The article presents the folding mechanisms in the Ministry of internal Affairs of certain practices to manage ethnoregions of the Kazakh Steppe as the process amied to the task to preserve the structural relations of the Empire in the historical conditions of acquisition, integration and expansion of the Central Asian territory in southern and south-eastern directions. The territorial- administrative borders of the Ural, Turgay, Akmola and Semipalatinsk regions reveal the bases of diagnostics of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, where the ethnoconfessional dominant played a crucial role in determining the threat of disintegration of the "the Borderlands". Attention is focused on the position of the Ministry of Internal Affairs which adhered to the "balance of power" in balancing the circumstances of internal and external nature. Bidirectional diagnosis is presented through the analysis of the foreign policy activity of generalgovernors and the opposition to "moderators" of colonization events. The emphasis is placed on the confrontation between the logics of state-building ("active integration") and "protective policy". The basis for the relevant decisions of the Ministry of Internal Affairs was the religious activity of the Kazakh population and a measure of its "religious sensitivity" that bordered on "fanaticism".