Imperial officials who daydreamed about looking out the frosty windows of the Winter Palace onto a relentlessly well-organized and highly standarized state were in for disappointment.
Wedged in at the margins of the more-or-less regularized provinces of the empire were a handful of regions with what might be described as temporary, underdeveloped, or relatively autonomous administrative structures. These included the territory of the Don Cossack Host, the former kingdom of Georgia, the territory of the Caucasian mountaineers, the lands claimed by the Russian American Company on the North American continent (with the Aleutian Islands), Chukotka, the okrugs of Kamchatka and Okhotsk, and two chunks of land in remote northern Finland.
