In the article for the first time in the historiography the author analyzes tax system of the Kazakhs in comparison with the fiscal systems of other ethnic and social communities of the Russian Empire. The study found out that during the 19th century the issue of the Kazakh nomadic population registration procedure improvement, determination of the size of the so-called ‘kibitochny (nomad tent) tax’ and ‘zemsky dues», their distribution between fiscal units and uninterrupted delivery to the state treasury, repeatedly became the subject of attention of federal and regional authorities. Thus the tax system was considered one of the ways to integrate the nomads into the Russian social, economic and legal structure. However, taxation system existing in Kazakh community was considerably different from the imperial one and rather liberal. The amount of the taxes put the Kazakhs, as well as other members of national minorities of the Russian Empire, in a privileged position compared with the Russian peasantry, that the minorities had to be equal to in social and legal rights. All this allows to re-evaluate the effectiveness of tax system as a mechanism of integration into the imperial space.