1

DYNAMICS OF AVOIDANCE AND ENGAGEMENT

Russians: The Dangerous Lutsaq

This chapter is on Sovietization and its absence as well as subsequent developments over the course of the early post-Soviet years. During the decades of Soviet modernization, the Independent reindeer herders came to be different from their neighbors (nomadic collective farm workers or newly sedentarized villagers), as they created their own Arctic “nonstate space” (Scott 2009, 13). I shall give an overview of the history of the Nenets reindeer herders who chose concealment from the Soviets and who, for reasons to be explained, were successful in this. These Independents lived distinct lives in many respects.

By the late Soviet period, most Nenets working in collective farm brigades (brigady) or living in villages had become subjects molded by state policies and Communist values and micromanaged through everyday institutional practices. The generations whose parents had suffered from Stalinist repressions had grown up in a new state and social system they had come to see as “a fact of life” (Gray 2005, 96). However, the elusive Independents had by and large sustained a precollectivization way of life, with the family-based herding of private reindeer. They maintained a typical pattern of migration of the small-scale herders whose animals numbered rather in tens than hundreds; this amount enabled only limited mobility and required extensive fishing and hunting (Babushkin 1930; Kertselli 1911; see also Klokov and Zayker 2010; Krupnik 1976, 1993). By the late Soviet period, many, especially the younger generation of Independents, came to perceive themselves as left behind in the rapidly changing world around them. I would suggest this is why they have tried to break out of their isolated way of life and set up relations with outsiders.

The wider argument I shall make is that religious conversions are linked—at least for the younger generations—to a sense of marginality in the community of Independents.¹ However, reasons for conversion are never singular, nor do they stay the same over time. As Robbins (2004, 86) argues, “The motives that initiate the process of conversion are often transformed as it progresses” (cf. Hefner 1993b, 18). His dynamic model of conversion ties together two dominant analytical approaches, which he calls “utilitarian” and “intellectualist.”² While the first offers political and economic advantages, the second stresses how a changing world is made meaningful through adopted exogenous categories. These approaches can be successfully juxtaposed, as Robbins (2004, 87) notes, “Good at explaining the initial impetus toward conversion, the utilitarian approach gives way to the intellectualist one when it comes time to explain why in some cases people stay with the new religion and come to engage it deeply.” Even if we may doubt whether things necessarily stand that neatly, especially when thinking of the intricately woven new ideas, fears, hopes, (in)conveniences, and constraints that conversion is known to entail, I find this model a useful heuristic for sorting wider social contexts and particular religious developments. In this chapter, I shall look at the initial phase, or impetus for conversion, by examining the experience of the Nenets reindeer herders in the Soviet period. In the next chapter, my focus shall be on the post-Soviet context and deeper engagement with the new religion, or the second stage.³

I would argue that to break through their perceived isolation, the Independents have been searching for empowerment from the outside world while trying not to be submerged by its influence. My focus in this chapter is on two brothers from the Veli family—Ivan, the first convert, and his elder brother Andrei, the second convert and later presbyter of “the Nenets church.” Ivan has come to be engaged in business projects and set up relations with administrators hoping for some kind of improvement in his and his kin’s lives. In this setting, Christian missionaries Ivan met on the path proved well adapted to offer a sense of empowerment and likely more trustworthy than state agents, who carry with them a history of interference and violence from the past. I shall suggest that conversion offers to the Independents a sense of dignity, a rough equivalent to what among collective farmers is glossed with the Soviet term “cultured” (kul’turnyy) or “civilized” (tsivilizovannyy). There has been a constant struggle to find a balance between leading the old way of life in the tundra (living with reindeer; the men, women, and children gathering around the hearth; etc.) and becoming different kinds of person as a result of the changes that Christianity and modernity offer.

Although much of the Soviet empire was governed by a central ideology and set of rules, there were remarkable differences in the ways in which regions were managed, especially in the post-Stalinist Soviet period (see, e.g., D. Anderson 2000; Balzer 1999; Grant 1995; Gray 2005; King 2011; Vitebsky 2005; Wiget and Balalaeva 2011). This was the case with the neighboring Nenets “national” regions, that is the Nenets Region and Yamalo-Nenets Region, where directives from Moscow were differently implemented due to an interplay of various factors (ethnic composition, regional leadership, economic structure, vast distances, etc.). West of the Urals in the Nenets Region, the full-scale sedentarization campaign—from the late 1950s until the 1980s—turned men into shift workers, who spent a month or two in the tundra and as much time in the village, often drinking heavily. Their wives, parents, and children were moved from nomadic tents into Russian-style log cabins, where they were alienated from tundra life, herding, and reindeer. This policy was carried out to increase control over the local economy and Indigenous population under the labels of “rationalization of production” and “raising the cultural level of the Indigenous population” (Khomich 1966, 261; Lashov 1964). As a result, the family-based nomadic way of life remained in only a few pockets of the region. East of the Urals, in the Yamalo-Nenets Region, mobile pastoralism was (and still is) considerably more viable (Stammler 2005; Golovnev et al. 2018).

In the following, I shall map out the Nenets’ relationships with outsiders—especially Russians (lutsaq). In the perception of Nenets nomads, there are largely two kinds of human others who have enabled them to craft their local sense of themselves. These are other reindeer-herding peoples, who have specific names, and nonreindeer-herding peoples, who are all labeled lutsaq—the word marking a fundamental kind of alterity in a world split into nomadic and settled ways of life. This division is manifest not only in lifeways, but also in language, race, colonial experience, and ideas about origins.

Ivan and Andrei’s brother Yegor explained to me that all people who do not live with reindeer are lutsaq. Other reindeer-herding neighbors like the Izhma Komi (ngysma) and the Khanty (khabi) have their own distinctive names, while the nonnomads bear one generalized name (cf. Pushkareva 2000, 95). Lutsaq makes up a category that has evolved to be multilayered and highly relational over the course of time and which can be grasped only in the context of situated naming practices. It is not so much a fixed name for a bounded group but rather a default term that describes different ways of living, subsistence practices, communicative behaviors, and skills.

Figure 1.1. Nenets shift workers, August 1999.

Their children are visiting the herders’ camp only in the summer holiday.

Those who live with reindeer refer to themselves as nyeneyq nyenetsyaq, translated as “real people” or “genuine humans.” The word nyeney is used to emphasize one’s humanity, as in the phrase nyeney mirkani ngani khamyvq, “to take on again a human form” (Pushkareva 2007, 79, 201; 2019, 118). However, being Nenets is not only about the human form or having reindeer but also about having certain skills. It is possible to become enskilled (tyenevana) only through an intimate contact with the living environment. When somebody is unskillful in the tundra, the person is called lutsa (for men) or khabyenye (for women). As such, reindeer herders also use the term as a pedagogical tool. When his children did something wrong, Yegor would call them lutsaq, either teasing with a smile or scoffing seriously. Yegor explained his word use like this: “Whenever somebody in the tundra called another lutsa or said that he did something like a Russian [lutsarakha], this was taken as a serious offense. For example, people called [my father] Sem Vesako lutsa. Yet my grandfather Mikul did not tolerate it when somebody did something like a Russian.”

