Dec 12, 1993 - Their weapons were simple, but not crude, and their clothing was meticulously .... They simply evolved out of practical experience. ::·-j_~i}.
PART ONE Colonization, Industrialization and Cultural Renewal
I'·
;.:'i>A~r'ONE: Colonization,!ndustria\ization and Cultural Renewal
-.-,,\.:···
.
!{;~;~·{-)s.t of this study is based on the presentation of avast dati base of intervie\v material or its analysis ·::·;?'i}ill'&t~()f. Ho\vever, in order to provide a frame\vork for a survey \Vhich touches on the traditional ;i·:t:~if\felihood of many different peoples sc~tt.ered over a huge ar.ea of the. \Vorld's largest country, in effect, f(crprovide a cm~text for the r~ponses, it 1s necessary to outlme the history of these peopl~, especial'.y F':A_;:dt~ircontacts \Vlth their Russia conquerors that began some four hundred years ago and continues to tlus :,l(\'.~\iJay. lt is this history of events of the period since about 1590 that situates the position of these peoples
'ifoday.
,,'~;;f+o'.that
end, it is fortunate that, in the period since perestroika began in 1985, there have been several ,:'',f}c'
6~ria, for four hundred years, has been a fully integrated part first of the state of Muscovy, which then Imperial Russian En1pire, and \Vas transfor1ned into the Russian Soviet Federated Socialist
''.\i_~h1e-_the
,;,s~¢bublic during the Soviet era, and, since 1991, the Russian Federation. Unlike othei· regions of Russia, ":p0p~lation of Siberia is overwhelmingly Russian in its ethnicity; language and cultural. tradition. ;:;e;ver, there have also been significant pockets of indigenous peoples who have, since the late 1980s, qn to assert their rights and the legitimacy of their livelihood, language and culture.
'.·~;~hapter will examine the situation of these peoples during the period beginning with the initial 1?,ll9?ests by the state of Muscovy until the collapse of the Imperial Russian Empire during the events ',f;'Yqrld War I. It will examine the early years of conquest by outsiders and the requirement to pay a ~!(]).'Of tribute (yasak) to the central authorities. The second section will examine the situation of :-;~s~Si~'.~ alien peoples to den1onstrate that n1ost of these remote peoples had, in fact 1 a viable social
):~t~J;rrbased on clans, shamanis1n and numerous other ele1nentary aspects of a social systen1; and ho\v · iy··had survived for centuries in \Vhat outsiders considered a hostile environ111ent. Contact \Vith Russian :.vJ~l.ii.qg'raphers and Christian missionaries began to study these peoi)leS 1nore closely; these \vill be 7,ill),!Ji~~d in section 2.3 below. The fourth section will summarize the colonization of Siberia for h:~:·&P:~Jcµlt~ral purposes, necessitating many Northern peoples 1nigrating to other regions in order to '.f2i~~),ith,ue their traditional \Vay of life. · ifG< clergy, approved by government, established parishes and later churches to tend to the ",trial needs of settlers. Church and state officials were generally cooperative but at times they (b) Old Believers (Schismatics) trying to escape persecution in Russia would establish .. unities of their own that tended generally to be remote from other settlements. These would prove 'still active until 1917 and beyond, retaining most of their 17
>h~.stages through the payment of yasak or by taking an oath of allegiance (sher!) to become loyal yasak :'!f~yi9i; subjects of the tsar forever. Jn cases where indigenous inhabitants did resist the invaders, the
~.::;.~n,s-Sians \Vould use their superior kllo\vledge and technology to over\vhelm the oppositioll, killing most >-9f::the men, seizing the \Vomen, appropriating their food supplies, and forcing on the survivors an oath ::,of\eternal loyalty and an annual payment of yasak. All native men of Siberia and northern Asia (except >:iS?~verts to Russian Orthodox Christianity) \Vere required to pay yasak and JJontin;kf in pritne sable ·-.-.:-·~rs._14 -The amount of payment varied from region to region depending on availability. Later as stocks · :~~:-._
~;,_G.R_QSsi~n colonization beca1ne an intricate \Veb of n1utual dependency bet\veen the state and private ~ihCiividuals, among the military, hunters, peasants, craftsmen and 1nerchants.1\1any peasants, at f11·st, had . fi~i,nforcibly settled in areas of Siberia by government directives. Others were attracted by opportunities ~'ff,,J1~eeJand. "Peasants tended to 1nove on\vards in short stages, so their progression across Siberia \Vas Fs\Idden. It was more a trickle than a flood, for peaceful homesteads could be successfully built only ;;--er~ -there \Vas relative security, and \Vhere there \Vere kno\vn to be agriculturally suitable regions. ::jl'.:-i~;;·~-51~,sev_eral specific features. They did not harness the deer to sleds but rather transported goods 011 their "'" _?a9ks and even rode them; the does \Vere ntllked.26
. 25
AWAKENING SIBERIA. From Marginaliz>'.:,.·'sc:ittlers. Along with this po\ver \Vent a contemptuous attitude to~vards the natives as an inferior race.
