The article analyzes the system of direct and indirect taxation of the indigenous population of the Central Asian suburbs of the Russian Empire on the basis of legal acts and records. It is emphasized that the tax policy in this ethnoregion was an important component of the process of its modernization and was implemented in line with the government's discussion on the rationalization of the economy of national suburbs, increasing the efficiency of using their resources and reducing the center's costs for their maintenance. In this regard, during the 70s of the XIX - first decade of the XX century, the state took various measures aimed at increasing the total amount of tax payments by the indigenous population of the Steppe region and Turkestan. In the end, the regional model of taxation has acquired a number of distinctive features, including: various ways of calculating and paying taxes to nomadic and settled populations, granting them preferences in paying both direct and indirect taxes. The author comes to the conclusion that the solution to the problem of profitability of the Central Asian tax model was significantly hindered by a number of objective factors: understaffing of tax authorities - land-tax inspections, imperfect legislation that restricts the ability of tax authorities to collect taxes, inertia of regional authorities, peculiarities of the structure of employment and income of the population, etc. As a result, government circles were forced to recognize that using only data on Russia's expenditures and revenues in the Central Asian region could not objectively reflect its role in the General Imperial economy. Therefore, on the eve of the First world war, they stopped looking for ways to increase its profitability by increasing direct and indirect taxation of the indigenous population.