Although Mikul did not like it, his son Sem joked by calling himself “Russian” when he was drunk, claiming that his mother’s father was Russian. One of the proofs was him being taller than most others. He imitated Russians by being very noisy and talkative. Sem used to say, “I am a half Russian,” (lutsa takharuv) and “I am talking like a Russian.” Sem was simultaneously mocking Russians and his alcohol-induced talkativeness, being self-reflectively ironic. This was not a positive identification but rather took the role of “the other” in a similar entertaining way as the Western Apache mock the white man’s intolerable verbosity and noisy bravado (Basso 1979). When Yegor talked about the lutsaq, he often referred to his own grandfather. As a fresh Baptist convert, he could not, however, subscribe to his “pagan” (even if “a bit Orthodox”) grandfather’s views in a straightforward manner. To prove his current position, he would say from time to time that “people did not understand then,” a standard phrase from a convert’s mouth. Despite this, Yegor was eager to talk about his grandfather’s views on the Russians.

The idea that Russians are evil and dangerous has roots in the spiritual realm, as occurs in many other societies that have faced the aggression of colonialists. Yegor once said, with a smile, “My granddad Mikul did not want to send his children to school because, as he said, all Russians are the sons of the younger wife of the underworld’s master [Nga taty nyuq]. They are monkeys [ngayatarq] and evil spirits [ngylyekaq]. But [Grandfather used to say] Nenets are from God.” Calling Russians “evil spirits” was not an idiosyncratic habit of Mikul. In Nenets oral tradition, too, Russians have their origin from the underworld, and they are described as chthonic spirits, sons of the underworld’s master, Nga, who has also fathered all other evil spirits with his junior wife (Chernetsov 1987, 88, 119–20; Golovnev and Osherenko 1999, 1). Amused by what he was going to reveal, Yegor said that when Communists appeared in the tundra for the first time, they themselves declared that their origin was not from God but from monkeys. Because monkeys were portrayed as evil spirits in epic songs, a Darwinian narrative quickly became merged with a Nenets one. Thus for Mikul, the godless Russians were the worst, briefly called “Communists” or “monkeys,” who were to be avoided for better or worse.

For Yegor’s grandfather Mikul, the most fearsome lutsaq were the godless Soviets, collectivizers, repressors, soldiers, officials, and prisoners he had seen in the Gulag camps on the coast of the Kara Sea. Herders used to say when speaking of the outsiders that “the Russians do not joke” (lutsaq niq yonyenaq) or “the Russians can kill” (lutsaq khadangguq) whenever a situation was tense. “We were afraid of the Russians,” Yegor told me many times. However, as with predators, one had to adapt to the situation and find the best kind of relationship with them. Russians, wolves, and spirits of the underworld could not be shunned entirely; instead, they called for sacrifices through exchange circuits, as I was told. Some herders used to say that Soviet fishing inspectors or greedy state fur buyers had to be fed in the same way as wolves (cf. Vitebsky 2005, 273). In this way, Nenets tried to protect themselves from what could be called the witchcraft of the Russians. (I shall return to this topic in chap. 5.)

Today’s concerns of the Independents come from a logic of avoidance and engagement that has evolved over several generations. I shall give a brief overview of what constitutes the historical experience of Yamb-To and Ural Nenets with Russians. The families of Independents all have slightly different stories about how they remained outside the collective farms. Yet common to such narratives are motives of fear and escape, especially in the early period of Sovietization when members of the same family would often become engaged in different ways with the power of the Russian “civilizing mission.”

The Veli Family in the Stalinist Period

To explain what stands behind this perception of Russians as dangerous agents, I shall give a short overview of the Veli family, who figure as key characters in the changes that the Yamb-To Independents have gone through. During the Stalin era, Yegor’s grandfather Mikul and his three brothers were going very different ways: Mikhail joined with most of the family’s two thousand reindeer into a collective farm; Ngel disappeared to the front during the Second World War (in 1942); and Vas perished in the Gulag after being arrested in the aftermath of the mandalada uprising in 1943. Only Mikul managed to stay behind and live the cautious life of an Independent herder. I shall describe this family’s history in detail not only because I have spent most of my time in the field with Mikul’s descendants but also because of the diversity it illustrates of the fortunes of most Nenets of the area.

In the nineteenth century, Mikul’s great-grandfather Yarki Veli lived in the forest. His children would migrate across the open tundra in the eastern part of the Great Land tundra.⁴ Yarki’s grandson Taras (Mikul’s father) had a big reindeer herd. His grandson Vata, then an old man himself, told me that Taras’s herd was “ten thousand strong,” a poetic formula meaning “very many.” He lost the greater part of his herd in one of the several waves of reindeer epidemics of the early twentieth century (cf. Kertselli 1911). He and his wife died in epidemics of smallpox when whole nomadic camps perished, leaving Mikul and his brothers orphans, all of them very young. Mikul survived smallpox, yet he lost the sight in his left eye. This would later save him from being conscripted in the Second World War.

Like most others to the west of the Urals, the Velis were baptized by Orthodox missionaries, who were active in the area from 1825 until the end of the 1910s.⁵ The missionaries used to come to the summer settlement of Khabarovo in the Yugor Strait area on the Kara coast, where as a young man Mikul spent most of his time in the 1920s and 1930s. During the short summers, this area became unusually densely populated, as it offered various options for fishing, hunting, and trade with Russians and Izhma Komi for Nenets (Arzyutov 2016; Krupnik 1993, 209; Kvashnin 2009b). It was a ritually loaded area as well, where a Russian church and a major Nenets sacred site lay close to each other. The first was situated on the mainland coast of the Yugor Strait in Khabarovo and the second on the island of Vaigach across the strait, known among Nenets as Khekhe Ngo (“island of spirits”) or Khebyidya Ngo (“sacred island”). Orthodox priests systematically destroyed wooden and stone images of spirits (syadeiq) at these sites (see chap. 4). Yet the Nenets still visited them and other sacred locations, where they created new syadeiq to whom they made sacrifices and offerings. However, they also visited the Orthodox church in Khabarovo and took their offerings to St. Nicholas, known as the “Russian spirit” (lutsa khekhe) Mikola. The Orthodox religiosity of the Nenets was thoroughly integrated into the existing ritual complex. However, as many reports suggest, the Nenets knew almost nothing about Christian doctrines, including the economy of salvation (Igumnov 1912; Jackson 1895, 84–89; Kozmin 1903; Mikhaylov 1898; see also Vallikivi 2023).

Figure 1.2. An icon of St. Nicholas the Miracle-Maker and coins used as offerings at sacred places, September 2006.

Note the Lenin heads.

In the 1920s, the Bolsheviks shut down all the Orthodox churches in the region and repressed the priests. When Stalinist industrialization and collectivization was taken to the North in 1930, Fyodor Eikhmans, the head of the Gulag secret police (OGPU), built the first forced-labor camp in the area, under the label of the so-called Vaigach Expedition. According to the historian Orlando Figes (2008, 210), Eikhmans was looking for gold there after he had heard “ancient legends about the ‘golden woman,’ a totem doll of solid gold” from some Nenets. However, he found only zinc and lead, which the convicts, most of them geologists and other specialists, extracted in deadly conditions. Like many others both before and after, Eikhmans was fascinated by the idea of transforming scarcely populated frontiers with abundant treasures into industrial hubs. As Kate Brown (2007, 84–88) writes, Eikhmans’s idea of the development was reminiscent of the “frontier thesis” forged by the historian Frederick Jackson Turner, who believed in the crucial role of frontiers for American nationhood. We shall see later how the idea of conquest of the world’s end is crucial in the thinking of the evangelical missionaries as well. So far it is enough to point out that, although the goals of the two have a great many differences, they both are motivated by the desire to conquer untapped areas and transform local people into believers of the project they carry out (see chap. 3).