:j;;.>;:·:·:··}-:lciv.•ever, as the adrninistration of this vast te1Titory evolved from conquest and fur trade to colonization
\:.st disappeared as a people, partly through assimilation to their stronger neighbours, but partly also - ~Use.of so many of their tnen folk being recruited as native auxiliaries in Russian 1nilitary campaigns aillst other native peoples, such as the Even along the coast of the Sea of Okhotsk. Other native qpJes that virtually disappeared from existence as a result of Russian colonialism were the Itel'men ;~amchatka and, eventually their southern neighbours, the Ainu. The Aleuts were largely annihilated '4he.Russians during the trans-Pacific adventure pursued by the Russians in pursuit of sea otter furs.47 j~erla
has for centuries also existed as a penal colony for forced labour or penal servitude (katorga) fid as a location for implementing several different types of political banishment (ssy/ka) that could ,i,~g'.~ from residency in a Siberian tO\Vll \Vhile under police surveillance to condemning criminals to live :i)i.png Siberia's natives and endure their prhnitive 'vay of life. Starting \Vith the First Northern War in J1e· 1650's and continuing until the end of the Soviet Union, Siberia has served as a destination for pr,~,jgn- prisoners of \Var, religious dissenters, statesmen, courtiers, generals, princes 'vho had fallen out Jffavour, and hundreds of thousands of ordinary citizens.48 During the period of the Russian Empire, ~ny banished people, depending on their offence, would often be given posts in the administration ~_e,c_~use of a shortage of educated people. Ho,vever, for those 1nen and 'vo1nen conde1nned to hard .l~!iour, they could expect to spend years at Siberian outposts. Many did not survive. Starting in the early l,']OO's, when Peter the Great began to send criminals to the recently opened silver mines around ~-~,~i~chinsk, these prisoners began to supply the human po\ver needed to \Vork a net\vork of ntlnes that ctVentually stretched from Siberia's Altai foothills to the north-eastern wastes of the Kolyma valley. •. ,i.;,;i'L~ter, Russian prison labour helped build the Great Siberian trakt and laid sections of the Trans-Siberian ::.:•)hilroad through the rough and remote lands east of Lake Baikal.
'r~~~,f'~~;/_;:;·~\yhile this sort of banishment 'vas con1n1on in the Russian period, it turned into a flood 'vhen the :~_olsheviks seized po\ver and began to designate huge numbers of its citizens as "enentles of the people."
29
AWAKENING SIBERIA.
