Document(s) 18 of 23

Petra Rethmann is Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology at McMaster University. Her current work focuses on the intersection between history and political imagination, with particular attention to issues of violence, power and struggle. She is author of Tundra Passages: Gender and History in the Russian Far East (Penn State University Press, 2001).

How does a globally circulating social category such as ‘democracy’, as a corollary of the almost equally ubiquitous term ‘civil society’, come to mean something in a particular political context? Can it mean anything at all? Anna Tsing (1999: 159) describes such globally circulating categories as ‘dream machines’ that can offer promising possibilities for social projects while at the same time being practical tools that help put such projects into place. I, too, argue that dreams can be powerful tools for considering social possibilities. They may open up ways of thinking about local practices and social actions in circumstances that seem desolate and devoid of hope. The dreams I have in mind are not personal dreams that one pictures in one’s private room. They are configurations of social practices and ideas that assume at least a tentative political power through their sharedness and collective enactment. They are dreams with social and material effects. This chapter puts such a dream at its centre. It seeks to analyse and describe how one group of Native activists in the Chukotka Peninsula in the Russian Far East endeavours to build an Indigenous community and movement, Ionto, that stands in the way of various regional and economic developments. But, equally important, Native activists try to find ways to imagine regional initiatives on their own terms. The doubled relatedness of the phrase ‘in the way’ involves techniques of both resistance and defiant challenge, and the creative ability to think about alternative political styles. It is, then, in this sense that this essay contributes to discussions on the creation and composition of Indigenous social movements, political possibility, and self-determined schemes of development. While it does not situate itself within frameworks of development in any direct way, it builds on and works against them as they insinuate themselves into regional and Indigenous relations.

The exploration of social dreams is unusual terrain in the formation of development and democracy. In Russia, as elsewhere, social scientists are expected to build their analyses on data that help to build models, paradigms and identifiable patterns. Hardly ever do researchers build their analyses on social visions and ideas whose promise has not yet been redeemed. In the northern Russian context there is a growing literature on Indigenous land claims and environmental degradation, identity and place, traditional knowledge, property, and identity (Anderson 2000; Fondahl 1998). For the specific Chukotka context, Patty Gray’s (1998) research on the difficulties of Indigenous organizing has shown how Chukchi political aspirations and desires have been systematically suppressed since the country’s democratic transition. Precisely because the conditions of everyday living are so terrible in the Russian Far East, scholars and activists interpellate Chukchi as the quintessential subject of ‘endangerment’ and risk (Schweitzer and Gray 2000; see also Pika, Dahl and Larson 1996). It is certainly true that since the beginning of the 1990s Chukotka’s Native residents have experienced dramatic rises in poverty, violence, drinking, disease, jealousy and inequality (see, e.g., Abriutina 1999; Pika 1993). Yet when analysts imagine Indigenous residents in ways that stress their inability to think and act self-consciously, representations emerge that easily, although unintentionally, overlook the political possibilities that Chukchi women and men try to create for themselves. This chapter argues for the importance of a critical anthropology, including the study of political possibilities and creative imaginations. Given the current disenchanted state of public and intellectual debate, such analyses seem all the more urgent. Instead of succumbing to a politics of cynicism and the real (realpolitik), I argue that we must begin with the question of how particular social visions and dreams come to mean something to people caught in particular dilemmas. It may be that in these alternatives–creative innovations rather than ‘old’ forms of contestation–just futures are to be found.

My focus on Ionto’s hopes and dreams seeks to facilitate such a discussion. Since the end of the 1990s, the movement has worked hard to create a space for political initiative and debate. In its efforts to build the conditions for thinking about social alternatives and action, Ionto draws on elements that are understood, albeit appreciated in different degrees, by most Indigenous residents in the peninsula. Reindeer and the cultural practices associated with them are Ionto’s guide to what Tsing (1999: 160) calls a ‘field of attraction’, a space in which Indigenous women and men are able to imagine themselves as agents capable of envisioning the conditions of their own existence. True, not all Indigenous residents in the Chukotka region have lived or live by reindeer herding. Whale, walrus and seal hunting, fishing, collecting mussels, seaweed, birds’ eggs, various kinds of berries and tundra herbs, too, constitute forms of the Chukchi livelihood and help to extend Chukchi knowledge beyond the land to the sea. In the ethnographic imagination, the Chukchi are known as the people who herd chauchu (reindeer) (Bogoraz 1909: 11). Reindeer, and the land, endow people with a deep sense of who they are, and they continue to define the responsibilities and obligations, along with the enjoyments, people can and do have.¹ Dislocation, collectivization of traditional economies, environmental disasters, ‘newcomers’ (priezhie) and the problems they bring, unemployment and, more currently, the botched politics of economic privatization are all part of Chukchi knowledge of the contemporary world. And although people have lived in government settlements for about the last sixty years, reindeer and the cultural and economic practices associated with them remain a focal point of the Chukchi identity. They provide the means–hides, meat and cultural meaning–through and by which people can live. They are at the centre of Chukchi autonomy and independence.

In focusing on animals and the products they yield as principal components for achieving justice and a social movement, it is Ionto’s tactics and style that sets it apart from most other Indigenous and social justice movements in the region. In Chukotka, as elsewhere in the Russian Federation, RAIPON (Russian Association of Indigenous Peoples of the North) is currently both the voice and framework through which most Indigenous organizing in Russia occurs.² Founded at a convention on 20–23 March 1990 in Moscow, RAIPON is an outflow of Russia’s civil society movements, during the era of perestroika, that also comprised Indigenous activists. Originally created at Russia’s federal level, the association has been quick to institute itself at the district and village levels to (1) create regional and local venues for an Indigenous voice, (2) channel information concerning Indigenous issues and rights into villages and regions, (3) dispense monetary aid and funding for Indigenous projects, and (4) guarantee the flow of knowledge and advice between the centre (Moscow) and the regions, and among the regions. The movement has created much excitement at both international (for example, at the United Nations and Arctic Council) and Russia’s federal levels, but it has also generated much scepticism in Russia’s regions.

In the main, criticisms revolve around the failure of RAIPON representatives to address the interests and concerns of local people. Since the inception of the association, foreign monetary support has been generous, and projects that flow from foreign funding currently operate throughout the Russian North–with some regions being better served than others. So far, Chukotka’s Indigenous constituencies have received comparably little funding, and there is a growing awareness that most funding models are not designed by community members but favour rather standardized strategies to train local communities in a range of political and legal fields. At the same time, the complex vulnerability of those who seek political power at administrative levels frequently prevents Indigenous representatives from speaking out against political and economic inequality. As one result, in Chukotka RAIPON representatives are either not well known or associated with forms of political exclusiveness or co-optation. This is certainly part of the reason why people often keep a distance from politics. This distance, too, stems from deep-seated distrust regarding many aspects of public power, as well as its institutional forms and rhetorics.