Nenets were both attracted to and repelled by the Gulag camps. Male herders were hired to transport geologists in search of metallic ores (Gurskiy 1999; Vittenburg 2003). Like many others in the 1930s living near the newly established Gulag camps, Mikul was hired as a sledge driver (yamshchik). His duty was to transport various goods, mail, and people along the coast of the Arctic Ocean between the Gulag camps of Khabarovo and Amderma (the first convicts were taken to Amderma in summer 1933 to excavate fluorite [see Josephson 2014, 272–80]). As Vata told me, his father witnessed there how Communists were particularly dangerous sorts of Russians, who killed their own people, that is other lutsaq from the Gulag camps, by throwing them under the ice “like frozen fish.”

In parallel with industrialization through the Gulag system, agricultural collectivization became a full-fledged project in which the whole rural population, including the Indigenous minorities, was forced to take part. As described in the introduction, this caused fierce resistance in many parts of the North. Soviet ethnographer Georgiy Prokof’ev writes in his private diary, “Nenets call this nothing other than that ‘they were robbed’” (quoted in Arzyutov 2016, 344; cf. Laptander 2017). In summer 1934, the authorities in Naryan-Mar requested the leaders of the Bolshezemelskaya District to intensify the collectivization of Nenets in the Kara tundra, who, unlike in western areas, were lagging behind the official schedule (Yevsyugin 1993; cf. Tolkachev 2000b, 271–72). By that time, very few collective farms had been established in the region, and most Nenets were still classified as Independents (yedinolichniki), individual freeholders outside the collective farms or state farms. This category was planned to be eradicated in a few years’ time.⁶

The main tools with which to compel reindeer herders into collective and state farms were persuasion, intimidation, and various repressive measures ranging from expropriation to incarceration and deportation. The most respected community members, better-off reindeer owners, and shamans were often victims of dekulakization: their property was heavily taxed and reindeer confiscated; some of them were imprisoned or killed as “anti-Soviet elements.” As a result, entire communities reacted either by fleeing or with armed resistance.

A half-Nenets and half-Russian, Arkadi Yevsyugin, the first secretary of the Bolshezemelskaya District, was responsible for collectivization in the region.⁷ With a few other members of local Native councils (tuzsovety), he began to visit reindeer camps in the area. As Yevsyugin (1993, 24) recalls in his memoirs, “We started to go to tents and joint camps [po chumam i parmam] and carry out individual and group political work among the rural proletarians and middle-class reindeer herders [olenevodov-batrakov i serednyakov]. We explained what Soviet power was and what it aimed at. We talked a lot of the future tasks in the tundra; we conversed about the Communist Party and Lenin.” Yevsyugin refused to be accompanied by the police, as he believed in the power of persuasion, or as he put it, “We shall rely only on the true word of the Party [pravdivoe partiynoe slovo]” (ibid.).⁸ This echoes Christian missionaries’ conviction of the persuasive power of the word, as we shall see below.

A pragmatist by nature, Yevsyugin made a curious move to attract the Nenets to join the collective farm. The reindeer herders had complained to the Soviet officials that they could not use the Khabarovo church on St. Elijah’s Day. In summer 1934, Yevsyugin asked Aleksandr Ditskaln, the next head of the Vaigach Gulag camp after notorious Eikhmans had left, “to fix, paint, and limewash the chapel and put the religious items back in their places” (26). The Soviets had been using it as a dormitory. On August 2 (St. Elijah’s Day by the new calendar), Nenets arrived and “stopped at the church and were satisfied with the church looking better than before” (ibid.). This took place despite this time being the height of the state’s violent antireligious policy. A big tent was erected nearby for the meeting, and herders were given free tea and vodka. Ivan Prourzin, the first secretary of the Nenets regional party organization, and some other high-ranking officials arrived from Naryan-Mar; in addition, representatives of the Gulag were present.⁹ The meeting lasted for two days and was said to be a success, as over the following years, a few new collective farms emerged. Yevsyugin was probably hoping to gain symbolic capital from overlapping the Soviet time and place with the Orthodox time and place: following the Soviet practice of replacing saints days with the days of new heroes, events, and professions (Lane 1981; Peris 1998; Tumarkin 1983), in 1932 party officials had declared St. Elijah’s Day to be a “mass agricultural-political holiday—Reindeer Day instead of the clerical holiday” (quoted in Tolkachev 1999, 112).

Many Nenets still resisted. Out of four Veli brothers, only Mikhail joined the collective farm, doing so in 1935. He went with most of the family’s reindeer and became chairman of the collective farm, which was called “Yadey Segery.”¹⁰ Despite Yevsyugin’s efforts, Mikul’s family, along with many others, did not join the collective farm. Vata told me that working for the Gulag protected his father: “The chief of Amderma [Gulag] did not let him go to the collective farm, as he worked well for him.” In the early days of the Gulag, this was possible because of the different management style when camps bought the service of the Independents: the herders could also rely on individual relations and the supply system outside the collective farm for the time being. Yet soon pressure from the collectivizers grew, and the herders searched for safer places. During the Second World War, Mikul’s family escaped to the other side of the Urals after hearing that the “red soldiers” were coming to take their reindeer. On the Ob River, Mikul was caught and forced to work as a log transporter on a Gulag construction site in Aksarka.¹¹ This time it was not a voluntary or paid job. After working there for a year, struggling with cold and hunger, one night, with the help of local Nenets, he managed to gather some reindeer and flee back across the Urals (cf. Bjørklund 1995; Khanzerova 2003, 2007).

With the beginning of the Second World War, a new threat emerged for the herders. A 1939 law had abolished the military service exemption for the Indigenous minorities of the North. One of Mikul’s brothers, Ngel, was conscripted into the army and sent to the front. He never returned.¹² A significant proportion of Nenets adult men (six hundred men with six thousand reindeer) from the Nenets Region were sent to fight against Finland on the Karelian front and elsewhere, not having “the slightest idea about what in fact a war was,” not speaking Russian, and considering it a trick to send them “to their deaths” (Gorter-Gronvik and Suprun 2000, 130–32, 141n6; see also Dudeck 2018). Ngel’s fate was shared by hundreds of other Nenets men who never returned from the war. While the men were on the front, families in the tundra had to meet extra high quotas, make “voluntary” payments to the defense fund, and tolerate confiscations of private animals. In addition to all female chores, women, often with small children, had to herd reindeer and trap foxes and fish by themselves to survive (see Khomich 1966, 244–45 for a heroic account; Mamoylova 1997, 67).

The excessive work norms and taxes (live reindeer, meat, fish, and furs), recruitment of men for the war, and lack of supplies led to extensive unrest among the Nenets on both sides of the Urals. While in Aksarka in 1943, Mikul met his brother Vas’s son and learned that Vas had been arrested in an uprising. This event came to define the relationships between Nenets and the Russians and their collective farms for years to come, forcing many to avoid the lutsaq and state institutions at any cost. Most Independent herders today are either direct descendants—including orphans—or close kin of participants in the uprising.

Nenets call this uprising mandalada. Families around the Urals had not managed to meet the production quotas set by the state through the collective farms because of the bad hunting season. As a result, the collective farm did not give supplies to the herders. Desperate and infuriated, Nenets families left the prescribed collective farm pastures in Baidarata (east of the Urals), took their reindeer with them, and retreated to the northern slopes of the Polar Urals, away from the trajectories where Russians moved. A few yedinolichniki also joined. Yegor’s mother-in-law, Tetteya, who was born the same year as the mandalada, explained to me that her family, like others, had gathered to discuss how to chase the Russians out of the tundra. Andrei added that from the Nenets’ point of view, “there was no difference between dying in the army or here in the mandalada.” During the spring months of reindeer calving, maybe two hundred to four hundred people were camping around the mountains called Nganorakha. Some participants traveled across the tundra, inviting people to join the mandaladaq (“gathered ones”), threatening to kill all the Russians and any Nenets who collaborated with them. Mandalada people once attacked a supply caravan and took flour and salt; another time ninety-five reindeer paid earlier as war tax were taken back (Vallikivi 2005; see also Golovnev and Osherenko 1999, 81–93; Laptander 2014; Leete 2005a; Tolkachev 2000b).

