However, with the opening of the country by means of the railway, it stood to reason that a new class of travellers would spring up, and thus better accommodation had to be provided. More comfortable hotels and inns appeared, and towns materialised from nothing where the Trans-Siberian Railway’s stations were constructed, as the increased traffic brought money to the region. Already by the end of the nineteenth century, before the completion of the Trans-Siberian Railway’s unbroken route from Moscow to Vladivostok, adventurous travellers from America and western Europe were entering Russia in droves, eager to embark on the uniquely long voyage across the Siberian steppes, which was still a notoriously uncertain and perilous one. One such early traveller reported:
“Gratuitous information concerning the Trans-Siberian Railway was freely offered by our fellow-passengers, and we began to fear the worst. Tales about three hours’ stoppages at small stations; half a day here and a day there. No bridges over the Obi and Chulim rivers; so that the monotonous train journey should be relieved by a little sledging.”
Unfortunately, the railway’s influence was restricted to the southern part of Siberia and left thousands of square miles to both the north and the south completely untouched by its economic prosperity. The less positive contributions of disease and corruption, however, were brought from the crowded cities and spread amongst the native Siberian peoples with ease and rapidity, devastating entire races and permanently endangering the very existence of tribal culture in the Arctic.
Ivan Shishkin, Distant Forests, 1884.
Oil on canvas, 112.8 × 164 cm. Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow.
Isaac Levitan, The Vladimirka, 1892.
Oil on canvas, 79 × 123 cm. Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow.
Sergei Ivanov, On the Road, the Death of a Resettler, 1889.
Oil on canvas, 71 × 122 cm. Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow.
With the increasing influence and pressure imposed by the waves of emigrating Russians, the culture of the tribal people of Siberia suffered greatly. Throughout the 20th century, confronted by industrialization and the insistence on assimilation, each generation of native Siberian youth found itself more at odds with parents and relatives, unable to find a place in what had once been home, knowing nothing about the ancestral way of life and incapable of living in the manner best suited to the taiga or the tundra. In the space of just a few years, the precious practical knowledge transmitted from generation to generation for centuries on end was deliberately obliterated.
But there was an even more vexatious consequence of the industrialization of Siberia and the influx into the northern and eastern regions of massive numbers of immigrants: environmental destruction. The list of ruinous effects is long – deforestation in the most easterly zone and on the Pacific coastline; pollution of rivers and lakes (the Ob, the Yenisey, the Vilyuy, Lake Baikal, and so on); acid rain (the High Altai, the area around Lake Baikal); air pollution (Norilsk, the Kuzbass Basin, Magadan, Vladivostok, Khabarovsk); and more. Such forms of pollution of course hit first and hardest the local populations who lived almost exclusively on natural produce in the affected areas. The spoiling of pasturage similarly led to an immediate reduction in the numbers of livestock and reindeer. Places where the hunting was known to be good suddenly became much smaller – and much emptier once the poachers arrived there. Fish became scarce, and those that were caught might often be dangerous to eat.
Since the 1970s, many of the different communities in Siberia have discovered among themselves writers, poets and artists, all intimately concerned with the catastrophic fate of their fellow aboriginals, and all refusing to admit even the possibility of their own ancestral culture’s extinction. They include people whose names are today well known, such as Vladimir Sanghi (of the Nivkhi), Yuri Rytkhe (Chukchi), Anna Nerkagi (Nenet), and the Kurilov brothers (Yukaghir).
The realities of life for the peoples of the north today are far from simple. A good third of the aboriginal populations have become entirely urbanized and are no longer distinguishable from other members of the public. The remainder live as best they can in their rural surroundings, perhaps half-engaged in traditional activities, perhaps half doing other things or simply unemployed.
For all the pain of assimilation, and for all the traditional ancestral practices with which the younger generation has failed to become familiar, the essential contribution bequeathed to the world by the ethnic cultures of Siberia seems, nonetheless, to have been maintained. That contribution is made up of a way of life founded directly on closeness to and dependence on nature, and on a holistic vision of the world and of humankind’s place in it, both recognizable even now in the persistence of animist rituals (or less often, shamanist rituals).
The next section of this book makes contact with such original ways of life, original ways of thinking – original, that is, in the sense both of being primeval and unlike anything else – so characteristic of the aboriginal peoples of Siberia.
The taiga (central Yakutia).
Khanty, Reindeer sled crossing a shallow lake, 1998.
II. Traditional Daily Life
A. The Routine of Survival
“In every aspect of their daily life, in the midst of their interminable struggle against the unrelenting landscape and weather, we may glimpse the expression of an irrepressible aesthetic.”
The traditional lifestyles of the various communities that live in Siberia depend on one or more activities – fishing, hunting, the herding of reindeer or the breeding of cattle – that are specific to their locality, but also subject to regional variations, some of them significant, even within a single ethnic group. For example, the Evenki may herd reindeer and hunt, may hunt and fish, or may instead farm cattle and breed horses depending on where they live. The Eveni people, on the other hand, herd reindeer and hunt in the tundra and the taiga, while on the shores of the Sea of Okhotsk they rely solely on catching marine creatures.
Communities in Siberia tend by tradition to live on the resources available to them, making the best of the geographical and climatic conditions. Factors that have a far-reaching influence on their everyday lives include fragile ecosystems; the long, cold, dark northern winter; the migration of herds; the hibernation of species upon which they rely for food; the brevity of the crop-growing period.
Reindeer herders thus take it for granted that when the reindeer make their annual move to seek out new pasturage, they must go with them, so becoming nomads. The arrival in the far north of migrant birds in May marks the beginning of the most bountiful hunting season of the year. In spring and autumn various species of fish swim up the rivers to spawn. Each has its own preferred riverine destination – salmon, for instance, find their way far upriver to the shallow headstreams. The fishermen naturally follow season after season to where their preferred fish are most plentiful, to make their best catches while the fish are at their meatiest and while the females are full of roe. In summer, the brief period of plant growth is punctuated by the ripening of different types of berry, one after the other, in their preferred surroundings.
At the coasts, however, there are always animals and birds to catch, which means