Ionto is working within these contexts and confinements. The movement’s approximately fifty members (as of 13 November 2002) form an eclectic group of community workers, elders, and young and independent leaders. Although many of Ionto’s key initiators, including Anton Tynel´, intellectual architect of the movement, are Chukchi, other Indigenous residents in the region–Evenk, Even, and Iukaghir–have joined in. Indeed, the fact that Ionto’s membership is based not on ethnicity but on articulations of cultural empathy and sharing is one of the reasons that it is able to attract divergent constituencies. Although Ionto was thought up and founded in Anadyr´, Chukotka’s administrative centre, most meetings are held in Tavaivaam, a government-created village in close proximity to Anadyr´. In the mid-1990s, Tavaivaam became the organizing centre for bold, in-your-face tradition-oriented practices, and flagrant demonstrations of Native cultural consciousness vis-à-vis Chukotka’s authoritarian government. In Tavaivaam, reindeer-hide-covered tents (iarangas) stand side by side with dilapidated buildings within this still largely Soviet-era space. Many of Ionto’s members have actively developed their own interpretation and practice of culture, a memory work by which people consult neighbours, kin, elders and their own memory to learn about obychie (traditions) that are overwhelmingly experienced as a site of loss. Although this practice may not be too surprising, and certainly does find its parallels elsewhere, in Russia it is less than self-evident. It is part of Ionto’s provocation.

Several layers of historical and cultural context are necessary for the force of Ionto’s challenge to emerge. I begin with the processes of Russia’s current economic transformations and their effects on contemporary Indigenous cultural politics. Most frequently, Russia’s economic restructuring and ‘transition’ are looked at from the perspective of domestic or market relations. Soviet nationality politics, however, changed too as the country began to unravel. Recent historical analyses argue (Brubakers 1989; Slezkine 1994b) that the Soviet state created ‘nations’ to promote systematically the national consciousness of non-Russian cultural minorities.³ As Francine Hirsch (2000) has shown, in the Soviet Union the ‘nation’ was a construction of history, not its description. By granting nationhood the Soviet state sought to split above-class national alliances that were based on cultural identity and forms of historical consciousness associated with them. By eroding the conditions for the continuation of strong identity formations–so the argument goes–class divisions would automatically emerge, which would allow the Soviet government to recruit proletarian and peasant support for their own agenda. The resultant politics are torn and contradictory.

More than an antiquated relic of the Soviet Union, nation-building was and is part of the political consciousness that informs a great deal of Indigenous organizing at Russia’s federal and regional levels. In Chukotka and elsewhere, there is an implicit criticism that institutional Indigenous organizing is steeped in the history of elite-making, and that there are too many urban-based and institutionally affiliated professionals that do not connect with the country’s very different regional cultures and peoples. In implicit criticism of Indigenous representatives associated with Chukotka’s local administration, Ionto argues that ways need to be found to make political initiative look like a possible and worthwhile project for regional women and men. One consequence of ‘market reform’ was the descent of Chukotka’s Indigenous residents, and many of their non-Indigenous neighbours, into entrenched poverty and destitution. In Chukotka this situation is aggravated by structuring economic logics that keep Indigenous residents in conditions of perpetual dependence. As a challenge, Ionto poses its own vision of the market, turning democratization from a process of disempowerment into one of promise in which people craft their own political practices and futures.

The power of Ionto’s dream is not to be content to identify what is. It is to show the possibilities that might become.

Democracy

In Russia at the beginning of the 1990s, democracy became one of the political key sites around which the country’s hopes and economic aspirations rallied. The new democratic regime sought to put an end to the trappings of the old regime–the Communist command economy, one-party rule, non-elected political representatives, and the strong influence of the military (as expressed in strong criticisms of the unpopular Afghan war at that time)–to move towards democratic media representations and elections. Yet as political possibilities seemingly opened, it quickly became clear that they were short-lived. The astonishing energy that had led to the emergence of a variety of civil society movements in Eastern European countries and the Soviet Union was quickly curtailed when, on 6 December 1991, the Soviet Union officially dissolved. Superpower political status no longer translated unambiguously into economic status. With the end of the Cold War, the new post-socialist regimes found themselves at the mercy of IMF debt-rescheduling guidelines developed for the economic restructuring of countries like Mexico and Brazil. The social impact of being considered economically a Third World country was humbling. Democratic issues were relegated to the sidelines while economic issues became dominant.

Translated into a programme for the transition from a planned to a market economy, the overriding Western (chiefly US) policy concern was not whether incorporation into global capitalism should occur, but how quickly and on what terms. For Russia’s post-Soviet citizens, the word ‘shock’ (udarnik)–a historical term in the former Soviet Union which implies jolting an economic system into gear through rapid acceleration of the transformation process–returned in a new context, as the ‘shock therapy’ economic programme designed by Harvard economist Jeffrey Sachs rose to hegemonic prominence.⁴ Speed of implementation became paramount in order to prevent political debate about the social desirability of such transformation. Yet if speed is necessary to avoid political debate, political debate needs to be avoided because it slows down the speed of implementation. Circularity was the epistemological essence of both kinds of ‘shock therapy’. But, even more significant for the argument here, recent reform-driven shock therapy separated decisively two projects that at first appeared to be inextricably linked: the economic project of free markets and the political project of democratic rule. In this separation, it was democracy that was expendable. The goal of instituting capitalism had clear priority. The tragedy of this separation was not the destruction of the old socialist economy, but the fact that Westernizers in post-socialist governments no longer identified the elimination of socialism with the establishment of principles of democracy. In the case of Russia, it meant that Yeltsin (as currently Putin) did not feel himself necessarily burdened by putting democracy into practice.