From Marginalization to Self-Determination :lhe Small Indigenous Nations of Northern Russia on the Eve of the Millennium
These political prisoners were fed and housed wretchedly in Soviet slave labour camps. During the Soviet era, they built factories, hydroelectric dams, and cities. Those condemned under Stalin's vast Gulag system cut titnber and 1nined coal, iron ore, copper, and a dozen other nonferrous metals above the Arctic Circle to help take up the slack iu economic development that plagued the capital-poor Soviet regime. Forced labour thus became a vital link in the historical chain that connected Siberia's past \Vith its future.49 Const1uction began in 1891 on the Trans-Siberian railroad \Vhich \Vas to have an enorn1ous iinpact for transporting large numbers of emigrants from European Russia into the farthest reaches of Siberia. By 1900, the line extended to Irkutsk where it stopped at Lake Baikal. The period up to 1914 saw the 1·. completion of the Trans-Siberian railway all the way to Khabarovsk and Vladivostok which opened up the Far East for further settlement. This had a major influence on internal migration \Vithin Russia. Fro1n 1861 to 1914, approximately 3,800,000 people migrated and settled in Siberia and the Far East. The rate and size of the n1ovement \Vas spread unevenly over the period depending on a number of social and I. economic factors. Between 1861 and 1885, around 300,000 settlers crossed the Urals, about 12,000 a I year. With the abolition of serfdom in 1861, many peasants were driven by a desire for land and by the oppression of their landlords to migrate to the southern Ukraine, the Caucasus, Central Asia and Siberia. Legislation in 1889 provided grants and loans for those migrating to enable them to establish farmsteads. From 1886 to 1895, there were 611,000 immigrants to Sibeda, that is, more than 62,000 a yem: The building of the Trans-Siberian Railway, beginning in 1896, facilitated the movement of settlers into · Siberia. It also promoted the export of agricultural and other goods from Siberia to European Russia. Between 1896 and 1912, almost 1.8 million Russians left for Asiatic Russia, along with almost two million Ukrainians and a half million Byelorussians.
l
By the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th centuries, Siberia had become Russia's principal region for colonization.50 In settling this ne\v land, the migrants laid ne\v roads, built ne\v villages, cleared the forests for agriculture and cultivated crops. The major role in the economic develop1nent of Siberia from the mid 19th to early 20th century came to be played by peasants, workers and artisans. New territories came to be opened up with the development of agriculture, animal husbandry and associated cottage industries. Whereas those migrating to Siberia initially came primarily from the category of middle peasants, by the beginning of the 20th century, the vast majority of migrants were poor peasants seeking opportunities for prosperity in Siberia that had never been available to them in European Russia. Native peoples again had to aajust as vast new number of outsiders competed for the use of their traditional lands, waters and forests. Summary: Although the Imperial Russian Empire came to an end in 1917, it still set the framework as to how many indigenous peoples view their culture today and how they wish to re-establish it. Anthropologists have de1nonstrated ho\v vibrant indigenous culture had existed in a hostile environ1nent for centuries and flourished. Unlike the Soviet period, a number of independent studies by ethnographers, linguists and cultural historians took place and much of this material is still ger1nane for consideration in today's efforts to restore many of these national cultures. Endnotes
Dmytryshyn in A. Wood (ed.) 1991; 17. Wood 1991; 4. 3 lbid. 4 Ibid., 5. s Raymond H. Fisher (1943), The Russian Fur Trade 1550-1700; Berkeley; 109-19.
1
2 Alan
30
~,APTER 2: Conquest,Co!onization and Alien Cultures :_~;-
.~{ftlO doubt the proposition: 'Had there been no Siberian sable, there would have been no Muscovite empire,' is somewhat 'f~hdful, but there
is no gainsaying metropolitan Russia's early economic dependence on the resources of her Siberian
p~essions" Alan Wood 1991; 5.
ttilllytryshyn 1991; 17. Vakhtin (1992; 9) characterized this conquest of north Asia as being "accomplished more by a process of fo[lfiration than by military action but nevertheless the whole process had great impact on the life and fate of the Indigenous • pulation." ~;~ornytryshyn 1991; Golllns 1991; 40.
