Ethnic Peoples Populating the Russian North Are Extremely Diverse

But as the economic and cultural pressure to assimilate into the greater Russian population increases, their remoteness makes it ever harder for them to maintain unique identities and traditions.

Fifty thousand people—a number that could easily fit inside many sports stadiums—is the upper threshold for defining an “indigenous small nation” in Russian terms. There are approximately 40 such nations in Russia, according to Professor Igor Nabok of the Institute of Nations of the North at the St. Petersburg’s Herzen State University. These peoples—along with their larger neighbors, such as the Yakuts and the Buryats (both over 400,000 strong)—are mostly found in Siberia, the Far East, and the Far North.

The diversity among these groups is striking. The Paleo-Siberian peoples, such as the Chukchi and Itelmen, are of great antiquity and belong to a language group not demonstrably related to any other. The Khanty and Mansi, two small peoples isolated near the Ob River, are the closest linguistic relatives to the Hungarians. The Yakuts, who occupy some of the coldest territory on Earth in northern Siberia, are in fact a Turkic people. The small Tungusic peoples, such as the Udege and Nanai, are the linguistic kin of the Manchus, who conquered China and gave that country its last imperial dynasty. These nations represent a range of religious traditions—shamanistic, Orthodox, Islamic, Buddhist, and syncretistic (mixing elements of different religions). However, their remoteness from Russia’s Slavic heartland has not saved them from all kinds of economic and cultural pressure; and it’s an open question as to whether they will be able to maintain their distinctiveness.

What it takes to survive

Nabok said that it is impossible to give an objective scientific answer to the question of these peoples’ long-term survivability. However, many factors are contributing to changes in their situation. It is remarkable, given the forces acting on them in the last century or so that many of them maintain both a strong sense of identity and a dedication to a traditional way of life.

Soviet policies both promoted the viability of the peoples of the North and damaged them. On the one hand, the Soviet Union brought literacy, some degree of economic development, and state subsidies. On the other hand, the economic basis for many peoples’ existence was restructured in often harsh ways—nomads were forced to become permanent settlers, and many indigenous people were subjected to collectivization. The Soviet policy of mixing children from different small nations together in boarding schools, so that they were educated separately from their native communities, led to language loss and a weakening of ethnic identity. The general economic collapse of the 1980s and 1990s meant a plunge into disorder and poverty. While the situation has begun to improve in some respects, challenges remain.

The question of identity is not simple, and confounds a number of assumptions. Such traditional pillars as language, religion, and ancestry are not necessarily reliable guides. Sofia Sorokina, a colleague of Nabok at Herzen University, provided an example based on her field work among her own nationals—the Evenks—in their homeland near the Laptev Sea, deep in northern Siberia. The Evenk villagers have forgotten their own language and undergone a linguistic shift—but not to Russian. Rather, they adopted Yakut, the most widely spoken local language. However, they do not identify as Yakuts, because their cultural traditions and habits remain what they were for centuries.

Identity can also be complex and multivalent. The situation on the Yamal Peninsula, is a case in point. Here people are prone to identify themselves in three ways—as having an ethnic identity (“we’re Nentsy” or “we’re Khanty”), and a national identity (“we’re citizens of Russia”), but also a regional one (“we’re Yamalians”).

As if highlighting their distinctiveness from the general Russian population, the demographics of the Northern peoples are also notably different. Their birth rates are significantly higher. It is normal for families to have three or four children. Since the last Soviet census in 1989, 18 of the small indigenous peoples have recorded an increase in their numbers. However, these facts should not be taken as an unambiguous sign of good health. Their death rate is also much higher, and lives often shockingly shorter. Among the Koryak people of Kamchatka, life expectancy is only between 40 and 50 years—the lowest in Russia. Suicide, in particular, plagues many of these communities, and is fueled by high rates of alcoholism and depression. Pavel Sulyandziga, the vice president of the Russian Association of Indigenous Peoples of the North, points to cultural factors as playing a role as well. “In the Caucasus, if somebody offends you, you take it out on him. But in the North, if somebody offends you, you take it out on yourself.”