The national restructuring of the Soviet economy had several consequences that fundamentally changed the political relationship between Indigenous and non-Indigenous representatives in governmental and administrative bodies. In April 1932, roughly two years after the inception on 10 December 1930 of the Chukotkskii natsionalniy okrug (Chukotka National District), the First Chukotka Okrug Congress of Soviets decided to inaugurate a parallel political system which was to grant both Indigenous and non-Indigenous CPSU (Communist Party of the Soviet Union) members equity and politically balanced shares of power. At the regional level, the chairperson of the Worker’s Deputies was invariably Russian, while the chairperson of the Executive Committee of the Soviet of Workers’ Deputies was invariably a Chukchi woman or man. In highly formalistic implementation of this rule, from 1932 until 1991, Chukchi women or men served as chairpersons of the Executive Committee or ispolkom. To the astonishment of Chukotka’s residents, in 1991 this rule was reversed when Chukchi politician Vladimir Mikhailovich Etylin was elected chairperson of the Soviet of Workers’ Deputies, while a Russian ‘newcomer’ (priezshie), Aleksandr Viktorovich Nazarov, was chosen as chairperson of the ispolkom.

To outsiders, the fairly high status and power of Indigenous representatives at government levels since the inception of the Soviet Union may be surprising, but recently historians have argued that Soviet nationality policies were one important step in creating what Terry Martin (2001) has labelled the ‘affirmative-action empire’. The ‘affirmative-action empire’ may have been the Soviet Union’s own unique historic response to a problem that has troubled, and still troubles, many multinational states and federations: how to integrate cultural multiplicity within larger governmental configurations by maintaining, at least in appearance, justice and equality among them?⁵ The answer to this question, the ‘nation-builders’ (as represented by Lenin and Stalin) among the Bolsheviks argued, lay in the implementation of affirmative action (polozhitel´naia deiatel´nost´) policy in the name of korenizatsiia, loosely translated as ‘indigenization’. After many debates at previous party meetings, at the Twelfth Party Congress in April 1923, korenizatsiia matured into an idiom for Indigenous affirmation and decolonization.

Scholars of social policies and history tend to study korenizatsiia as an institution (Brubakers 1996: 38), analysed for its structure and mode of legitimation, and for the way it took part in both the establishment and disavowal of Soviet imperial power (Slezkine 1994b; Martin 2001; Suny 1993). But, more importantly to the Chukchi men and women and the analysis here, korenizatsiia is also a persistent part of the social context within which a great deal of popular Indigenous organizing and its political articulations occur. More than an antiquated relic of the nation-building process that was to make the Soviet Union, it is also part of the political consciousness that informs a great deal of Indigenous organizing on Russia’s federal and the international scene. Perhaps more than anywhere else, in Russia questions of recognition and cultural rights are entangled with the history of the state and its forms of institutionalized power: a history of social advancement and prestige through and by allegiance to the Party and more than seven decades of well-calculated government rhetoric that posited the state as the nexus of political possibility, progress, justice and cultural rights.

The termination of the policy in 1993 as a consequence of economic power struggles in Moscow distressed Russia’s Indigenous residents because there no longer existed a guaranteed institutional basis for their voice. In December 1992 a fist fight broke out in parliament over the nomination of the pro-Sachs ‘Westerner’ Egor Gaidar for the position of prime minister. In May 1993 over 500 people were wounded in a Moscow May Day riot. In October 1993, tanks ordered by president Boris Yeltsin moved onto Russia’s Parliament building. In the ensuing violence, between the elected Members of Parliament who opposed Yeltsin on several accounts and the ‘new’ democratic government that was unanimously backed by all member states of NATO, 187 people died, Russia plunged into a deep economic crisis, and the president won almost tsar-like powers for himself. Never mind that Yeltsin, in opposition to the communist Gorbachev, was one of the founding members of the democratic party Nash Dom–Rossiia (‘Our House is Russia’), by the end of October the outcome of all this upheaval was enacted in true authoritarian style. Fearing for the continuation of his leadership and political survival, Yeltsin called for the dissolution of all Soviets of Workers’ Deputies. Their chairpersons were replaced by carefully chosen members of Nash Dom–Rossiia and the Yeltsin clan. In Chukotka, Vladimir Etylin, who from 1991 to 1993 had served as chairperson of this Soviet, was summarily dismissed, and Aleksandr Nazarov advanced speedily to the position of governor.

Thus, in the perception of many Chukchi, seven decades of affirmative action ended. Effectively barred from all positions of decision-making power and struck–like the rest of the country–by dramatic increases in poverty, unemployment and inflation, the Chukchi communities sank into a state of despondency and despair. At the same time, Aleksandr Nazarov, the new ‘governor’, ruled by harassment, intimidation and authoritarian decree. Departmental divisions that exclusively dealt with Indigenous affairs were closed. In 1996 the iaranga (the Chukchi term for the traditional reindeer-fur-covered tent that was used by reindeer-herding Chukchi), a meeting place for various Chukchi cultural and political groups, was disbanded and, in the same year, the Chukchi section Murgin Nutenut (‘Our Homeland’) of the regional newspaper was terminated. Demonstrations and public protests led to more dismissals, and in lieu of activists and independent leaders Indigenous staff loyal to and financed by the governor were offered positions within governmental institutions. Among the Chukchi, these budzhetniki (Indigenous representatives whose work is included in the budget of the government) are simultaneously disrespected and feared. On extra-regional trips and on the international Indigenous stage, they endorse the regime of the governor, saying what he wants them to say.

The reason why RAIPON representatives in Chukotka are so often distrusted needs to be understood in the context of these constellations. But to argue that in Chukotka the efforts of institutionalized Indigenous movements have often been in vain is not simply to dismiss their organizations, or to disagree with those who see them as the single most important way to a political voice. To relate regional politics in such a way is not to deny what many have argued, namely that the self-conscious articulation of an Indigenous movement in challenge to the Communist regime created an important political space in which Indigenous issues could be heard (Gray 1998). One problem is that most of these organizations were produced within the logics of the old regime, rather than being the consequence of their defeat. As one consequence, in Russia RAIPON’s Indigenous critics charge that representatives situated on institutional levels produce rather standardized political demands and forms that mirror bureaucratic limitations rather than peoples’ wishes and needs.

The implications are that Indigenous politicians are rarely trusted by their own constituencies, partly because of the legacy of the Soviet Union itself, partly because of their manoeuvrings and rhetoric that put governmental aid at their nexus, thus actively asking for protection, making appeals for dependency, albeit by implication. This is a politics that cannot enliven the imagination or inspire. What is needed here are new modes of producing consciousness and awareness, modes steeped in a different kind of morality and–to evoke a rarely used term–integrity. Modes that can rally citizens and community, and make political activists work look like an identifiable and worthwhile object for Chukchi women and men. This is precisely the project on which Ionto has embarked: how can we meet the needs of the present without submission to state governance and the forms of the governing mentality that come along with it? For a start, consider a fragment from an interview with Anton Tynel, one of Ionto’s founding members and key leaders.