On June 24, 1943, a group of Soviet military men armed with machine guns arrived at Ned-Yu Mountain (see map 2). A daylong battle followed. The Nenets killed one Russian officer; the Russians killed six Nenets. “You can still see a skull there,” said Andrei’s wife, who, when staying in the camp nearby, once went there as a child to search for hidden items left by the mandalada participants. After the Russians had taken some Nenets women hostage, the Nenets men surrendered. Over fifty men were arrested (many of them days later), among whom some had no connection whatsoever with the incident, including Mikul’s brother Vas.¹³ He was taken to Arkhangelsk and perished somewhere in the Gulag. Almost no one returned from the prison camps. Tetteya’s father was among the few lucky ones to come back to the tundra. Tetteya was fourteen when, in 1957, she first saw her father. She vividly described to me how wary she was of a stranger arriving and kissing her on the cheek.

For Nenets, mandalada was also an event that involved spirits. Tetteya told me of two shamans who performed a ritual seance in the mandalada. They foretold success in the fight against the Russians. Tetteya, like many others I talked to, noted that these shamans had erred in their prophecy. This failure probably contributed to the deteriorating image of shamans, who had become a rare species after a prolonged persecution they could not withstand. As Ivan told me (from whose Baptist viewpoint, this was a chance to condemn “shamanism,” or “Satanism” as he also called it), “What is interesting here is that, if the shaman had known, he would have understood what was going to happen—for example, that the authorities would come and that Communism would start and that we were about to be killed. But this was not open to them.” When I met Ngelku (a Ural Independent), the grandson of one of the shamans called Sevdya Mishka, he did not wish to talk about his grandfather’s role. Some said that he was ashamed of his grandfather; others believed he feared arrest himself for his grandfather’s deeds over sixty years earlier (cf. Bjørklund 1995, 78; see also Golovnev 1995, 194; Laptander 2014, 2017; Lar 2001, 217). As I learned from some others, this kind of fear had not vanished completely, even in the post-Soviet era.

The parents and grandparents of several families of Independents managed to escape arrest after the uprising and to remain outside collective farms. For instance, at the beginning of 1943, Yegor Vylka left the Kara collective farm to join the mandalada. He avoided being arrested and started living with a few reindeer near Amderma with three other Independent families, forming the origin of today’s Yamb-To community. His name appears in two documents: in the first, he is listed with the other “deserters” of the Kara collective farm (Tolkachev 2000b, 302) and in the second with those who had “gathered” but had succeeded in escaping on hearing of the Russians’ arrival; he had been declared wanted by the authorities (305). In the following years, many Independents married those who had been widowed during the mandalada. For instance, Mikul’s third marriage was to a woman with a small child who had lost her husband in the mandalada and lived in a trading post in extreme poverty. At that time, there were some thirty to forty Independents living in the area, while probably well over a hundred found refuge in the Urals.

Dodging the Officials after Stalin

In the 1930s, thousands fled inside Russia. While in the Russian agrarian South only a few land-bound Independent peasants could move away from the pressure (Alexopoulos 2003, 7, 9; Fitzpatrick 1994, 154), in the subarctic North, collectivization triggered large-scale movements of the (semi-)nomadic population (D. Anderson 2000, 47; Brandišauskas 2017, 44; Donahoe 2003, 124; 2012, 107; Lavrillier 2005, 124; Perevalova 2019, 208–9). Nenets, like many other nomads, were used to the tactics of retreat in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when they felt growing colonial pressure, including attempts of Christianization (Golovnev and Kan 1997, 153; Shemanovskiy 2011, tome I, 187). However, unlike that period, in the era of Stalin the pressure had become unavoidable everywhere, and evading the state by flight was now virtually impossible. Most of those who had succeeded in remaining separate were herded into collective farms by the late 1940s, such as hundreds of Nenets who had fled to the northernmost part of the Yamal Peninsula (Lezova 2001).

Across Siberia, there were families or small groups who remained outside the collective farms after that period. Some of them were collectivized in the 1960s—for example, small groups of Evenki (Fondahl 1998, 60–61; Lavrillier 2005, 123; Tugolukov 2005, 230; Vasilevich 2005, 9–11, 21), Eveny (Gurvich 2005, 102–7; Khakhovskaya 2008, 108–9; Popova 1981), and Koryak (Khakhovskaya 2018, 33–34). However, a few families among the Potapovo Evenki and Nenets (D. Anderson 2000, 25, 48), Tozhu in Tyva (Donahoe 2003, 124; 2012, 107) and Ust-Nyukzha Evenki (Lavrillier 2005, 123) appear to have remained in the taiga hidden from the gaze of “Soviet organs” until the end of the 1980s or beyond.¹⁴ Nevertheless, by the late Soviet period, none of these state-evading groups seem to have been of a comparable size to the Nenets Independent groups in the Polar Urals and Great Land tundra.

In the post-Stalinist period, the Independents presented a disturbing problem for the local authorities, although there was no need to deal with this problem intensively because officially there were almost no yedinolichniki left. According to official rhetoric, in the Nenets Region, collectivization had been completed by 1940 (Abul’khanov and Kovyazin 1977, 66). Furthermore, even if the authorities knew, nobody had an exact idea about the scale of the “problem,” even though a growing number of aircrafts flew above the heads of Independents, offering a view of their campsites from the sky. Yet there were those who had met the Independents and described them as surviving “elements” who unforgivably lived outside the gaze of the state, without documents, not fulfilling their “obligations.” This was a moral problem. Some Soviet activists tried to solve it, while most others ignored it.

Journalist Viktor Tolkachev, arriving in the Nenets Region from Donbas, Ukraine, in search of “romanticism of the North” is a telling example. In the mid-1960s, he took a job as a culture worker (kul’trabotnik) in the “agitation group” (agitgruppa) of the Ust-Kara “Red October” collective farm. Its brigades migrated in the easternmost area of the Nenets Region where Independent families were numerous. By traveling from one reindeer-herding brigade to another, his job was to screen films, organize games, and give talks on Soviet life and politics. When staying in a brigade in October 1965, he met a family of Independents. This was Mikul’s son Sem (father of the then five-year-old Yegor) with his wife and eldest daughter. Tolkachev admits that Sem, with “the narrow and darkened face of an Indian, with high-pitched guttural voice and pure Nenets speech,” caused contradictory feelings in his “Soviet consciousness.” He writes:

Back from the tundra in 1967, Tolkachev went to a meeting for culture workers in Naryan-Mar where he spoke of “the problem of yedinolichniki.” Officials there were dismissive and refuted Tolkachev’s claims by saying that in the Nenets Region there were not “these” (takikh) and the ones he met must have come from Yamal. But in Salekhard, the center of the Yamalo-Nenets Region, Tolkachev believed, they were said to come from the Nenets Region. The “problem” was just written off from both sides (Tolkachev 1999; 2004, 504). Apparently, the Independents themselves occasionally used the same tactics. Ivan said to me, “When in Komi, we said that we were from the Nenets Region; when in the Nenets Region, we said we came from Komi.”

The existence of the Independents was known among the farm chairmen, chairmen of village councils and party workers of the area who reported on them to the regional centers from time to time. The complaints that reached Naryan-Mar contained accusations from unlawful use of collective farm pasture to parasitism and to parents not giving their children to school or lads to the army. The collective farm chairmen were above all concerned about the use of the pastures. They argued that as the Independents were tramping the transit corridors of the collective farm pastures, they should be “called to account” (Tolkachev 2004, 499).

