PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

THIS BOOK IS THE RESULT OF MANY HAPPY coincidences and long friendships. In 1999, as an undergraduate ethnology student at Tartu University, I traveled to the Nenets Autonomous Region on the invitation of Nenets poet and artist Prokopi Yavtysyi (1932–2005), whom I had met on his visit to Estonia. This cheerful, talented man, who tirelessly worked to make the suppressed Nenets language and culture more visible, took me to a collective farm reindeer-herding unit in his childhood lands of the Malozemelskaya tundra. This Vyucheiskiy kolkhoz brigade consisted of five men and one woman who were working as paid shift workers away from their families. Prokopi left me there and flew himself with some regional officials for a Reindeer Day to the Yamb-To Nenets, five hundred kilometers further east in the Bolshezemelskaya tundra. When we met again in Naryan-Mar, Prokopi told me of dignified Nenets families who had never been collectivized and who lived in the tundra with their children and private reindeer. As I soon learned, these nomads were unique in the entire Russian Arctic because, unlike the others, they had not been registered with the state institutions and were not school educated during the Soviet period. Prokopi’s vivid description of these proud yedinolichniki or Independents, as if “from the old times,” made me wish to find out more.

A year later, I met Lyudmila Taleyeva in Tartu, a Nenets graduate student of linguistics, who in summertime worked as a teacher in the Yamb-To nomadic school. She gave me information about the migration routes of the Independents and told in more detail about the ongoing proselytization by Russian and Ukrainian missionaries—something Prokopi had mentioned with noticeable regret in his voice. It turned out that many of those never Sovietized Nenets were undergoing a rapid cultural change, as if trying to catch up with the collective farmers in their own way. In December 2000, I took a train to the dark Vorkuta, once the notorious Stalinist labor camp area, and contacted the Baptist pastor Pavel and his family; he welcomed me in his home and prayer house. Pavel introduced me to Ivan, the unofficial leader of the Yamb-To community and the first Nenets convert, who had been a member of the church for five years then. Ivan became a friend who introduced me to his kin in the tundra, among whom some had and many were about to become members of the Baptist church.

Over the years, I made eight field trips (last time in 2017) and spent altogether a year and a half in the area. Most of the time, I lived in the Yamb-To community with newly converted Baptist families. In 2007, I also spent four months with a family that was undergoing conversion to Pentecostalism in the neighboring Ural community of Independents. Furthermore, I also stayed for shorter periods with religiously divided families or with those who resisted the missionaries’ attempts and were called yazychniki, “pagans.” From time to time, I spent an occasional week in Vorkuta or some other settlement, often with Nenets herders looking for necessary provisions as well as attending Baptist and Pentecostal church services.

I am very grateful to the many people in the tundra who shared their tents, reindeer, food, and world with me. It is impossible to mention them all. I owe an enormous debt to the Nenets reindeer herders I lived with—especially to the Veli and Laptander families—who generously accommodated me in their camps, provided me with their insights, and gave gifts ranging from a reindeer coat to harness reindeer. Ngarka vada! I am also indebted to the friends in Naryan-Mar, Vorkuta, and Vorgashor, who invited me to stay in their homes and provided practical assistance, especially the Stetsyuk family, Lyudmila Taleyeva, and the late Prokopi Yavtysyi.

I thank the Baptist and Pentecostal pastors and congregants in Vorkuta, who—despite their frustration with me not converting and my regret of seeing them destroying animist cultural heritage—let me observe their church life and have conversations with them over the years. Being a constant object of evangelization gave me a good understanding of what it means to be targeted in a mission encounter. In Naryan-Mar, I want to thank officials from the Nenets regional administration and Vladislav Peskov for making my entry into the closed border zone on the coast of the Arctic Ocean possible.