Initiative

The fair [iarmarkt] is the foundation of our independence. If we start now, in the beginning, only two or three people will come. Let them bring meat, and nothing more; let them bring animal hides, and nothing more. But this will be the beginning of our trade activism. We will do it ourselves and not through some government. This is what we will do for ourselves; we will do it how it was for a long time.

Trade fairs? What is happening here? Is this fragment part of a tradition-oriented but politically eccentric dream of empowerment and self-determination? Is this a fetishizing of origins summoned in opposition to governmental credos? Or does this statement offer evidence of a withdrawal, a retreat into the certitude of tradition, of what once was, of an unrivalled past in which many things Chukotka’s Indigenous residents now lack were a given? Through this statement I can ask about Ionto’s attempts to motivate and inspire Chukchi women and men, while at the same time being limited by the same discursive, institutional and political constraints as other leaders. I can ask about Chukchi fantasies, imaginings and hopes, and the possibility of their realization.

The segment of Ionto’s vision as related above must be read in light of, but not reduced to, the commitments, significance and love Chukchi and their Indigenous neighbours attach to animals and reindeer herding as a meaningful form of making a living. There is a tendency in northern Russia studies to emphasize the material utility and worth of animals, including reindeer. But the significance of reindeer stretches well beyond considerations of diet (intestines, meat and marrow) and utility (shelter and clothes). If whaling, fishing and sealing are important to the economic and cultural livelihood of Chukchi women and men, reindeer are also cultural media for expanding and connecting their identities. Precisely because people herded and thus travelled with these animals, they were able to establish meaningful and enduring bonds between themselves and animals, as well as within and between communities.⁶ Reindeer were the medium through which the Chukchi formed and form ontologies of social and spiritual relations (Rethmann 2001). Even at the beginning of this millennium, after disease and the effects of national and international economic policies, including collectivization and privatization have undermined the material bases of reindeer herding, reindeer remain a sign of social identity and wealth, albeit in a radically transformed cultural and political environment.

The significance of animals for producing connections gains importance, too, in the economic realm. In Chukchi communities, women and men actively remember trade fairs and the mobility associated with them as important and constitutive aspects of their livelihood. In Chukchi memory and in the native country, trade fairs (dense networks of economic transaction and exchange) were important places of biznis (business) and commerce, connecting different Indigenous constituencies–Chukchi, Koriak, Even, Inupiat (Kotzebue 1821, I: 228)–and non-Indigenous constituencies–Russian, Japanese, and American–into the bargain (Burch 1988). Fairs enter the ethnographic record as early as 1789 (Bogoraz 1904: 56) and were then held in the area of Ostrovnye and Anui at irregular intervals. Eventually the latter location prevailed and Fort Anuisk was built. The Anui fair grew rapidly in importance, and around the 1880s financial turnover amounted to 200,000 r0ubles a year.⁷ Older Chukchi men and women confirm the reports of scholars that there must have been fairs in villages as remote as Naukan or Uelen, to which people travelled, again, fully armed, offering their wares to each other on spear points (Bogoraz 1904: 53). Their mobility and autonomy allowed Chukchi herders to establish far-reaching trade relations in the region, and stretch out–across the ocean–throughout the entire Bering region.

Historic changes at the turn of the century, however, forced the Chukchi to shift the emphasis in trade from intraregional to interregional relations, resulting in the intensification of trade among Chukotka’s Indigenous and non-Indigenous constituencies. The Chukchi recall some of the specificities of such exchange in great detail (Krupnik 2000: 224–31). Cultural memories of this trade continue to enthral younger Chukchi as sites of enchanting action; communication between generations becomes possible. Younger people ask about the prizes for knives and rifles (how many reindeer hides did you ‘sell’ to buy a gun?), and older people consult each other and their memory to answer these questions as accurately as they can. To the Chukchi women and men I know, interregional trade identifies them as wide-travelling and knowledgeable people: trading people are people who can manage their own affairs.

In fashioning its own vision of autonomy, Ionto works hard to create political meanings that may resonate with a position ‘from below’. It is not a statement that addresses the desires and hopes of the Chukchi in the name of transcendent abstractions: Indigenous justice, democracy, sustainability and human rights, as if such articles were invariably the property of states, development agencies or international political bodies. Precisely because the statement deploys Chukchi history, memory and knowledge to inspire the Chukchi people is Ionto able to attract attention. Promising openings have been created. In 1998 Chukchi women and men from the western Chukotka territory of Bilibino thought of organizing such a fair to protest against the radiation and emissions from Bilibino’s nuclear power station which kills animals, humans and plants. At that time, the Chukchi let the idea of trade pass so as not to direct attention away from the goals they pursued then. To the excitement of everybody involved, the idea was a success. Bilibino’s resident Chukchi were there, but many more arrived from far away to participate. ‘There was even a couple that travelled on reindeer sledge for three days with their newborn.’ Elders came. People danced, played the drum, and drank less. Everybody seemed to have a good time. A ‘field of attraction’ had been created and cleared within a social landscape of desire and hope, granting Chukchi agency within the imaginations of their own making.

Government Tradition

In Ionto’s statement, tradition is turned to its own unexpected ends. Not all tradition is licensed to empower, as its dramatization on the governmental stage of cultural recognition makes clear. One of its key aims is appeasement and accommodation, whether we refer to Soviet-era ritualizations or to the dawning of Russia’s post-Soviet, ‘new’ democratic epoch. Theatrical representations of the commonwealth’s cultural multiplicity and that of its ‘cultures’ sprang up all across the Soviet Union in the 1920s (Rolf 2000). In the name of ‘allying’ (smychka) and, again, the ‘Friendship of the Peoples’, ritualized stagings of ‘everyday life’ (byt) turned into dramatizations of life as song and dance, a highly routinized catalogue of artistic movements and gestures contrived to pass the phantasm of culture as its own factuality and truth. In this highly socialist economy of signs, tradition as the concrete stuff of Chukchi everyday life turned into a simulacrum of itself, a mirror that reflects meaning as image alone. Following the Soviet creed that ‘culture’ should be ‘nationalist in form, [but] socialist in content’, the traditions of ‘the people’ metamorphosed into fetishized articulations of the regime’s good intentions and will, duplicates without–and this is what concerns the Chukchi most–genuine matter. ‘[They] perform (tantzuem) traditions, but their meaning is gone.’ I have previously claimed that the Chukchi, in search of political possibility, invoke tradition not so much in the spirit of the authentic but of the fantastic. In this section, I turn to the question of tradition as governmental ritual to show (1) how rituals which are enacted in the name of Indigenous rights actually help to maintain authoritarian government, and (2) how these rituals in their very simplified and compressed forms open spaces for the very reversal of their own code.