Anchored in the cold

Despite these pressures, migration is not a crucial issue among the indigenous peoples of the North. “We have to distinguish between two population groups in the North,” said Sulyandziga. “There are the people who moved there for economic reasons—mostly ethnic Russians—and there are the indigenous peoples.” The former group is more inclined to leave the North for good; the latter show no particular desire to do so, preferring to maintain their traditional way of life when possible. About 90 percent of the indigenous people live in rural areas. The economic basis of their lives has not changed much over the centuries: they still make their living raising cattle, herding reindeer, hunting and fishing. The ancient modes of life continue, although the form they take has been upgraded in certain respects. “People used to get around on dogsleds,” said Sorokina. “Now they use snowmobiles instead.”

Those who do migrate to the cities face assimilative pressures, and how they deal with those pressures is an individual matter. Since such migrants are few and their nations are small, they lack the institutions that one finds among larger minorities in Russian cities. Nor can they be bundled together in a general “Northern group”—each of these cultures differs greatly from the others. They look different, and this sometimes makes them targets of ethnically-motivated attacks; two students at the Institute of Nations of the North have been killed by racist gangs in recent years. As Nabok says, “A Russian in St. Petersburg can forget who he is; for a member of a Northern nation, that’s not possible.” In Siberian cities, there is a greater degree of tolerance—the indigenous people are considered as “locals,” and inter-ethnic relations are better.

If cultural and ethnic identity continues to hold despite changes and there is no rush to escape from the traditional homeland, it still does not mean that the future of these small nations is secure. Probably the biggest threats to these people’s integrity come in the economic sphere, and are exacerbated by Russia’s weak legal system.

Legally vulnerable

The Russian North may be vast and empty in popular imagination, but the ecosystem it hosts can be fragile. Thus the ongoing development of the oil and gas industry has potentially dire ramifications for the viability of ancient communities. Although this development has obvious positive aspects—investment and jobs—it carries dangers of its own. For instance, laying a pipeline through a river might have devastating consequences: vibrations from the pipeline scare away all the fish, and suddenly a populace that has survived over the centuries by fishing, loses its means of subsistence. There is also the question of control. As the large companies move in, the indigenous inhabitants become increasingly alienated from their land, as power over it passes into the hands of outside forces.

According to Sulyandziga, however, current economic threats come more from other types of business now that the major oil and gas companies have divided the land among themselves. In particular, firms engaging in activities related to hunting and fishing are taking control of lands long used by indigenous people. Charges of rigged auctions and bureaucratic pressure abound, irrespective of what the law actually says. Thus the issue of protection of indigenous peoples’ rights bumps up against the law enforcement realities of Russia.

Sulyandziga states that there are substantial differences in efficiency of governance across Russia’s patchwork of ethnic regions, districts and republics. “In Yamal, for example, the Nentsy have an effective leadership, and local government follows the laws,” he says. He also cites oil-rich Khanty-Mansiysk as a place where the indigenous communities have produced strong and efficient leaders, able to defend their own interests in negotiations even with such industrial giants as Gazprom. But in other regions, the situation is different. Sorokina claims that in the Amur region, for example, there is no effective government policy regarding the indigenous nations, and people are thus “abandoned” to their own devices. Sulyandziga sums it up like this: “The key to the fate of the Northern peoples is held by two hands. One hand is the state; the other is the Northern peoples themselves. Right now, the state isn’t helping very much.”

However, the peoples themselves may be taking up the slack. The Institute of Nations of the North continues to look to the future, preparing a new cadre of teachers and experts who expect to return to their native lands. “We’re not talking about the extinction of peoples,” says Nabok, “but about an identity crisis among them”—which is, after all, a natural consequence of social change