While most of the time the regional leaders ignored these reports, a few concerted efforts were made to “liquidate the problem.” For instance, in 1958, the chief prosecutor, the police chief, and a specialist from the agricultural department from Naryan-Mar went to the coal-mining settlement of Khalmer-Yu to prosecute the Independents for social parasitism (tuneyadstvo) (Tolkachev 2004, 505).¹⁵ According to the law, any adults who refused to engage in socially useful work were considered “parasites” and could be jailed (Alexopoulos 2003, 10; see also Konstantinov 2015, 324; Vladimirova 2006, 108–11).¹⁶ The officials went on a hunt for these “parasites” by all-terrain vehicle (vezdekhod), following the sled trails from the village and hoping to catch up with Independents who had just left Khalmer-Yu. Having found only a few children and women in camps, they returned empty-handed. Geologists working in the tundra confirmed that lichniki were “not hospitable, trying to be silent, and when Russians come to a chum, the men go to the tundra” (Tolkachev 2004, 507).

Another attempt was made by Yevsyugin who was imprisoned in 1937 and released from the Gulag after Stalin’s death. He became a leader of the Bolshezemelskaya District once again, this time as the chair of the executive committee (okrispolkom). During his short tenure (1958–59), he felt responsible for tackling the issue. He approached Independents on a small market in Khalmer-Yu. There they sold fish and with the cash earned bought necessary provisions from the shop. While most ignored his repeated addresses in Russian (Yevsyugin had forgotten his childhood language), he managed to talk to an Independent herder called Dmitri Fedotovich Taibarey, who knew some Russian. Yevsyugin recognized him as a “collective farm activist” from the Yusharskiy Tundra Council from the early 1930s. Dmitri’s brother Ivan had even become the chair of the executive committee of the Nenets Region in 1936, one of the highest officials in the region. Like Yevsyugin himself, only two years later he was sent to the Gulag during the Great Terror (Tolkachev 2000a, 43–44). Dmitri learned from Yevsyugin that his brother had died in the prison camp. Struck and angered by the news, after a long pause Dmitri asked in Nenets whether Yevsyugin himself was not “with stars,” in other words, a masked agent of the NKVD, the secret police. Dmitri left the village, never to appear again (Tolkachev 2004, 504–11). Yevsyugin’s naive hopes to build a “trusting relationship” with the Independents were destined to fail because they considered any approach by officials dangerous.¹⁷

Having relatively small herds—which protected them from excessive interest from the local authorities—the Independents needed cash. They relied on selling valuable furs that could give a substantial income. Yet according to the law, furs could be sold only to the special collection points, which belonged to the state-monopolized auction organization called Soyuzpushnina. Although herders sold pelts on the black market (from hand to hand) as well—for instance, to the military officers in Amderma or geologists working in the tundra—most of the steady income came from fulfilling contracts with Soyuzpushnina (see Yevsyugin 1979, 79). Andrei explained to me how it worked:

In essence, the Independents carried on with the old-style fur trade their ancestors were practicing before the Bolshevik revolution.¹⁸ Even the claims of cheating had not changed (see Yevladov 1992, 70). Despite his criticism against the head of the Khalmer-Yu fur collection point, Andrei admitted that thanks to the written agreement, he could obtain the documents necessary to protect himself from the pressure that came from state officials. In this way, in the 1970s, several Independents of working age got residence permits (propiski) through the Khalmer-Yu fur collection point, where they were registered as hunters (okhotniki) (cf. Alekseyenko and Its 2005a, 116–17; 2005b, 238–39).¹⁹

While in the available publications the past tense was used when talking of the Independents (Yevsyugin 1979), they were still mentioned as “contemporary” in the classified reports written by Soviet ethnographers from the 1960s to the 1980s for the regional and central authorities (Khomich 2006, 149; Vasil’ev 2006a, 2006b). Vladimir Vasil’ev stated that the biggest concentration of Independents was in the southwestern part of the Yamal Peninsula and the Polar Urals. Writing from the perspective of the Yamalo-Nenets Region, he was implying that the source of the problem was the Nenets Region, reflecting the way the officials in the Yamalo-Nenets Region were accusing the Nenets Region (as discussed above). Vasil’ev describes, “From behind the Urals every summer, reindeer herds of Independents from the Karskiy and the Yusharskiy Village Councils of the Nenets Autonomous Region, Arkhangelsk Province, arrive here. Moreover, these Nenets families, to whom these reindeer belong, are not registered in any of the village councils of either autonomous region. Apparently, the time has arrived to join the efforts of the executive committees of the Yamalo-Nenets and Nenets Region for family and numerical registration of the Independents as well as the reindeer herds in their possession” (2006b, 195).

The efforts were never joined though. The Independents were profiting from living at various kinds of borders. The division was even more complex as collective and state farm lands stretched across administrative borders (see map 3). The farms did not use the pastures further away that were allocated to them (Tolkachev 2004, 499–512; cf. Stammler 2005, 136). For instance, the Ust-Kara collective farm “Red October,” which was surrounded by Independents was officially based in the Nenets Region but also had pastures across the border in Komi and the Yamalo-Nenets Region. Yet in practice they rarely used their winter pastures in the Polar Urals because of the rough terrain, deadly avalanches, exhausting herding on foot, and abundance of wolves, which had found refuge in the mountains from the mass culls carried out from airplanes. Instead, dozens of Independent families were using these unwanted pastures.

In addition to this, the Yamb-To Nenets, who were living on the plains, took advantage of the favorable division of lands on the Yugor Peninsula, as their animals predominantly grazed on the pastures of the Komi state farms, the offices of which where hundreds of kilometers further south. Izhma Komi reindeer herders rarely came to the coast of the Arctic Ocean (cf. Habeck 2005, 31–32), where the Independents spent their summers. During winters the Yamb-To people stayed in the middle Korotaikha River in the Nenets Region, which was allocated to the Komi Usinsk state farm as a spring and autumn transitional passage (this was still the case in 2007). Nevertheless, the Komi herders were tolerant toward the Independents, who were scattered with their small herds, a few hundred strong, over a large area. The Komi herders I met spoke of a good bartering relationship, which had lasted over generations with the Independents.²⁰

Map 3. Land-use rights of reindeer-herding enterprises.

The map shows the usage rights of kolkhozes and sovkhozes at the end of the Soviet period. Yamb-To Nenets and Ural Nenets areas are as of 2007.

However, Independents were reminded of their “illegality” from time to time. According to Yegor, when he was a child, Karataika collective farm “Friendship of Peoples” wrote a letter to Moscow, claiming that there were “bandits” in the tundra. A “land committee” and police officers arrived in Karataika. Independents were chased to the village and a meeting was carried out there that lasted for three days. Their names and migration routes were written down. When they were told to join the collective farm, Yegor explained, “Kulei Van [a Yamb-To Independent] even gave a speech and said that he had been in the collective farm, but there was nothing good in it.” They all gave promises that they would join a collective farm, not in Karataika but further away in Salekhard or Ust-Kara, which they never did (except for Yegor and Tyepan in the 1980s, see below).