The ideals of the Bolsheviks may be gone, but the legacy of the Soviet Union lives on. In the Chukotka Autonomous Region this is nowhere more evident than in the ritualized forms of public recognition, including cultural difference and rights. On 9 August 2000, the newly democratic government of Chukotka celebrated the ‘International Day of Indigenous Peoples’ (Mezhdunarodnykh den´ korennykh narodov) in Anadyr´.⁸ The celebration, conducted under the auspices of the regional government, assumed a grandly theatrical form. In keeping with the theme of the day, the elevated stage engulfed almost one-third of the plaza that stretches out in front of Anadyr´’s House of Culture (dom kul´tury), with the municipal administration doing its best to approximate some sort of original of Chukchi culture. Indeed, there was nothing particularly spectacular in Anadyr´’s rendition. An open and wide iaranga, with all the trappings of exemplary Chukchi life, furnished the background and the illusion of cultural simplicity and authenticity. Reindeer-hide-covered drums were hanging from cords along the side of the tent; boots, mattresses and coats sewn from reindeer fur either lay or hung down on the ground; antlers, bows and the odd spear stuck out everywhere; and, finally, a rounded plate manifesting a quintessential Chukchi sign of life, the sun, shone over the entire charade. Walrus tusks and simulations of Chukchi petroglyphic imagery of sea mammals, including whales and seals, baidars (boats), and hunting scenes had been painted on pieces of cardboard, each of which was attached to the stage.

Under the slogan ‘our way, our pride’, difference not collectivity took centre stage. Alongside the governor and the Russian administrative elite stood Chukchi representatives, their amplified voices overpowering the everyday sounds of Anadyr´’s life. Aleksander Nazarov spoke of economic achievements (‘We now have 500 Indigenous students studying here’), of justice (‘I want to tell you that the law concerning the Indigenous Peoples of the North, Siberia and the Far North was passed. . . . And this fact gives grounds to the growth of Indigenous self-consciousness. Today, we also work for other laws. . . . And we also prepared a series of laws which are presently under review in the Federal Duma. That is The Law of the Arctic. The respective committee should work and give this law to the people’), and of debt, with the inkling of an apology (‘Ahead of us, there is a task. Together with preservation of the ethnic and cultural uniqueness [samobytnost´] of the Indigenous peoples of the North, we will also need to elevate them to the level of a modern civilization. . . . Our debt today: the continuous, harmonious, and, most importantly, compassionate (dobrovol´noe) introduction of our Indigenous people to a modern level of life’). Indigenous representatives avowed the governor’s claims in their own speeches, only to be interrupted–but always in carefully staged intervals–by the dancers and drummers of Ergyron, the ‘Chukchi-Eskimo’ national dance ensemble founded in 1968 to the general edification of Chuktoka’s Indigenous and non-Indigenous residents. Amidst the cries that Eryron’s dancers emitted in imitation of the seagull, official Chukchi leaders, too, spoke in enthusiastic, albeit very general, ways of the accomplishments and kindheartedness of the governor. The few Chukchi who were there observed this newly democratic but also terribly familiar scene with their own air of practised detachment.

It will be remembered that in the political culture of the Soviet Union the recognition of Russia’s non-Russian constituencies was situated at the threshold between negation and affirmation, between the denial of ‘culture’ as a site of difference and its avowal as folkloric aestheticization. This was a dialectics that created its own particular form of exclusion by purportedly empowering that which it sought to keep out of its political realm. As Chukchi women and men are well aware, the logics of this system have not been abandoned but live on: in the creation of new political vocabularies and legal language, rhetorics of patronage masquerading as kindness, dependencies disguised as guardianship and care through which the spectre not of communism but of democratization rises. No one but the governor himself makes this more clear. That day, in an act of singular and magnanimous ostentation, Aleksandr Nazarov had allowed himself the pleasure of a special gesture. Piles and piles of pinkish-grey layers of bowhead whale fat (makhtak) were heaped up on long wooden boards alongside the iaranga. The adjoining banner read: From the Governor (Ot gubernatora)!

Aid

Ionto’s concerns grow directly out of these perplexities, provoked by a democracy driven by cunning and deceit rather than by, as much current political philosophy would have it, virtue and sincerity (e.g., Tully 1995; Kymlicka 1995). This is the context in which Ionto works to turn the fantasy of tradition to its own unexpected ends. Yet there is one more aspect that I need to explore before the ingenuity of Ionto’s project can come fully into view. What about the explicitly economized aspect of Ionto’s vision, the market? Does not the statement maintain, albeit by implication, that ‘tradition’ acquires its antithetical value in the very process of its marketization, its trafficking and exchange? How can the ‘tradition’ that must find its commodified (if not always monetized) ‘other’ be useful in granting political possibility or, indeed, in fulfilling sovereignty and self-determination? My concern with the possibility of imagination as a site of hope turns here to the possibility of subjugation and enslavement in the context of gift-giving in its particular form of ‘humanitarian aid’ (guminitarnaia pomosh´). Since 24 December 2000, the Chukotka Autonomous Region has been run under the auspices of a new governor, Roman Abramovich, whose allegedly altruistically given help has compelled Chukchi women and men to think even more deeply about political styles and innovations than during the authoritarian rule of Aleksandr Nazarov. In the following I work to understand Chukotka’s own logics of promise and debt in which Chukotka’s Indigenous residents have recently become ensnared. Although I follow Roman Abramovich’s efforts closely, my argument extends beyond the political ambitions of one particular politician to understand the underlying logics and effects of regional developments in the form of the ostensibly altruistic gift.

