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I. SIBERIA: GEOGRAPHY AND HISTORY

A. AN INHOSPITABLE CLIMATE

“A country of intense cold and great heat. A country outwardly wretched, but hiding in its bosom incalculable treasure.”

Understood for almost three centuries to be no more than a geographical extension of the Russian state, Siberia stretches from the icy Arctic Ocean in the north to borders with Kazakhstan, Mongolia and China in the south, from the great chain of the Ural Mountains in the west to the Pacific Ocean in the east. Siberia lies (roughly) between the 45th and 77th parallels of north latitude, and extends from the 60° to the 190° of east longitude. Its most northern point is Cape Severo, or North-East Cape, a tongue of land between the estuaries of the great rivers Yenisey and Lena; Cape Vostotchni, its eastern extremity, is only forty-eight miles from Cape Prince of Wales in North America, from which it is separated by Bering Strait. Its greatest length from East to West is about 3,600 miles, and its greatest breadth from North to South a little less than 2,000 miles, forming an area which is 30% larger than Europe.

Many Europeans think of Siberia as a huge wilderness, remote and hostile to human habitation, mostly iced over, darkened by the polar night for a good part of the year. And yet Siberia is nothing if not diverse. From north to south there are a number of large areas that are completely different from each other in climate, terrain, flora and fauna. As you move southward, the Arctic wastes gradually transform into the tundra with its permafrost; further south, the tundra in turn transforms into the slightly warmer zones where scrubby trees will grow; further south still is the evergreen coniferous forest of the taiga; continuing south, there are the fertile steppes and then the arid steppes – and all these various ecological areas come with their own topographical relief, from low-level flatlands to massively towering peaks.

Occupying the greater part of this vast landmass, the central Siberian plateau is bound to the north, east and south by an enormous amphitheatre of mountain chains. To the north and east are the mountains of Verkhoyansk, which at their highest reach 9,097 feet (2,389 metres). Forming Siberia’s southern boundary are the Sayan mountains (9,612 feet/2,930 metres) and the ranges of the Altai (which at Mt Belukha top out at 14,783 feet/4,506 metres). Within these various chains lie the sources of the three great Siberian rivers, the Ob, the Yenisey (a name derived from Evenki ioanessi ‘great river’), and the Lena. These rivers are frozen over for much of the year – between October/November and May/June – but at other times flow powerfully across Siberia for about 2,500 miles (4,000 kilometres) until they reach the cold Arctic Ocean.

The peninsula of Kamchatka, an important center of Siberian aboriginal life, is a long, irregular tongue of land lying east of the Okhotsk Sea, between the fifty-first and sixty-second degrees of north latitude, and measuring in extreme length about seven hundred miles. It is almost entirely of volcanic formation, and the great range of rugged mountains by which it is longitudinally divided includes five or six volcanoes that are still active today. This immense chain of mountains stretches from the fifty-first to the sixtieth degree of latitude in one almost continuous ridge, and at last breaks off abruptly into the Okhotsk Sea, leaving to the north a high level steppe called the dole or desert, which is the wandering ground of the reindeer-herding Koryaks. The central and southern parts of the peninsula are broken up by the spurs and foot-hills of the great mountain range into deep sequestered valleys of the wildest and most picturesque character, and afford scenery whose majestic and varied beauty is difficult to match in all northern Asia. The climate everywhere, except in the extreme north, is comparatively mild and equable, and the vegetation has an almost tropical freshness and luxuriance to it.

The Arctic Ocean to the north of Siberia is divided into several regional seas –from west to east, the Kara Sea, the Laptev Sea and the East Siberian Sea – which are likewise choked with a thick blanket of ice for at least ten months of the year. The summer period of remission is brief: just the remaining two months, July and August.

Orographically, Siberia may be naturally divided into two parts: the lowland west of the Lena, through which only a few less important mountain ridges run, and the immense region to the east of that river, traversed by the great chain of the Jablonoff mountains, which in some places to the south-east reach a height of nearly 7000 feet, giving to this part of the province the character of a mountainous region. Shut off by mountain-chains from the warmer currents of air coming from the south and the south-east, and exposed to the Arctic winds from the north, this immense country has possibly the severest climate in the world. The winter commences early.

The smaller rivers and the numberless lakes begin to freeze in September. In the first or second week of October the whole country is covered with snow. The cold increases day by day. In the middle of the winter the temperature may remain for weeks together below the freezing-point of mercury, and at times will sink to 80 degrees below zero Fahrenheit. Such a low temperature gives a keen and penetrating sharpness to the air, and all life seems to have congealed. The Siberian winter does not rage and roar, as does that of northern Europe, but suppresses all motion. Neither the sun, which only for a few hours appears above the horizon, nor the earth, which is frozen to an unknown depth and in the summer melts only two or three feet, can withstand its power. The constantly growing cold compresses the air more and more, until it finally threatens, as it were, to suffocate all life beneath its weight. The strongest currents of air from the Arctic sea, from the Pacific, or from the immense continental regions lying to the south are unable to move this inert and compressed mass of air.

In these northerly latitudes, the ground surface – permanently frozen – is mostly shingle, perhaps covered in algae, lichens and mosses. This is the true Arctic wilderness and characterizes most of the islands, especially those off the coast of the Taimyr Peninsula. Seals, walruses, belugas and polar bears populate the coastline.