The threat of collectivization had not yet disappeared. Andrei’s wife, Lyuba, grew up in a Ural Independent family that had a herd three thousand strong, the size of an average farm brigade. One day in 1976 people from the Baidarata state farm administration (Yamalo-Nenets Region) flew to Lyuba’s family camp in the mountains. On board the helicopter were state farm representatives and an armed police officer. They ordered the family to give up most of the herd and told them to join the Baidarata state farm. Taking advantage of rugged terrain and poor weather, Lyuba’s father and uncles managed to hide parts of their herd and gave away only around eight hundred (cf. Golovnev and Osherenko 1999, 98). Lyuba told me that while her father and uncles were taking the to-be-collectivized reindeer to Laborovaya, they stopped every now and again, killed a reindeer, ate the best parts of it, and left the rest behind, saying that “these are not our reindeer anymore.” This was what many rich reindeer herders did in the 1930s and 1940s when reindeer threatened with collectivization were slaughtered or “lost” (Donahoe 2012, 107; Golovnev and Osherenko 1999; Grant 1995, 91; Leete 2005a, 2005b; Prokof’eva 2018, 137; Stammler 2005, 137). After this confiscation, Lyuba’s family escaped to the west and joined the Yamb-To Nenets. Lyuba’s father was sought by “people from Salekhard,” although without success. An Independent herder who was thought to be Lyuba’s father was arrested in Khalmer-Yu, although he was released after the mistake was discovered.

Probably only in the late Soviet period did the problem of Independents reach the highest authorities, when, in 1983, a typhus outbreak erupted in Yamb-To (Zuyeva 2017). Eight Nenets were hospitalized, and all the tents of the Independents were sanitized. Lyuba’s first husband died during this outbreak. Others survived. After the epidemic was brought under control, the local authorities tried to deal with the “problem” of yedinolichniki more thoroughly than ever, relating the typhus to absence of hygiene, lack of education, and general “savagery” (cf. Shearer 2009, 250–51). The regional administration issued a decree (reshenie), “to register all members of the Independent families and issue them passports,²¹ to register their firearms, to carry out medical checks, to count reindeer and determine migration corridors, to make contracts on procurement of reindeer meat, to assist with acquisitions of foodstuffs and manufactured goods, to teach children in boarding schools, and to give accommodation to families who become sedentary” (Tolkachev 2000a, 491). The deadline was set for 1985, but the regional leaders preferred to leave things as they were (Golovnev 2000a, 139).

Figure 1.3. Yegor and his family with Russian acquaintances in Amderma at the end of the 1980s. Private collection.

Soviet militaries and civilians were interested in buying valuable furs from reindeer herders.

Almost nothing from this plan was carried out, except for Vata’s family, whose two children were forcibly taken to boarding school (internat). People recalled that whenever they heard helicopters flying, children were told to hide behind reindeer skins and bedding rolled at the low edge of the tent. However, when, on an early September day in 1983, a helicopter came to take children to school in the camp of Vata, there were no parents, as they had gone to the settlement to renew their supplies. Like birds of prey, the officials took two school-age children away from an unguarded nest. Yegor witnessed the event from the neighboring tent but dared not do anything. Vata’s daughter Tyepas and son Yegor stayed in Naryan-Mar for eight years without seeing their parents or receiving news from them.²²

By that time, only two children had attended school in Ust-Kara for a short time in the late 1970s. These were Ivan and Andrei. Andrei explained that free school meals probably motivated his father to send them to school: “We were poor and probably this is why father sent us to school.” Their father, Sem, had decided to follow the example of the collective farmers. It is likely that he hoped to later benefit from his sons’ experience with the sedentary world. Yet he took them away after two years (as Ivan said, “We ran away”). This was enough time to learn some Russian and Komi (the main spoken language in Ust-Kara among the Komi and the Komified Nenets called Kolva Yaran). In many ways, these were vital experiences for them as they later paved the way to deeper engagement with the sedentary Russian world, and, as I shall suggest in chapter 2, made conversion to Christianity more imaginable.

By the late Soviet period, a considerable cultural gap had evolved between the Independents and the collective farm workers. Alongside the collective farm, media, and army, the school probably had the greatest impact on the formation of a new kind of person in the Indigenous Arctic (Liarskaya 2003, 2013; Ravna 2019; Yadne 1995, 2006; cf. Bloch 2004). Many from the younger generation of collective farmers that passed through boarding school, pioneer camps, the Communist Youth League, and the army considered themselves an enlightened new kind of people (Thibaudat and Desplanques 2005, 236–37) and were as knowledgeable about society and history as most others in the Soviet state (Stammler 2005, 96; Vitebsky 2012, 189). They became fluent in formulaic Soviet language, even if their thoughts and words were in an ambiguous relationship. Alexei Yurchak (2006) has described how, for most people by the late Soviet period, the constative dimension of language, with its “literal” meaning, had lost its importance. Following speech act theory, he shows that it was not the “truth” of the text that mattered but the reproduction of the text for the sake of participation in “normal” social life.

Yet language and other state rituals paved the way for the “Soviet consciousness” emerging here and there. In a published interview, Khabecha Yaungad, a Nenets journalist, recollects his realization of how different he had become in comparison to his father, who lived in the tundra. Speaking of the time around 1973 from a post-Soviet perspective, he recalls:

The older generation, who had limited contact with Soviet institutions, did not “speak Soviet.”²³ They had not even learned the Soviet “evocative transcript”—that is, the use of previous texts, which are reproduced even while “there is a shared sense that the official truth is not true” (Humphrey 1994, 40). People like Yaungad were living proof of the existence of committed speakers of Soviet, as were many other “sincere young communists” (Yurchak 2006, 104, 209). They had acclaimed the truth of the Soviet cause (Humphrey 2008; see chap. 2).²⁴

The Independents were in a different position, as there were certain things that they never heard because they did not “speak Soviet.” I realized this when living in the camp of Poru, a middle-aged Nenets man. He was different from other Yamb-To men because he had spent his teenage years in Khalmer-Yu and Vorkuta. His father, after marrying a daughter of an Independent herder from the Urals, left the collective farm—having been an illiterate party worker in his youth—but soon lost all his reindeer because of excessive drinking. As a result, his family moved to an abandoned shed in Khalmer-Yu that they refurbished with reindeer skins imitating the interior of a nomadic tent. From there Poru was taken to a school in Vorkuta where he spent four years. In the mid-1970s, he met a Yamb-To man who invited him to the tundra. He agreed.

In the beginning, Independents called Poru Russian, lutsa, because he had forgotten Nenets and when he got drunk he sang Russian songs. Now with thirteen children and over three hundred reindeer, he has stubbornly resisted the pressure of the Baptists. On the day we met, he told me, “In Vorkuta, I became an atheist, a Communist. Uncle Brezhnev taught us that way.” This was language that reflected Soviet-style ideological indoctrination and which could never be heard among Independents. He had appropriated this language and related values through his formal education and reading habits. When reflecting on why there were so many conversions among the Independents and not among the collective farmers, he said to me that the illiterate nomads never resisted verbally but instead they “listen to the missionaries silently and are easily made to agree” (see chap. 5). Although he portrayed his neighbors as naive (as did usually ordinary Russians in the city), he also argued that once the missionaries had left the converts kept gossiping, deceiving, and stealing from one another. He explained that they “pray, then they are forgiven and are free to sin again. They deceive thus both themselves and God.”

The school’s influence on Ivan and Andrei was different in comparison to Poru because they attended for only a short period, being younger than ten years old. Now a few decades later, both men recall this period as particularly difficult because only Komi and Russian were spoken in Ust-Kara, and they were bullied. Fed by their contradictory experiences of hardships and attraction to the village, the brothers remained fascinated with life in the settlement. Once back in the tundra, they felt that their families were too different from the others, who were better integrated into the Russian world. As Ivan said to me, many collective farmers laughed at Independent herders because they did not understand how things worked in the city (markana). In a way, they were discovering their “backwardness” even compared with other reindeer herders whom wider Soviet society considered “backward” (Slezkine 1994).