'!t~Dmytryshyn 1991; 22. ;•;t)oAJthough not an Integral part of the colonial administrative apparatus, Russian peasants played a vital role. Most were state ;]~[p?asants whom government settled near various fortifieq.outposts (ostroglj to grow food for the garrison and to form the nuclei of . \B!p§riiianent Russian s:ttlements in the colony. Many were killed In attacks on these fortifications by non-Russians as they Jived :.•§;·dµtslde the armed buildings. -Ibid.; 29. ;•~:,1:eomns in A. Wood (ed.) 1991; 39. 'f•'t'lJb/d. \1pmytryshyn 1991; 30-31. • \viiereas yasak was fur tribute payable to the Tsar (or central authortties in Moscow), pominild was tribute payable to the local .vemor or his entourage. Payment of either tribute could prove difficult omytryshyn 1991; 29. ''ibid.; 24-25.Also, Forsyth 1991; 78-79. !forsyth 1991; 80. . Wood 1991; 6. J.L Black, Ibid., provides a summary analysis of this internal exploration within Russia. :\1lf'orsyth (1992; 190-91) elaborates: "An event of great importance for the opening up of Siberia to Russian penetration ...The -., fear Moscow trakf was an enormous achievement, little sung in Russian history ... " ' Collins 1991; 40. ·-Yuri Slezklne 1994; 4. Much of this initial summary is from the opening chapter to his book. 'Ibid. 'ibid., 70.
~~.Pall A. Fondahl (1998) in her Jn-depth study described Evenki nomadlsm through the Russian, Soviet and post-Soviet period. ;sh~ furthermore
examined possibilities for many Evenki to returnto that way of life In light of legislation that was being
i~onsldered by the Russian Duma during the 1990s, legislation ultimately enacted.
;hlfmsyth 1991; 81-82.
-_l¥~tAlmost every Russian official In Siberia and In northern Asia, including cossacks and even priests, had native mistresses. }t~ually,
they were personal slaves and they were frequently bartered among masters."- Omytryshyn 1991; 29.
zf.1'.Forsyth 1992; 174-180.
'2' (:olllns 1991; 43. ')vood 1991; 9. ,ffUncoln 1994; 156. .)SlJ~coJn 1994, T/18 Conquest of a Continent, Chap. 18, "Governor-General Speranskil;" 155-62. Po/noye sobran/ye zakonov }lossirskoy Imperils 1649. T. 38. 1822-1823 gg. (complete Collection of Laws of the Russian Empire since 1649. Vol. 38, 1822}>1823) . .. , •..'"' Siezkine 1994; 84. Marc Raett (1956), Siberia and the Reforms of 1822. Seattle; 112-128; Stephen Watrous (1993) In Slezklne ;c:t:;;~Dlment (ed.); 113-132.
•tf}y:'The term "alien" was not legally defined; rather, the statute applied to all "alien trtbes who had been Identified as yasak people, [?,0'. !"eluding those who were not required to pay yasak anymore-as cited In Slezklne 1994; 85. Slezkine went on to add how the .•;>:;{ cJrcumpoJar hunters, gatherers, and reindeer herders were all Indisputably 'alien' and belonged to either the nomadic or the ' :,wandering category. They were administered indirectly with little interterence from the Russian authortties. Every encampment or
31
AWAKENING SIBERIA. From Marginalization to Self-Determination :The Small Indigenous Nations of Northern Russia on the Eve of the Millennium
settlement of 15 or more families had a permanent name with as little Russian Interference as possible. Among wandering aliens one man would often be appointed as liaison with authorities and gathering of yasak. Every effort was made in this legislation to' keep contact betv1een Russian officials and native nomads to a minimum with less harassing and arbitrary decisions over payments. " Slezkine 1994, 84-5. "Ibid., 88-89. 40 V.A. Kryazhkov 1996; 86-87. 41 Ibid., 87. " Slezkine 1994; 83. 43Kryazhkov1996; 86-87. " Forsyth 1992; 174-189. 45Forsyth1991; 87. "Ibid. 174-180.
47Forsyth1992; 150-153. "Lincoln 1994; 163-67. "In Chapter 23 on the Yukaghir people In Part Ill, our Interviewer came across a number of older respondents who remembered Inmates they had known at the Dal'stroy prison camp. so Leonid M. Goryushkln, "Migration, Settlement and the Rural Economy of Siberia, 1861-1914," in Alan Wood ed., 1991; 140-1.