I owe a deep debt of gratitude to Piers Vitebsky for his remarkable guidance and limitless support over the years. I benefited greatly from discussions of my work in progress in his Magic Circle seminar at the University of Cambridge. I want to express my thanks to the seminar participants, among others to Barbara Bodenhorn, Ludek Broz, Paul Connerton, Prudence Jones, Janne Flora, Elena Khlinovskaya Rockhill, Tania Kossberg, Terto Kreutzmann, Evelyn Landerer, Eleanor Peers, Madeleine Reeves, Hugo Reinert, Vera Skvirskaja, and Olga Ulturgasheva. The Scott Polar Research Institute in the University of Cambridge, with its wonderful library and bibliographer Isabella Warren, was the perfect setting in which to base my research. I also thank King’s College for providing a home to me and my family. For funding my research, I am grateful to the Gates Cambridge Trust, the Archimedes Foundation in Estonia, the Cultural Endowment of Estonia, the Estonian Science Foundation, and the Centre of Excellence in Cultural Theory at Tartu University. The writing up has been enabled by the Estonian Research Council grant PRG1584.

I am particularly grateful to Fenella Cannell, Tim Jenkins, Alex King, Karina Lukin, Joel Robbins, Nikolai Ssorin-Chaikov, and Florian Stammler for their valuable comments on reading earlier drafts of the book. I also want to thank Matthew Engelke, Roza Laptander, Mathijs Pelkmans, Sergei Sokolovskiy, Katherine Swancutt, and Konstantinos Zorbas, who all read parts of my research at various stages and made perceptive comments. Any shortcomings that remain are entirely my responsibility. I have also received useful suggestions and help from Tatiana Bulgakova, Stephan Dudeck, Jenanne Ferguson, Patty Gray, Toomas Gross, Otto Habeck, Caroline Humphrey, Kirill Istomin, Jeanne Kormina, Igor Krupnik, Yelena Liarskaya, Igor Mikeshin, Aleksandr Panchenko, Patrick Plattet, Tapani Salminen, Elo-Hanna Seljamaa, Sergei Shtyrkov, Anna-Leena Siikala, Tatiana Vagramenko, Nikolai Vakhtin, Virginie Vaté, Aimar Ventsel, Vladislava Vladimirova, Maria Vyatchina, and Rane Willerslev.

In Estonia, I am especially grateful to Eva Toulouze, Liivo Niglas, Art Leete, Ülo Valk, Piret Koosa, and Taavi Tatsi, who for more than twenty years have not only offered support and constructive criticism but also their friendship. For various kinds of help, I should also like to extend my thanks to my colleagues in the Arctic Studies Centre, the Department of Ethnology, and the Department of Estonian and Comparative Folklore at Tartu University.

For editing my English, I need to thank Daniel Edward Allen. At Indiana University Press, thanks are due to my editors, Sophia Hebert, Bethany Mowry, and Nancy Lightfoot and others in this highly professional editorial team.

I am grateful to my extended family, including my brother Hannes and sister Mari, and their partners and children, who all play a huge role in my life. My mother and father, Ene and Arvo Vallikivi, have offered their unconditional love, encouragement, and inspiration. As part of a “class enemy” family my father was deported in 1949 to Siberia with his mother and brother. He spent his teenage years in the Novosibirsk area and then moved to Kolyma in 1954, where my grandfather had survived seven and a half years in the infamous gold mining camps. The family was not allowed to return to Estonia for another five years (until 1958). However, my father, who finished secondary school in Susuman and got a “clean passport” by mistake, managed to return after half a year. Back in Estonia, he soon became a writer who gradually developed interest in Finno-Ugric and other ethnic minorities in the Soviet empire. The stories he shared as well as our childhood family trips in Estonia and beyond instilled in me a deep curiosity about Indigenous cultural worlds. I am also grateful to my late maternal grandparents, Leida and Johann Kitse, with whom I grew up in Viljandi and whose many words and silences I carry with me to this day.

Last, but by no means least, my deepest thanks go to my wife, Juta, and to our three children, Johannes, Leen, and Oskar, who have supported my work throughout its long course with their actions, thoughts, and love, and to whom I dedicate this book.