Who is Roman Abramovich? There are at least two totally different incarnations behind this name. First, Roman Abramovich is Chukotka’s latest manifestation of self-aggrandizing benevolence and care. In the words of one of his closest advisors, however, he is just part of a ‘bunch of young men from Moscow who came to Chukotka to do good’.⁹ Recall that in the recent ethnographic imagination Chukotka is always a region of immense poverty, a state-of-being in which the Chukchi hover incessantly at the brink of extinction. This is a situation that cannot fail to evoke empathy and compassion, and one that ‘merits attention on humanitarian grounds alone’ (Carnegie Foundation 2000: 69). Abramovich actualizes, in the flesh, what Russia–according to many international observers–so bitterly lacks: (our) commiseration, sympathy and sharing. Roman Abramovich comprises all these qualities in abundance. In summer 2000 he paid for hundreds of Chukchi children to spend the two summer months of their school vacation in well-staffed camps on the Black Sea. Jet planes flew back and forth between Anadyr´ and Sochi, covering thousands of miles, financed by Abramovich’s own wealth, promoted by his own propaganda machine. Pictures of healthy-looking and, for once, non-starving children were published in his own weekly paper, Polius Nadezhdy (‘Pole of Hope’). As if to underscore all of this ‘assistance’, the new governor, too, sends ‘humanitarian aid’ in the form of food, clothes and shoes, but also candles and fishing rods, to Chukchi villages in Chukotka. Yet there is one article that Roman Abramovich will not give: ‘aid’ in its rawest form, money. Yet it is the latter, Chukchi argue, that they so urgently need. Money not only buys products and food. Money also buys technical tools and mechanical devices that might aid them in their own endeavours.

Considering Roman Abramovich’s almost frantic giving, there is one obvious question that emerges here: why is he providing all of this ‘assistance’? What are his intentions, his motivations? A look at Roman Abramovich’s second incarnation might provide the answer. In Russia, Abramovich is better known as one of Russia’s oligarchs (if not the ‘most powerful [and] wealthy’ [Lloyd 2000: 91])–key beneficiaries of the economic reign of the few (the ‘oligarchic period’) who have decided Russia’s economic fate since the beginning of the 1990s. Trading a career in the Komsomol (Kommunisticheskii soiuz molodezhi, ‘Communist Youth Organization’) for a risky future in Russia’s emerging private sector in the late 1980s, Abramovich enjoyed the distinct advantage of growing up under the strong tutelage of Berezovskii within the Kremlin ‘family’. Together with other members of this economic elite he entered his apogee in 1996 when ‘the oligarchs’ received important slices of state property at extraordinarily low prices (the so-called ‘loans for share’ deal) in return for their collective decision to underwrite and finance Yeltsin’s re-election campaign. The move guaranteed Abramovich’s apotheosis as an ‘oil baron’. He currently holds a significant percentage of the shares of Sibneft (Siberian Oil), one of Russia’s most powerful corporations, and a considerable portion of Rossisskii Aluminy. Yet in Russia speculations persist that the ‘oligarchic period’ may soon come to an end.

Such tentative assumptions have everything to do with another significant change on Russia’s contemporary political scene: the tough-fisted regime of Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, who wishes to curtail both freedom of the press and the oligarchs’ sway. Abramovich and his accomplices may all be very rich, but for most of them it is an uneasy, robber-baron kind of wealth that may be snatched away at any time. Since their ascendancy to economic wealth and power, Putin, then chief of the KGB, has been keeping kompromat on them, material gathered by the security agencies on their rise to wealth. Putin’s decision to employ this material in his interests depends on whether Russia’s top businessmen can throw off a decade of corruption, strong-arm tactics, private feuds and cheating foreigners to emerge as credible financial leaders.¹⁰ So far, membership of the Federation Council by virtue of his position as governor has guaranteed Abramovich immunity from prosecution, but he may want a safer bet. What better way, then, to show the noblesse of a kindred spirit in economic hard times and donate, bestow, present?

As a result, the humanitarian aid given by Roman Abramovich may be largely conceited, although some of it may be sincere. Yet if it carries traces of altruism and care, it summons them with enormous ambiguity–an ambiguity, indeed, that marks the very disruption of Abramovich’s wished-for goodwill. In its most severe form, the doubled intent of all this gifting expresses itself in the very continuation of the conditions that bring about the economy of the gift in the first place. In this context, Ionto’s vision emerges as one of disruption, of unexpected challenge that confronts the conditions of dependency in the gestalt of kindness through the conception of a market based on the rejection of the economy of the good deed by replacing it with–as a vision–an economy of equivalence. The market of Ionto’s imagining outlaws indignity and exploitation by reclaiming autonomy and sovereignty. It does this through a vision of production based not on distancing and alienation but on local history, interests and loyalties. The entrepreneurial activities of Ionto’s market are build on parochial experience, yet they are capable of its transcendence by involving always larger, far-flung constituencies in the bargain. Such trade does not necessarily involve the conditions of its own corruption. It holds the promise of possibility precisely because it is based on a morality whose standards and rules the Chukchi create themselves for themselves.

It is too early to say how Ionto’s project will evolve. On the one hand, there is little to suggest that Ionto’s vision of exchange and trade will grow into a powerful initiative, fulfilling its own promise by dissolving the spirit of the economy of dependency and debt. But on the other hand, there are grounds that dispute the certainty of governmental giving through the self-conscious refusal of accepting Abramovich’s ‘help’. ‘We are fed up [nadoeli] with all his humanitarian help’, Ionto states. This is a rejection that contains the rejection of enslavement that set the conditions of ‘humanitarian aid’ in the first place. Kindness and protection are the idioms in Chukotka in which democracy is spoken, but they are also the idioms of governance. Danger continues to loom for Indigenous peoples: if nobody will take care of them, they will become the victims of all this democratic modernization. Only under the guidance of outsiders will the Chukchi be able to solve their problems. The double-edged sword of that danger is clear to the Chukchi. Only if they escape the guidance of outsiders and think about their own models do they stand a chance of gaining autonomy and independence. This is the spirit of Ionto’s own project. It refuses the dialectical logics of domination and enslavement. The conditions for self-determined independence are set.

Development

The importance of this point for the Chukchi communities cannot be overstated; a last example will make this clear. In October 2001, Chukotka and Alaskan regional officials, scholars, Indigenous representatives, and environmentalists convened for a two-day meeting in Anchorage to discuss the creation of an international Beringia Heritage Park–‘bridge of friendship’ (Beringia–most druzhby) between the US and Russian governments, and a link to unite the lands and peoples of the Bering Straits in exchanges of culture, conservation ethics and scientific findings, and natural and cultural resource management technologies. Amidst the upbeat atmosphere of the convention, the Alaska assistant governor pointed out that the meeting’s focus on joint action and intergovernmental cooperation was a testimony to the serious commitments to improve relations and bring about change in this one-time Cold War zone. Speakers commented on the ecological and economic challenges especially in the Chukotka peninsula, and an attentive audience listened. Many scheduled Chukchi, however, drew attention not because of the acumen of their presentations but due to their absence. Rumours had it that poor weather conditions had made it impossible for them to board the plane from Anadyr´ to Anchorage. However, official representatives of Chukotka’s government had managed to get to the meetings. One of them was Chukotka’s official spokesperson on economic affairs; another was the governor’s official and Native assistant on Indigenous affairs.