32
~PTER 3
~~LISHING SOVIET HEGEMONY Pika and Proklwrov (1988) pointed out how some indigenous peoples continued to inhabit settlements that had been liquidated by the authorities and long considered abandoned. They wivte on how huge industrial development projects had caused destruction to the lands and ecology that Northern peoples depended on for hunting and reindeer husband1y; how fishing resources in many internal watenvays of the North were close to exhaustion. The authors asked, rhetorically, how the interests of the Northern population were being defended, only to reply abruptly: depressingly badly. _ pjka and Prokhorov (1988), "The Big Problems of Small Peoples," in Alexander Pika (1998), Neotraditionalism in the Russian North. '''ti\;iZation, to provide food and transport for ne\vcomers. Many Even children acquired an ~iion at one or inore of the ne\v schools created to benefit the Even, staffed by native teachers 'd at the Magadan College of Education. This pattern of subordinating the interests of Siberia's :':hiJµs peoples to those of the ever-expanding needs of the Soviet state \Vere repeated over and over ''throughout Northern Russia in the following decades.12 'tge industrial development projects initiated during the 1930s as part of the Communist Party's }ar plans under Stalin's dictatorship also enabled Siberia to acquire its greatest notoriety as the --\aestination for forced labour, exile and a series of concentration ca1nps. Millions of Russians ---- to be "enemies of the people" \Vere sentenced to years of forced labour and mass suffering under t;Lag (Main Prison Camp Administration) system. These people were transported to the camps, d"e$, mines, construction sites and \vhat \vere termed as the "forbidden zones" of the GULag 'nf~trative apparatus to \Vork and eventually die as slave labour.13 Many ne\v industrial complexes -~~4)n Siberia, in particular Magnitogorsk and the huge Urals-Kuznetsk iron and coal co1nbine in ('l)iberia, and the mineral-extracting ente1prises at Norilsk and Lolyma in the Far North, lay at the ~:Mart of the industrialization of the Soviet economy overall. While an exile system in Siberia had ~---_?eve.loped under the tsars, the GULag prison carnp administration and its sister organization, .€fl:oi; functioned on a massively different scale \vith its prisoners numbering in the millions.14 .~vents of the Great Patriotic War (1941-45) had a considerable impact on Siberia. Because so many · t:.:cities in European Russia \Vere under 1nilitary threat, much of the industrial production of the . t.Union was relocated to the North which again severely imposed on the native way of life. Whole "_,:-":rises and hundreds of factories \Vith their attendant \Vork-forces \Vere uprooted from European _fa_-- and replanted in Siberia, thereby guaranteeing continuing production of vital armaments, P-?ris, -aircraft and a1nn1unition. Thousands of ne\vcomers and vast quantities of equipment also edto Siberia. Russian industrial development in Siberia included additional mining of gold in order y. equipment, the develop1nent of lead, tin and other inetals, as \Vell as coal. Siberia made a inassive .ibution to the nation's war effort through the production and supply of military materials and as a ::_:~estination for the relocation of industry fron1 \vestern battlefronts and occupied zones.
