peoples of different backgrounds and languages, such as indigenous Siberians, was a monumental task facing the Soviet Union when it sought to create a new nation. A painful legacy of collectivization of lands and animal herds, nationalization of private property, and compulsory schooling for indigenous people were all part of this Soviet campaign to sweep the population into a new society and establish the contours of a new nation-state.
The Soviet attempts to create a new society, including altered social hierarchies and imposed structures of learning, were rife with challenges. As a range of authors have documented (Serge 1937; Pika 1989; Conquest 1990; Nove 1993), in the wake of enthusiasm for creating an equitable society, vast injustices took place and political idealism gave way to opportunism. By the late 1930s, millions had lost their lives as the newly entrenched Soviet policies drove apparatchiks and citizens at all levels of the social hierarchy to exercise power against their rivals and those people perceived as endangering the national interest. By the mid-1940s, which brought the devastation of World War II, the country was in ruins, but a nation of “Soviet” people had emerged.
It is a paradox that so many people in the nearly 75 years of Soviet power suffered government-sanctioned injustices of various degrees and yet by the late 1980s relatively few were seeking to jettison their allegiance to the nation. In fact, by the mid-1990s in various regions of Russia only a handful were openly decrying the former Soviet way of life, and more commonly there was widespread support for reinstituting aspects of the Soviet system. This book examines this paradox, specifically asking how a common sense of belonging to a Soviet society took shape in a region of Russia in which indigenous people suffered a specific form of repression—the dispossession of their land, cultural practices, and rights to self-government. Instead of homogenizing indigenous Siberians’ experience of Soviet power as one of belonging, this book also considers the ways in which resistances to state power, particularly in schooling contexts, took shape and why resistance was not automatic.
From another perspective the book is an examination of “habitus,” the creation of social patterns and structures through the everyday practice of actors (Bourdieu 1977). I am also critical, however, of how the idea of habitus tends to homogenize actors (see Bourdieu et al. 1973). In this book I aim to demonstrate that individuals’ actions and beliefs are shaped in society but not in a homogenous way. Specific subject positions influence how individuals transform society, for instance, by mobilizing constituents or by contributing to the smooth workings of institutions such as the residential school. I draw on perspectives of individual indigenous Siberians, specifically central Siberian Evenki, and especially women and men from a range of social strata, to consider the way relations of power are being reconfigured in this post-Soviet Siberian town.
Waning Socialism, Recent Ethnography, and Gendered Lives
The experience of the Evenki, one of the largest indigenous Siberian groups in the Russian Federation today, in many ways exemplifies how the Soviet Union as a socialist state sought to promote its own distinct path of “modernization,” including in regard to indigenous peoples.12 As I argue throughout this book, a focus on one Evenk community in the town of Tura provides insight into the unique ways in which a specific group experienced the Soviet era and continues to understand its identity as a distinct indigenous Siberian group. Set in the post-Soviet era, this book is about consciousness in flux and about the place of indigenous Siberians in broader social movements, both within the Russian Federation and beyond. As Kay Warren has noted, “revitalization” or “ethnic revindication,” is an important trend to turn our attention to throughout the world (1991: 103). Warren has cautioned that studies of such new social movements have often short-changed their subjects; they have tended to overlook the internal dynamics of the movements, de-emphasize the remaking of culture through activism, overly celebrate “choice” and individuals, and in general gloss over the complexities of people as having multiple identities and allegiances (1991: 103–4). Following Warren, I seek to reflect the internal dynamics and multiple levels of identities in one central Siberian community, while rooting this in a broad sociopolitical context.
It seems impossible to reflect on any group of people within Russia without considering the place of socialist practices in their lives. Purely socialist governments have decreased in number with the fall of the Soviet Union, and some—like Russia, China and Vietnam—have begun to incorporate aspects of market economies. Socialist cultural practices and ideals of egalitarianism (even if not realized in many ways) are recognizable, however, across cultural expanses and continue to play a role in contemporary societies.13 In the context of Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, recent scholarship has addressed a wide range of issues related to these ideals of egalitarianism. First, scholars have focused on negotiations around land reform, primarily in Eastern Europe (Hann 1996; Kaneff 1996; Pine 1996; Lampland 1995; Verdery 1999). Second, scholars have examined gender ideologies under socialism and post-socialism, emphasizing the ways in which women have been marginalized in both eras (Einhorn 1993; Kligman 1998; Gal and Kligman 2000). Most significantly, scholars have indicated that the demise of socialism clears the way for societies in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union to move on to establish alternative civic entities (Verdery 1996).
Some scholarship on the former Soviet Union is less eager to point out the inherent flaws of socialist culture as a whole and instead focuses on the ways in which people are interpreting their historical experiences. In Russia, much of this research has been conducted in cities (mostly Moscow and St. Petersburg). It has focused on ethnic identity (Starovoitova 1987), youth culture (Markowitz 2000; Pilkington 1996; Cushman 1995), structures of education (Lempert 1996), and queer culture (Essig 1999). Ries’s work (1997) on Muscovite discourses centering around suffering, poverty, and gender politics especially points to widespread contours of cultural practice in the former Soviet Union. Urban Russian intellectual circles have certainly defined a large part of what it means to be Soviet, or now post-Soviet, in a social system that has a tradition of highly centralized media, scholarship, and educational curricula.
Social practices in outlying regions, or the vast majority of Russia that stretches over eleven time zones and is not predominantly urban, have received less attention from Western scholars until recently. Perhaps one of the most important works that has served as a benchmark for studies in dispersed, outlying, or “peripheral” regions has been Humphrey’s Karl Marx Collective (1983) about a Buriat collective farm. Humphrey’s updated and expanded work (1999a) further explores the tensions created by the intersection of an individually oriented market economy and the collectively rooted Buriat society in southern Siberia. Several scholars have also examined the historical development of the intricate historical webs of Russian and Soviet political-economic development projects among indigenous Siberians (Golovnev and Osherenko 1999; Grant 1995a; Slezkine 1994; Vakhtin 1994). In general, this work has tended toward policy and structural analysis, with less emphasis on local experience.
Increasingly scholars are engaging in nuanced ethnographic work in Siberia that reflects the experiential nature of cultural expression in a specific time and place (Rethmann 2001; Kerttula 2000; Anderson 2000; Ssorin-Chaikov 1998). In these works, individual lives take center stage to varying degrees. They remind us that broad-ranging debates in anthropology—regarding tradition, gender roles, emotion, knowledge systems, and relations between periphery and center—are most compelling when they are illustrated not by the policy initiatives of governments but through the practices of people. In a similar manner, in this book I seek to dislodge an image of monolithic Soviet power. My argument revolves around the idea that Soviet power was differentially experienced, depending on the ways in which people were engaging with the state, as people who were urban or rural, men or women, indigenous or Russian. As explored in the narratives at the center of analysis in the book (and particularly in Chapters 2, 3, and 4), the residential school is a setting in which the Soviet structures of power—and the ambivalences around it, the resistances to it, and the accommodations of it—can be vividly examined.