Ivan and Andrei also learned some Russian at school, which later gave them an advantage when making relationships with city dwellers. For instance, Andrei’s father-in-law gave him a reindeer every time he engaged in some kind of business with Russians on his behalf. The other two brothers, Yegor and Tyepan, were the first to become even more closely engaged with the outside world. They joined the collective and state farm respectively a few years before perestroika started. In the early 1980s, after marrying a kolkhoz girl called Lida who had been to school for ten years, Yegor formally joined the Kara collective farm as a hunter. This category was the group least managed by the collective farm administration (see Vasil’ev 2006b, 195).²⁵ But the change was not significant for him. Yegor was obliged to fulfill the hunting plan and to take his fox furs to Ust-Kara instead of Khalmer-Yu. As he recalled that time, Yegor was amused by the fact that the collective farm even paid for firewood that he cut for his own tenthold.

Shortly after, Yegor’s younger brother Tyepan, who was a bachelor, went to work as a herdsman (pastukh) at the Vorkuta state farm. He did so “in the search of discipline,” as his Soviet-style explanation was years later. In addition to this, his decision to leave the life of an Independent also stemmed from his lack of any prospect of having his own viable share of his father’s small herd, as well as the relatively good salary the state farm paid. Already during the period of perestroika, he settled in Vorkuta as a reindeer skin boot maker selling to city dwellers. At that time, his brother Ivan organized a reindeer-herding cooperative with a couple of Russians, which soon went bust, as one Russian shareholder left for the south with all the money.

Despite the discourse of unease toward the lutsaq among the Independents, all four brothers felt an urge to become “modern” and earn money, which came to denote the realization of modernity in many ways. This was accompanied by an urge to overcome the embarrassment of neither knowing the Russian language well enough nor having a basic understanding of the mechanisms and technologies of the Russian world.

Becoming Citizens in Post-Soviet Russia

In 1990, the local newspaper in Naryan-Mar published an article on the discovery of the last true Nenets of the region, titled “The Recluse of the Tundra, or the People Who Do Not Exist” (Tolkachev 1990). Since then, the regional administration has paid institutionalized attention to the Independent herders. Largely emulating the decree of 1983, the administration proposed that it would count reindeer, register herders, and send children to boarding school. Unlike the Ural Nenets, who remained outside the “titular” Nenets areas and thus did not gain much attention, the Yamb-To Nenets became for many a romantic image of a lost tribe. The Yamb-To herders themselves were also looking for contact in the quickly deteriorating economic situation that hit the collapsing Soviet Union. Because at that time much of the food was sold using a system of coupons (talonnaya sistema), the documentless Independents were no longer able to buy salt, sugar, vodka, tea, and other necessities from the village shop because they were not on the list based on residence permits. They addressed the Amderma Village Council to obtain coupons. This could not yet be done without procedures of identification and documentation.

Figure 1.4. Entering Amderma, July 2002.

Amderma was a closed military settlement until the early 1990s, after which it was quickly depopulated and left in ruins.

With the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the existence of Independents was no longer illegal. With the new laws on privatization, the Independents gained the right to own private reindeer herds, falling into the same category as hundreds of ex-collective farmers (Osherenko 1995, 1091). For many, privatization was seen as a “progressive” way ahead. Yet in the eyes of the regional administration, the main problem was that the Independents—like reindeer herders who had recently left collective farms—had not been allocated usage rights to pasturelands (the land belongs to the state), which were distributed by the land resource committees of the region. In 1992, Naryan-Mar officials proposed the establishment of a reindeer-herding community with the invented name “Yamb-To” for the Independents. Ivan became an elected representative of this community-to-be and a middleman for the new world of bureaucracy and paperwork.²⁶ He was now coordinating relations with the regional administration (whom the Independents call “Naryan-Mar” for short). Among other things, this was the opportunity for an ambitious young man to raise his status through his skill in dealing with the lutsaq better than others.

Figure 1.5. Having a rest after selling and buying, Amderma, August 2006.

As in the 1930s, Reindeer Day became the time when Naryan-Mar officials visited the tundra to manage relations with the Independents. Every year in early August, representatives from the department of ethnic issues, and a few journalists, doctors, photographers, and entertainers, arrive by helicopter with appreciated gifts like tarpaulin for tent covers, binoculars, some foodstuff, and vodka. As in the Soviet period, urban singers in Nenets folk costumes with added glitter give performances, reindeer races are held, prizes are awarded, and officials make speeches. In 1995, when the registration of the families started, Reindeer Day offered an opportunity for administrators to carry out medical checks, take photos, and collect other information required to start the process of issuing birth certificates and passports (see fig. 1.6).

At the beginning, as many admitted, they were not very comfortable with the registration procedures, especially the taking of images and calling out names, which are both perceived as intimate extensions of one’s personhood (see chap. 5). For instance, mothers refused to say the Nenets names of their young children in fear of the loss of the child’s life force. Irina Khanzerova (2003), who participated in the process of registration, writes what one woman told her, “Write down [a name] you want; in our lives, we do not need them anyway” (see also 2017). As a result, the officials gave children Russian names to their own liking. From the state’s perspective, these new Russian citizens became properly represented in their rightful place within the bureaucratic system.²⁷

Figure 1.6. Passports are issued to Independents, July 2002.

However, the Independents were quick to learn that they needed the documents with names on them in bureaucratic dealings with the authorities, especially to receive various allowances. The Yamb-To Nenets were given the right of residence in the village of Amderma, which was rapidly depopulating in the 1990s (like many other Arctic settlements, see, e.g., Thompson 2008). Once registered, pensions and child benefits were allocated through the Amderma village administration. However, confusion with names was frequent. For instance, one child was given the wrong surname because of a misunderstanding and the officials’ ignorance of the Nenets language. When an official asked “father’s name,” the child’s mother said not the surname of the child’s father’s but her father’s surname, which was again different from the child’s mother’s “official” surname. As a result, the child had a different surname from his mother and father. When the discrepancy was discovered by the officials, the case had to be taken to court to legalize the relationship between the child and his parents.

Formal education has been another big change for Independents. In 1991, a couple of children were given to boarding schools in Karataika and Ust-Kara for the first time (except for Ivan and Andrei); many more started in the late 1990s. Although enrollment in elementary school was still compulsory after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the schooling of children was no longer a matter to which the authorities paid close attention (Liarskaya 2003, 68; 2013; Yadne 1995, 27–28). Yet an increasing number of parents—although not all—have been willing to send their children to school. In 2006, I witnessed how thirty-four Yamb-To children were flown from Amderma to Karataika school in a helicopter. Most of them declared loudly that they did not want to go to school. These children usually spend from September to May away from their family camps, during which time they become fluent in Russian, reading and writing. They also experience new disciplinary practices, mandatory visits to the village sauna (banya), and the occasional fight with village children—the source of traumatic memories for many. Some parents take their children out early after realizing that the tenthold did not have enough workforce, even if some children, and especially girls, themselves would have liked to continue with school (see chap. 2). Those tundra children who develop a deep antipathy toward the school quit after their first year. Boys are often less keen to study, partly because there are rumors that studying for a longer period might make them eligible for army conscription.

Andrei once said to me, “Army, prison, and school are all the same. They can all corrupt people.” What he argued was that these institutions had the power to transform Nenets, including his own children, into the lutsaq. Another time his brother Yegor explained why too much education was not good: “You see, all these Kara collective farmers in the second and seventh brigades. They have lots of children but none of their sons live in the tundra. One of them tried living in the tundra but did not like it. He went on learning. Education and army turn them into half Russians.” Yet Yegor and Andrei both admitted that some education, especially the ability to read, was indispensable, as it helped not only to orientate people in the Russian world but also to bring them closer to their salvation.