On the first day, the governor’s representative on economic affairs spoke of the wonderful commercial possibilities in the region. Due to the work of the new government, he explained, Chukotka had finally a fair chance of riches. The industrial exploitation of the oilfields in the peninsula’s north would open up the region to the influx of international capital and investments, help Chukotka to become a powerful player on the global financial scene, and dramatically improve living conditions for all residents. The possibilities were limitless. But to the astonishment of the speakers, a few Indigenous representatives in attendance were not so easily won over. A Yupik man from Alaska stood up, demanding to know if the people he considers culturally his kin had been informed ‘of all of this development?’ Had there been public consultations with Native peoples about the government’s plans? What did Chukotka’s Indigenous residents think about the environmental impact of oil activity on reindeer herding and tundra lands?

Among Chukotka’s spokespeople, evidently, the question caused some commotion. In response, the government representative stepped gallantly aside while the governor’s Native advisor stepped forcefully in. Chukotka’s government had done nothing wrong, he explained. The recent drillings involved no violations of Chukchi customary rights. Besides, he continued, isn’t it up to the involved communities rather than the government to inform themselves about what is going on? ‘Native people, you have to understand, cry (plachut) all the time. They are passive and lethargic. They are not prepared to do anything on their own but always wait, with their hands open.’

Having most certainly awaited a different kind of answer, the Yupik man sat down in stunned silence. Someone else from the audience tried to be helpful. One might want to consider the creation of Native parks, protected areas in which no industrial activity can be pursued without a referendum by the Native inhabitants, was the speaker’s suggestion.¹¹ That way, Native communities would not run the danger of being swallowed up by all this new and inevitable development. Better still, the Chukchi would be able to retain certain parts of their land, their subsistence, and their traditions. The parks, of course, would be free of non-Native residents. Native peoples could pursue their own subsistence-maintaining activities; non-Indigenous residents could proceed in their endeavours. The region would profit. Everybody’s interests would be served.

Within the context of economic restructuring, aid giving and regional openings to developmental interests it is, of course, self-evident that not everybody’s interests will be served. Within the capitalist economy, it proves incomparably easier to segregate the Chukchi than it is to discuss issues of justice and land rights. The settling of Chukchi in parks has the effect of encapsulating them in history, denying them the possibility of active participation in the future of the region.¹² Precisely because such suggestions are based within frameworks of cultural stasis and not debate or dialogical exchange, they support the argument that only in isolation can Indigenous peoples maintain their assumed authenticity. Even if we grant the suggestion’s best intentions, it forestalls the possibility for self-determined futures.

Challenges and Dreams

Democratization in Chukotka has been largely an ambiguous process for Russia’s Indigenous constituencies, having led simultaneously to the improvement and aggravation of their situation. Precisely because a great deal of democratization meant not the creation of a public culture of discussion and careful examination but economic reform at enormous speed, debates about the desirability of the transformation and Russia’s political future shape were missed. At the same time, openings have been created. During the Gorbachev-inspired era of perestroika, ‘friendship visits’ between Alaska and Chukotka became possible, and there was even a USSR agreement on visa-free travel between Chukotka and Alaska for Chukotka’s Indigenous peoples. In spite of the many difficulties they face, Chukotka’s Indigenous residents have since the beginning of the 1990s travelled, attended conferences, and communicated their political desires and concerns to larger audiences. And although Chukotka’s familiar authoritarian logics quell Indigenous initiatives and rights, the recent processes of democratization have enabled Ionto and other Indigenous women and men to debate openly their aspirations and hopes. For these reasons, democracy needs to be criticized in the name of the hope to which it gave rise, not as a rejection of it.

The challenges that flow from all these issues and concerns are numerous and complicated. They are steeped in both Soviet and Russian cultural politics and in the transition from a planned to a market economy. As Russia emerges out of the crucible of Soviet politics, Indigenous peoples have begun to pursue projects for cultural recognition, land rights and self-determination in Russia’s chronic climate of political uncertainty. At the same time, political strategies are often contested, and differences in political background and tactics frequently put activists at odds with each other. Spearheaded by RAIPON, Indigenous organizations press for Russia’s ratification of International Labour Organization (ILO) Convention 169, which supports the strengthening of Indigenous cultural rights, languages, schools and autonomy. The creation of a draft law on obshchinas–tradition-oriented and voluntary communities of families and kin who wish to use and govern their own traditional lands, as well as protect these lands from uses that conflict with those supported by and supporting Indigenous peoples–has been considered a breakthrough for Indigenous justice. (More recently, the draft law has turned into a site of intense conflict. Obshchinas have the right to petition for land and its exclusive use; however, land title remains with the state.) Yet ongoing tensions and debates over the legitimacy, tasks and responsibilities of the institutionalized movement have led to internal critiques that focus on issues of funding, centre–regional relations, and differences in political outlook and culture. Recently, RAIPON publicly acknowledged for the first time that more concentrated work and a better rapport with Indigenous communities in the region are needed.

At the same time as Indigenous associations in Russia have found ways to ride the current wave of global funding, impoverishment in the regions has set in. Rising unemployment, declining wages, cutbacks in social welfare, drastic increases in poverty, deteriorating health and education–in short, a massive decline in the standard of living of the majority of a country’s citizens–are now an all-pervasive reality. When post-socialist government leaders took up the discourse of ‘shock therapy’ and endorsed its principles, they acquired certain political benefits, and tapped into the legitimating aura of Western expertise. They spoke the language of private property and liberalization that has garnered sympathy from the IMF, the World Bank, and other international pro-capitalist agencies. And, perhaps, they could cover their own helplessness in the face of persistent economic decline by saying they were ‘letting markets work’. But at the same time, Chukotka’s Indigenous residents endure new forms of humiliation in economic forms. Market reforms and liberalization did not have the desired effects. Rather than establishing new industries that could create a global niche for Russian products, ‘free trade’ encouraged the practice, immediately profitable, of selling raw materials and other non-renewable valuables in exchange for manufactured imports.

