The article is devoted to the historiography of the incentives for the mass Christianization of the indigenous population of Siberia, which unfolded in the first quarter of the 18th century. It is pointed out that although certain aspects of conversion of Siberian aborigines to Orthodoxy have been studied in sufficient detail, its reasons, firstly, rarely fell into the field of academic view, and secondly, they were described and evaluated in different ways. The article examines the approaches to this issue of pre-revolutionary Russian, Soviet and modern Russian specialists. The authors reveal differences and similarities in their assessments and interpretations, and note the breadth of the range of opinions. It is concluded that the latter is connected both with the basic ideological and methodological attitudes of representatives of various schools and traditions, and with their subjective assessments of the activities of Peter I and his reforms.