from the thirties on especially there was a great number of exiles.
Among the causes for this decline, outside of the small natural increase of the aborigines, are such diseases as small-pox and typhus that have been introduced by Europeans, the injury done by brandy, the decline of the chase, and the steady advance of the Russian peasant.