And yet this is the territory used by the Tsars as a penal colony, a vast concentration camp for ‘internal exiles’. This too is where, simply because it contained all those goodies, massive migrations of people were organized and resettled during the whole of the period of Soviet domination, despite the generally inhospitable nature of much of the territory to human occupation. Almost 32 million people were sent to take part in exploiting Siberia’s resources, and many of them (and their descendants) are still there, in the thousands of towns, industrial centres and mining camps set up specifically for this purpose – places like Vorkuta, Noril’sk, Novosibirsk, Krasnoyarsk, Bratsk, Irkutsk, Kemerovo, Prokop’yevsk, Angarsk, Komsomolsk-on-Amur, Yakutsk, Petropavlovsk-Kamchatskiy, Magadan, Khabarovsk, Vladivostok and Ussuriysk.
Lake Lama, on the Taimyr Peninsula.
Yakuts in traditional festive costume, 1906. Yakutia.
B. People in the Wasteland
“These people manage to live in a country which holds out to the ordinary traveller no inducement commensurate with the risk and hardship which its exploration involves.”
Penal colony, place of banishment, ‘northern Eldorado’ for millions of Soviet migrants – Siberia today is populated by members of considerably more than a hundred different ethnic groups from all over what used to be the Soviet Union. It is not altogether surprising, then, that this vast northerly and easterly area is far less well known for being the cradle of cultures some of which are many thousands of years old. Representatives of around thirty of these aboriginal groups still live in the region, although some of the groups now comprise very few individuals (and are accordingly lumped together by some anthropologists under misleadingly generalizing descriptive names, like ‘the northerly folk’).
The fact is that from the far north down to the southern steppes and across to the most easterly region, Siberia displays a rich panorama of local cultures, traditions, languages and different ways of life. The history of these aboriginal groups, however, has in general been as misunderstood, or as unconscionably misinterpreted, as has the heritage of other aboriginal peoples, such as the Native American Indians or the Australian Aborigines, in times more recent than most care to remember. Now, at the dawning of the 21st century, this legacy of human endeavour through the millennia is rapidly eroding and may soon be lost for ever.
Archaeologists have turned up evidence of the presence of human residents in this part of the world as early as in the Upper Palaeolithic age between 20,000 and 25,000 years ago. Scattered remains throughout Siberia and along the northerly coastline indicate that by Neolithic times much of northern Asia was inhabited by people with some pretensions to culture, for they certainly seem, all those thousands of years ago, to have differentiated between the material and the spiritual sides of life, and to have appreciated their own forms of art.
The steppes of southern Siberia and the area around Lake Baikal were first settled by tribes who were livestock-herders and crop-growers. In the neighbouring regions of the taiga, people lived instead by hunting and fishing. It is probable that the communities in what is now Yakutia and the residents of the Baikal area maintained fairly close connections, which would account for the well-established cultural group that occupied the area between the Angara and Lena rivers. Archaeological evidence relating to this group is fairly plentiful, and includes rock carvings that appear to reveal particular aspects of their spiritual beliefs (involving rites of passage, Neolithic hunting rituals, and so forth).
The regions of the tundra to the north-east of Siberia were occupied by nomadic tribes who lived by hunting reindeer (rather than herding them) and by fishing. Sites discovered between the rivers Olenëk and Kolyma have proved that the ancestors of today’s Yukaghirs lived by hunting and fishing, in total isolation, from the Neolithic period for at least another thousand years. Elsewhere in the north-east were regions occupied by ancestors of the present-day Chukchis and Eskimos, who were able to live a settled, residential life because they depended on the resources of the sea. In time, the way of life of these marine predators became widespread, from the shores of the Bering Sea over the length of the Arctic coastline.
Inland, many communities at first lived a nomadic form of existence based upon hunting wild reindeer. The ‘domestication’ of the reindeer – or at least the discovery of the way of life that involved herding the semi-domesticated creature – was a highly progressive stage in the overall history of humans’ successfully taking up residence in the tundra and the taiga.
The great age of human migration in Central Asia fell between the 10th and 13th centuries AD. This was the time when an influx of new people into Siberia from the south pushed the original inhabitants there northwards and eastwards. Palaeo-Asiatic groups such as the Chukchis and Koryaks, and Tungusic tribespeople such as the Evenki and the Eveni, formerly resident in what today is Yakutia, thus found themselves hounded from their homelands and forced towards the northern and eastern margins by the ancestors of modern Yakuts – who had themselves been pushed northwards by Mongol-speaking invaders.
Until the 16th and 17th centuries, the peoples of Siberia had no contact at all with any European civilization. All were isolated, each community generally maintaining some form of relations only with neighbouring communities, and then often only if those communities were from the same cultural background. The names these people of the north give themselves in their own languages frequently bear witness to this aspect of primal isolation: most of the tribal names mean simply ‘the people’. In this way, the Chukchis call themselves the Lyg’oravetlat, and the Eskimos think of themselves as the Uit, Yuit or Yupik, all of which mean ‘the (real) people’.
Likewise, the Nenets know themselves as Khasava ‘people’, whereas the Olchi people, the Oroki and the Orochon people reckon that they are all Nani which, like Nanai – for several decades now the official name of their neighbouring tribal group, otherwise known as the Gold people – would seem to mean ‘the people of the soil’ (just as in English human may be related to humus).
When the Russians took over Siberia and its inhabitants, they tended to rechristen the groups they came across, often borrowing the neighbouring people’s name for each community rather than the indigenous name. This is, for example, how the peoples now known as Yakuts and Yukaghirs got their current names. As far as they are concerned, they are the Sakha and the Odul respectively – but in Evenki they were the Yakut ‘the yak (or cow) people’ and the Yukaghirs ‘the ice dwellers’ – and that is the way they are now known all over the world. Similarly, the peoples known by much of the world (but not in countries where there are Lapps) as Khanty and Mansis recognize themselves only as Ostyaks or Vogul people. The Eveni think of themselves as the Lamut.
From west to east inside the zone of the tundra that borders the coast of the Arctic Ocean, nomadic groups who live by herding reindeer, by hunting and by fishing, successively neighbour and occasionally overlap with each other. In that part which is in Russian Europe, on the Kola Peninsula, live the Saami (or Sami), better known as the Lapps, who also live in the north of Finland, Norway and Sweden. From the banks of the Dvina to the Yenisey, and particularly on the Yamal Peninsula,