:Ji1g .the \Var, thousands of native peoples across Siberia \Vere conscripted into aH-ethnic Soviet i!ary units, participating on the front in the same way as all other nationalities of the Soviet Union. _)8ry service placed an enormous burden on the rural economy \Vhere n1uch of the \Vork of fanning, :ii)~ and hunting had to be done by women, children and the elderly, who had to cope under harsh _diiions. Almost all of the food production went to the front. Reindeer herds were severely depleted '.their meat. Overall, the events of World War II confirmed even further that Siberia was an integral ~-=-Of ·Russia and ho\v the situation of the native peoples had become subordinate to the para1nount --~;ds of the metropolis.IS One result of the \Var \Vas the expansion of the Soviet Union in the Far East ,here, in 1945, it was to acquire all of Sakhalin Island from Japan, as well as the Kuril Islands.16
AWAKENING SIBERIA. From Marginalization to Self-Determination :The Small Indigenous Nations of Northern Russia on the Eve of the Mil!enn\J,""fl
After the \Var, the Soviet Union decided to exploit its large river systems \Vith huge hydro-electri~ projects although this \Vas accomplished on the \Vhole using 1nore acceptable n1eans for recruiting labour. With the death of Stalin in 1953, the GULag system in Siberia was dismantled and thousands of survivors returned hon1e. After this, large-scale industrialization came to be based on legitimateeconomic labour recruit1nent that brought large numbers of Russians, Ukrainians and other Soviet' citizens into Siberia and the Far East. Many of these settled more or less permanently in Siberia. Other , ne\vcomers \Votdd only \York at these industrial jobs for a fe\V years before leaving the North to return to their home region. The native population becan1e an ever s1naller minority \vithin their homelan.j regions. The once sparsely populated, native regions of Siberia were gradually being pushed back at th< edges, cut across by ne\V roads and raihvays, eaten into by seaports and river ports, so that the ethnk: n1ap sho\ved ever-shrinking islands of 'unassimilated' native Siberia.17 Massive hydro-electric dams were built on a number of Siberian rivers between 1955 and 1974 tb~ resulted in the flooding of huge areas of the Angara valley upstream from Irkutsk Bratsk and UstaIlimsk. Other dams created lakes of considerable size on the Zeya River in the Amur Region and the Vilui River in western Yakutia. The largest new mineral deposits were the oil fields in the middle Ob River basin of the Khanty-Mansi National Region, and the huge deposits of natural gas lying to the north of this in the Yamal-Nenets National Region. In the face of formidable natural obstacles, tk S\Va1nplands, forests and tundra of \Vestern and north-\vestern Siberia \Vere transformed into the centre' of the Soviet Union's most lucrative industrial development, \vith oil and natural gas exports accounting for over 50 per cent of the country's hard currency earnings. Ne\V explorations and drillings in the Far North, the construction of extensive pipelines delivering their revenue raising payload into the heart or: Europe, the expansion of old and the building of ne\v urban centres to acconunodate the soaring population, the laying of an extended transport and communications infrastructure in the inhospitable terrain of the oil and gas fields all continued to guarantee Siberian development a high priority on the Soviet Union's economic agenda.IS This industrial development involved large scale tree felling and earth removal that devastated considerable areas of West Siberian forest and tundra. The discovery of large iron ore deposits on the upper Lena River, and coal, copper and nickel farther to the east, led to the constrnction of a second Trans-Siberian raihvay, around the northern end of Lake Baikal, cutting across northern Buryati and southern Yakutia territory to Komsomolsk-on-Amur. Work on this Baikal-Amur Mainline (popularly known as BAM) began in 1974 and was completed in 1984. Where the BAM Railroad line had once been regarded as the project of the century, its economic usefulness never beca1ne apparent, leading many in the post-Brezhnev era to label it a 'white elephant.' 19 Traditional livelihood still had a presence during the 1930s. One result of the economic development of Siberia \Vas that the Soviet state continued to encourage its Native peoples to hunt and trap for fur· bearing anin1als. Animal skins \Vere \Vorth rnillions to the state, particularly in foreign trade. Little regard: was given to the protection of wildlife in this process. It was estimated that 14 to 16 million squirrels were killed each year during the 1930s; some 2,000 ermines could still be trapped in some areas. Some collective farms established a fur farm component that specialized in rnore expensive fur skins, such as silver fox. Much of this came to an end with the war. While regulations restricting the hunting of certain animals were introduced by the Soviet government from the 1920s onwards, these were widely disregarded both by hunters and la\V enforcement offices.20 Keeping to his long-tenn historical perspective of characterizi11g Siberia as a colony, Forsyth obsen·ed how it was only in the second half of the 2Qth century that the clash between the traditional way of life of the native people and the aims of the authorities in Moscow, had reached "truly annihilator)' proportions." 1\ventieth century technology had made it relatively easy to access and exploit natural resources in even the most rernote parts of Siberia. The "\vhole colony" \Vas subordinated to the
38
~.~ Laims of Mosco\v and its resources utilized as part of the 'national econo1ny.' Any consideration 1 ·-
