Art of Siberia. Valentina Gorbatcheva

territory thus just reaches into the Taimyr Peninsula – the area which, since prehistoric times, has been the home of the Nganassani, the most northerly-based people in the whole of Russian Asia. The area from the River Taz to the River Turukhan (a tributary of the Yenisey) is the home of the Selkup. Now almost disappeared, the Enets – culturally closely related to both the Nenets and the Nganassani – live along the banks of the Yenisey, where they come into contact with the Dolgans, a relatively new ethnic group which have not been around for much more than a couple of centuries, and which derive from combined Yakut, Evenki and Russian antecedents. The Dolgans are also prevalent in the north-east of Yakutia. Displaced ever northwards by the Yakuts infiltrating from the south, groups of Evenki established themselves on the lower courses of the Lena, which forms the western boundary of an enormous territory dominated for at least one millennium, as far as the River Kolyma, by the Yukaghirs. Of the Yukaghirs there are now only a few hundred left, generally in the Kolyma Basin not far from the mouth of the Alazeya, although some live further south in the taiga on the banks of the River Yasachnaya (Upper Kolyma). The Eveni people, also displaced by incoming Yakuts, once lived in what are now the lands of the Yukaghirs in northern Yakutia, and as late as the 19^th century found themselves pushed all the way to the extreme north-east to live among the Chukchis and their neighbours to the south, in Kamchatka, the reindeer-herding Koryaks.

      Eskimo (Uit) children.

      Yakuts in national costume making koumiss for the festival of Isyakh, 1910.

      Russian Museum of Ethnography, St. Petersburg.

      Some of these ethnic groups of the tundra are also represented in the more southerly zones of the taiga, including, for instance, the Nenets, the Eveni and the Evenki. The Evenki, in fact, are scattered across a vast area bounded in the west by a line between the Rivers Ob and Irtysh, in the east by the coastline of the Sea of Okhotsk, and in the south by the Upper Tunguska (a tributary of the Yenisey), the Angara, Lake Baikal, and by the Amur River.

      The taiga affords a fairly good living for the nomadic peoples who hunt and fish, or who hunt when they are not herding reindeer. In the west, on the plain of the Ob, is the land of the Khanty and the Mansis – closely related culturally and linguistically – who have a variety of lifestyles, based on hunting, fishing, herding reindeer and breeding other livestock. The non-nomadic (residential) Kets hunt and fish on the edges of the Yenisey. Pouring up from the south during the 14^th century, the Yakuts established themselves firmly on the middle courses of the Lena. This horse- and cattle-breeding people finally occupied an area as large as the Indian subcontinent, bordered to the north by the Arctic Ocean, pushing before them to the north and east those groups that had been there first – the Evenki, the Eveni, the Yukaghirs and the Chukchis.

      In the south of Siberia, towards the frontier with Mongolia between the Ob and the Yenisey, the Altai people (or Oirot), the Tuva people (or Tuvinians or Soyot), a little further northwards the Khakass people and, to the east of Lake Baikal, the Buryats are all specialists in raising horned animals Mongolian-style. Yet the Karagas people (or Tofalars) – a very small ethnic group to the west of Lake Baikal – herd reindeer and live by hunting and fishing in the taiga. The peoples of the Pacific coastline, from the Bering Strait in the north down to the Chinese border, mostly hold to a traditionally non-nomadic (residential) lifestyle that involves hunting marine mammals. These include the Aleuts of the Commander (Komandorski) Islands, separated from their ethnic brethren on the other islands to the east, the Aleutian Islands, not only by the Russian-American border but also by the international date-line. In this way they are very like the Uit (Yuit or Eskimos) who live on the shores of the Bering Strait, cut off from their ethnic cousins in Alaska and Canada. Inhabitants here additionally include communities of Chukchis and Koryaks, smaller groups of semi-nomadic Eveni people living on the shores of the Sea of Okhotsk (in the Magadan region), and, on the island of Sakhalin, the Nivkhi (or Gilyaks). Finally, still in the extreme east of Siberia, but further south around the border with China, is where the Eveni and the Evenki live, in close touch with the Olchi, the Orochon people, the Oroki, the Negidal people and the Udekhe, all originally inhabitants of the Amur Basin. Before the Russians took over, these semi-nomadic groups who depend on hunting and fishing were for centuries, if not millennia, under the thumb of their equally dominant neighbours, the Chinese.

      Yakut carrying straw for sale.

      Chukchi, Hunter with the skin of a fox he has killed, 1979.

      Magadan, village of Vankarem.

2) Cultures on the Edge of Extinction

      Although the peoples of Siberia may no longer live in what used to be their ancestral territories and are scattered in groups here and there in no particular pattern, they may nonetheless be regarded as stemming ultimately from only eight independent ‘nations,’ based not on racial characteristics but on language families. Most, in fact, belong to one or other of just two – the Uralic and the Altaic language super-families.

      In the west of Siberia, the Uralic super-family is represented by the Khanty and the Mansis who are related to the Finno-Ugric branch (which includes Lapps and Finns), and by their northern neighbours the Nenets, the Enets, the Nganassani and the Selkup who make up the Samoyedic branch. The Evenki, the Eveni and the peoples of the Amur region all belong to the Tungusic family, a branch of the Altaic super-family, which also includes in its Turkic branch the Yakuts, the Khakass people, the Tuva people, the Altai people, the Dolgans, the Shorians and the Karagas people, and in its Mongolian branch the Buryats. The Kets around the Yenisey and the Nivkhi on Sakhalin each speak a language that appears not to be related to any other.

      Independent of the Uralic and Altaic super-family communities listed above, the peoples of north-eastern Siberia form three different linguistic groups: Chukchi-Koryak-Kamchatka (occasionally referred to as ‘palaeo-Asiatic’) which includes the tongues of the Chukchis, the Koryaks, the Kereks and the Itelmen (the latter of whom speak Kamtchatka); the Eskimo-Aleut group which combines the Uit and the Aleuts; and finally the Yukaghir-Chuvantsi group which self-evidently comprises the languages of the Yukaghirs and the Chuvantsi, although these two may be said to be grouped together only by convention.

      The majority of the ethnic groups in Siberia have a couple of major factors in common: an area of dispersal so wide as to be significant for the continuing survival of each group, and the varying influences of unrelated neighbouring groups on the larger groups that do live as ethnic communities. So, for example, the Koryaks – like the Chukchis or the Eveni people – may themselves be divided into two groups: one that lives on the coast by hunting marine mammals and by fishing, the other that lives as nomads who herd reindeer and follow them inland in due season. Such groups, although originally speaking precisely the same language tend after all this time to speak different dialects of the parent language. And in the case of the Yukaghirs, the dialects have become so different and so mutually unintelligible that some linguistic anthropologists prefer to regard the Yukaghirs of the taiga who live by hunting and fishing as a completely different ethnic group from the Yukaghirs of the tundra who live by herding reindeer.

      Chukchi woman with children at the entrance to the yarang, 1925–1926. Yakutia.

      Chukchi, The people of the tundra, 1986. Anadyr area.

      Regardless of how different the languages and the corresponding dialects have become, regardless of the many linguistic barriers existing between the residents of Siberia, it remains a salient fact that today it is (and has been for some time) the Russian language that has in many areas displaced the ancestral languages for ordinary daily purposes. The result of compulsory assimilation programmes and the deliberate blurring of ethnic differences, it may well be that even now the numbers of speakers of some of these tongues are so few as not to be able to prevent them from