This is the pivotal point around which Ionto’s efforts revolve. In order to be meaningful and effective, economic projects must resonate with Indigenous desires and needs. As long as Chuktoka’s structuring economic logic is based on projects envisioned solely by non-local peoples and outsiders, such imaginings will remain dreams. Their political promise appears greatest when they are able to involve and rally people and communities. Rather than working within government-inspired structures of identity, they draw on materials–affinities with animals, community-making and fairs–that are already there and are meaningful to Chukchi women and men. Then it might become possible to think about communal political initiative.

Critics might argue that I am too sanguine about Ionto’s project and the politics of tradition in the Russian context. In introducing this analysis, I am aware that dreams are not the most powerful constellations around. There is perhaps the charge that dreams take us back to an earlier era marked by an intellectual romanticism that many of us hope to have left behind. But such an interpretation might miss the challenges particular people face. Thus, instead of beginning with our own scholarly common sense and conventional rejections, I have argued that we must begin with the question of how the extraordinary but down-to-earth aspects of Ionto’s dream come to mean something to people caught in particular dilemmas.

It is easy to read Ionto’s social vision as part of a tradition-oriented but politically eccentric dream of empowerment and self-determination–a dream of unwarranted ideals. But such an interpretation would not even begin to understand the challenges people face. The dream is part of the Chukchi refusal to be crushed by the exercise of daily patronage; it is part of the endeavour, in however exceptional a form, to work towards autonomy and independence. Ionto’s dream helps to create a context in which struggle and commitment are not meaningless articulations.

Notes

1. Chukchi knowledge that the land needs to be treated with respect sits together with much work on Indigenous human–animal–land relations. My own insights into the emotional, spiritual and symbolic significance of Chukchi animal–human–land relations
stem from my earlier work in tundra reindeer herding camps (Rethmann 2001), and from my many conversations with Chukchi women and men. A point of entry was frequently the insight that animals and the land ‘feel’, ‘hear’ and ‘can be offended’, and thus need to be treated with respect. Chukchi women and men make this abundantly clear when, for example, they entertain the spirit of killed animals and present offerings to sacred sites. To those who care, the land gives. Chukchi pointed this out to me upon my arrival in summer 2000 in Anadyr´, when the local government refused me permission to leave the airport (the airport is separated from the land by the ocean) and set foot in the region. After having filled out an endless array of paperwork (although I had all necessary documents), after a personal audience with the governor (who wanted to know what I was doing), and after polite yet insistent inquiries of Chukchi friends (who waited patiently in front of doors behind which I disappeared), I was finally handed the document permitting me to stay for several months in the region. Chukchi friends, however, explained that I was only authorized to live, at least for a while, in the Chukotka peninsula because I had thought ‘good thoughts about the land’. In return I needed to ‘feed’ the land. The point, here, is not one of ethnographic sensitivity. The point is about the sensibility of the land.

2. On 30–31 March 1989, representatives of more than twenty-eight Indigenous groups of the then-Union of Soviet Socialist Republics met in the Kremlin to discuss issues of political domination. Not altogether breaking with seventy years of Soviet logics, at that meeting–which was supported and attended by then-communist Party leaders Mikhail Gorbachev and Nikolai Ryshkov–representatives formed the ‘Association of the Small Peoples of the North’. Soviet interpretations of Indigenous peoples as ‘small’ did not necessarily carry, as one might readily assume, aspects of belittlement and depreciation–although the term certainly carries such traces. Although sheer demographics and numbers certainly played their part, the term ‘small’ ascertained also the position of Indigenous peoples as ‘non-chauvinistic’ nationalities within the context of the Soviet Union. RAIPON is the successor of the ‘Association of the Small Peoples of the North’, and the voice and framework through which most Indigenous organizing in Russia occurs.

In Russia, RAIPON is mostly referred to by its foreign name. The proper Russian term is AKMNCCiDV RF (Associatsiia korennykh malochislennykh narodov Severa, Sibiri, i Dal´nego Vostoka Rossiiskoi Federatsii).

3. A consequence of Soviet nation-building is the fact that the notion of the ‘nation’ in Indigenous politics is used somewhat differently than in, for example, Canada. While in Canada Indigenous nationhood–which has a long and well-documented history–is a powerful political force, in Russia it is often used to homogenize Indigenous diversity and peoples.

4. During the first and second Five-Year Plan in Soviet Russia, construction work became one of the most significant labour activities to aid socialist advance. Construction was performed in rushes or ‘storms’, a style of work that was called ‘shock work’ (udarnyi trud). Predicated on the assumption that high production levels could be achieved through a combination of labour exploits and systematic work organization, shock work was carried out in brigades. Shock work (analogous to the West’s ‘shock therapy’) became synonymous with a highly aggressive, competitive and unpitying economic style and climate.

5. Or, in the more concrete terms of Russia’s revolutionary government in 1917: how to avoid discontent, overthrow and failure (and thus the fate of the Habsburg empire that the Soviets inherited) by taming the terrifying forces of nationalist loyalties and aspirations?

6. They were also able to arrange marriages and reproductive rights and labour, and also to forge relations of inequality.

7. Bogoraz (1909: 56) states that at that time 1 rouble was equivalent to 50 cents. Converting roubles into US cents, this means that the traffic at the Anui Fair amounted to about US$100,000.

8. The date marks the day of the first convention of the United Nations Working Group on Indigenous Peoples of the Sub-Commission on the Promotion and Protection of Human Rights in 1992.

9. Personal statement by one of Roman Abramovich’s advisors at the Beringia Conference on 12 October 2001, Anchorage.

10. And Putin may well be serious, as the arrest of Vladimir Gusinskii in June 2000 showed.

11. The argument has a long-standing history in Russian anthropology (see Bogoraz 1922; Slezkine 1994a: 148–9, 154). As early as 1923, the ethnographer Bogoraz maintained that the creation of territorial reservations and parks would be the only way to protect Chukchi from the destructive influences of state encroachment and Russian culture. In 1924 Bogoraz’s suggestion was rejected by the People’s Commissariat on Nationalities (Narkomnats) in Moscow, which directed Native affairs in Siberia until 1924. The idea, it turned out, found itself in insurmountable contradiction with Marxist–Leninist teachings on the non-capitalist development of backward peoples and their passage to socialism through the active assistance of the revolutionary proletariat.

12. The impetus for the creation of parks emanates often from outside sources, with academic participation involving urban scholars from distant Russian and non-Russian institutions.

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