Illiterate parents had some initiation into reading and writing through a special program that emulated the liquidation of illiteracy campaign (likbez) of the early Soviet period (Khanzerova 2004). Every summer for a month or two from 1997 until 2007, four Nenets teachers from Naryan-Mar taught adults and children in the tundra. This so-called Summer Nomadic School (letnyaya kochevaya shkola) was initiated by Norwegian anthropologist Ivar Bjørklund, the first foreigner to pay visits to the Independents (Bjørklund 1995, 2000; Zhuravleva 2000). Financed by the Norwegian state and organized by the regional administration, representatives of the Nenets intelligentsia saw their role as teachers of the outside world to the Yamb-To Independents. Tellingly, one of the subjects was the “surrounding world,” which taught the technological advances of the modern world and the basic mechanisms of the market economy. Those who were thinking about becoming Baptists made a particular effort to learn literacy. Some others who were less motivated avoided it, claiming to have no time for “non-serious” things.

Baptist missionary Pavel contended that the state education program for the Nenets was part of the divine plan. He said, “I think the presence of these teachers comes from God’s thought . . . to enable these people . . . our people to believe in God’s Word and read.” Yet he was disturbed by the teachers’ “propaganda” against the faith (see chap. 3). To balance the harmful impact of the state school and the hostile Nenets teachers of the summer school, in 2001, Pavel organized a private boarding school in Vorkuta, located near the prayer house, for the children of converts. Running costs came from Nenets families selling reindeer meat in the market. In the first year, twelve children attended the school; the second year the number increased to twenty. Yet this project was abandoned after two years because of too much hassle with “material” and bureaucratic problems. Rather, sisters in faith from Ukraine, Bеlаrus, Saint Petersburg, and elsewhere began to visit converts in the tundra to teach reading, singing, and the gospel. As with the state teachers, church teachers moved from one family to another, staying with each for a couple of weeks. Unlike with the Nenets summer school teachers, the curriculum was in Russian and Bible based.

Compared to the Yamb-To people, the Independents from the Polar Urals had a rather different experience with the authorities, who mainly saw in them trouble. The Ural Independents have always visited Vorkuta and adjacent settlements in the Komi Republic. Unlike among the Yamb-To, a significant proportion of the Ural families had very few reindeer, or none at all, and thus lived in destitute conditions.²⁸ Partly because of that, they started to send their children to school to get them properly fed. A makeshift boarding school in a kindergarten in Sovetskiy village (near Vorkuta) was open in 1996, where children from the age of three to fourteen were admitted.²⁹ This was a profoundly traumatic experience for the children as they were unable to communicate with Russian teachers who were totally unprepared for the task (Drama 2000; Murashko 2013). As one visiting pedagogue described it, children in the classroom “were just sitting on their chairs and were silent. . . . On their faces, there were no emotions. Тotal closure [polnaya zakrytost’]” (Aromshtam 2002). Echoing similar descriptions from the 1930s, the teachers tried hard to teach children to wear manufactured clothes, sit at the table while eating, sleep in bed, and use towels and toilet paper. Uninterested in colorful cubes or toy cars, children discovered plasticine from which they masterfully crafted detailed reindeer for hours on end. Seeing the high quality of the craftsmanship, Russian teachers were surprised that “nobody had taught it to them” (Aromshtam 2002; cf. Ravna 2021). Children’s “education of attention” (Ingold 2000) was exceptional while they struggled with formalized teaching, the Russian language, and the abstract world of plastic toys.

The village of Sovetskiy was a new place for the Ural Independents. Until the early 1990s, the Ural Nenets had visited Khalmer-Yu (khal’myer, “dead” in Nenets, yu, “valley” in Komi) village, which served as their main base for trading (as for the Yamb-To) in the winter period. In 1995, it was closed down as unprofitable (neperspektivnyy, “lacking in prospects”). The three hundred or so Nenets who relied on the place for trade started to frequent Sovetskiy. Reluctantly, the officials in Sovetskiy began to deal with the visiting herders, only then realizing that there were dozens of families that had no documents, were unable to speak Russian, and were totally “uncivilized.” The village administration started their documentation. The new status gave the Independents access to the pensions and benefits for families with many children, who profited considerably from welfare payments.

When I visited the Sovetskiy Village Council in 2007 with local reindeer herders, a Russian woman, a middle-aged social worker responsible for “the problem of the unregistered Nenets,” argued that these Independents spent all their allowances on vodka and lost their passports, saying, “This is why we keep their passports here.” The Nenets sitting next to me were not protesting against the arrangement, as long as they were given their allowances. Furthermore, the official was troubled by a few people who were unwilling to address the local council and register themselves. She also told of an unregistered Nenets who by rumor lived somewhere in the mountains and who had never visited the village. It was as if a sense of incompleteness disturbed her.³⁰

Figure 1.7. Nenets boarding school in Vorgashor, September 2017.

Many scholars have rightly argued that from the viewpoint of administrators and missionaries, nomadic reindeer herders in the Russian Arctic have been the most difficult to subdue (Krupnik 1993, 86; Znamenski 1999). Yet their relationship with the state has always been more complex than just confrontation or submission. On the one hand, the Independents have feared becoming lutsa, losing the specific kind of humanity they gain from living with reindeer. On the other hand, they have always tried to benefit from engaging with the Russian world. This has been largely driven by the potential material gain and a sense of overcoming their marginality.

Figure 1.8. Ural Nenets paying a visit to the Sovetskiy village, May 2012.

Perceived marginalization is a common cause for conversion. Some have argued that the Roman conquest instilled a sense of marginality among the population of the eastern Mediterranean, which became a catalyst for the emergence of Christianity (Hefner 1993b, 31; Kee 1980). Probably the best ethnographic example of this phenomenon today has been given by Robbins, who describes conversion of the Urapmin in Papua New Guinea (2004). Having had less contact with Westerners than some other neighboring groups and having lost their earlier high status in the local ritual hierarchy, the Urapmin came to sense themselves as lagging. As a result, they eagerly embraced Christianity (of a Pentecostal kind), which took place in a sudden “revival” in 1977. This happened after a few individuals had received Baptist Christian educations elsewhere and brought new teachings and skills into the community. The community itself had never been targeted by any outside missions. Drawing on Marshall Sahlins (1992, 24), Robbins (2004, 9) argues that Christianity became the “means of cultural debasement” (Sahlins’s phrase), as it convinces “people in meaningful terms to regard their own traditions as unacceptable” (cf. Tuzin 1997). Robbins (2004, 85) goes further, saying that the Urapmin had a fertile cultural ground to understand themselves as “humiliated” and “sinful” because of their heightened sense of marginalization. He claims that neither missionary pressure nor socioeconomic change triggered the embracing of Christianity but that Urapmin culture did from its “internal” sources, “motivated by their own culturally given goals” (ibid.).

Among the Nenets, conversion to Christianity had certainly offered a sense of cultural debasement, as they—especially the youth—started to see their own way of life, at least partly, as unacceptable. However, unlike with the Urapmin, for the Nenets the long, complicated history of avoidance and engagement with the lutsaq and the dynamics of the missionary encounter with its inherent relations of power have defined the outcome somewhat differently. One can say that the encounter with missionaries is just the latest among many similar earlier encounters with outsiders that have significant similarities with one another. Perhaps for their earlier experience the older generation is not willing to give up too much, while the younger generation would be ready to leave tundra life altogether. However, the image of the dangerous lutsaq still haunts many, and this is what I shall look at in the next chapter.