As distance increases from the north pole southwards, the Arctic wilderness turns into the tundra – a bare region in which only lichens, mosses, and short, scrubby trees (dwarf species of birch or willow, mainly) shroud the ground, with some spiky plants and Arctic grasses. Winter in the tundra is lengthy – between eight and ten months – and cold. At the end of November the sun dips below the horizon and does not return. This is the polar night, which in the tundra lasts for two or three months (compared with up to six months in the Arctic wilderness). Then finally, in January, the sun reappears once more, and the days little by little lengthen even as the nights little by little become shorter. This goes on until, from sometime in May to sometime in July, the sun doesn’t leave the sky at all.

The tundra under the spring snows (May).

Vasily Surikov, Steppes near Minussinsk, 1873.

Watercolour on paper, 136 x 31.8 cm. Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow.

Summer in the Arctic is not so much warm as brisk – temperatures average from 5-12°C (40-68°F) – and short. Towards mid-August, heralding the end of summertime, the tundra takes on its autumnal coloration. Leaves on the woody plants turn golden, the lichens and mosses turn grey, while the wild mushrooms sprout in abundance and the berries ripen in a vast moving red and orange carpet.

The tundra is the home of the reindeer (caribou), of the Arctic wolf, the wolverine (glutton), the Arctic fox, the lemming, the great white owl, and the ptarmigan (the gallinaceous bird that, unlike any other, winters by hiding itself under the snow). In spring, the tundra welcomes the arrival of the many migratory birds – geese, swans, ducks, terns, gulls and others – that come to breed.

The terrain tends to be marshy, with a scattering of thousands of little lakes of no real depth. Baron Eddel, a traveller who a hundred years or so ago explored the lower reaches of the Indigirka and the Kolyma Rivers, recalled in his memoirs that ‘to draw a map of all these lakes, all you need to do is dip a paintbrush in blue watercolour and bespeckle the paper all over with it’. The tundra is swampy because of the presence beneath the topsoil of permafrost – a stratum of soil frozen solid over thousands of years sometimes to a depth of 1,000 feet (300 metres) or more, whereas the topsoil itself may be no more than a foot (30 centimetres) deep. The permafrost is impervious, which means that although annual rainfall may be comparatively low, the water cannot drain away or be absorbed. Nor does it evaporate, because the air is already extremely humid and the heat is not sufficient.

The southern boundary of the permafrost – a line that actually runs through a little less than two-thirds of the area covered by the Russian state – lies north of the valleys of the lower Tunguska (a tributary of the Yenisey) and the Vilyuy (a tributary of the Lena). It is in the north-east of Siberia that the permafrost is most extensive. To the north of Yakutia the subsoil keeps turning up the fossilized remains of animals – whole cemeteries of mammoths trapped in thick layers of frozen sediments, their bones and their ivory tusks forming colossal repositories. It is also in Yakutia that the coldest place in the Northern hemisphere is located – at Oymyakon, in the Verkhoyansk mountains. Here, the average temperature in January is somewhere between -48°C and -50°C (-54°F and -58°F), occasionally getting down to as low as -70°C (-94°F). However, the air is so dry, and there is no wind at all, so these temperatures do not feel as extreme as they might.

Further south, a change in vegetation indicates a difference in the prevailing climate and conditions. The number of dwarf trees and bushes increases greatly. This is an intermediate zone between tundra and taiga (which many people think of as an individual zone in its own right). Continuing south, the vegetation diversifies. The trees become more numerous and grow much taller. Finally, the environment is that of the taiga – the huge northern forest that cloaks the greater part of Russia.

Comprised mostly of conifers (larch, pine and Siberian cedar) but also the north birch, willow and aspen, in the south and west deciduous species, the taiga forests are home to an important group of larger predatory animals (bears, wolverines, wolves and lynxes), foraging omnivores (foxes, sables, polecats, weasels, ermines, mink and martens), ungulates (deer and elk) and birds (capercaillies, partridges, woodpeckers and nutcrackers). Winters in this region are very long and very cold. Summers, however, can be warm in the central part of the region, where the annual range of temperatures can be as wide as 100 degrees on the Celsius scale (180 degrees on the Fahrenheit scale). The warm months are propitious times for the insects, especially mosquitoes, midges and flies for which the tundra, with its multitudinous marshes and lakes, has been the ideal breeding-ground.

Further south still, the taiga gives way first to the fertile steppes and then to the arid steppes – areas typical of northern Central Asia and Mongolia. Here, the climate is by no means unpleasant: summers are fairly long and warm, and the rainfall is light although the prevailing winds tend to be strong. Much of the steppes is covered by vast prairies of tall grasses growing on humus-rich fertile soil. It is an area well suited to farming, both of crops and of livestock. But there is plenty of wildlife too: marmots, voles and fieldmice, hamsters, jerboas, hares, foxes, saiga antelopes and badgers. Birds of the steppes include bustards, kestrels, Asiatic white cranes and many more.

Amid the arid steppes north of Mongolia, over a length of an extraordinary 400 miles (635 kilometres), stretches the largest inland source of fresh water in the world: Lake Baikal. In places it is 5,300 feet (1,620 metres) deep. A miracle of nature, Lake Baikal provides essential water for all kinds of local populations – including of course the creatures that live in it, which are now regrettably under severe threat from the pollution exuded into the lake as effluent from the timber workings up the rivers that flow into it.

The most easterly part of Russia is an area drained largely by rivers that flow out into the Pacific Ocean – rivers such as the Anadyr in the north and the Amur in the south. In the area around the Amur (which for a time forms the boundary with China), the climate and the overall humidity are favourable to the growth of mixed forest, particularly of broadleaved trees like limes, aspens or oaks. The wildlife here is much the same as in the taiga, with the addition of the Asiatic tiger, the leopard, the civet, the genet, the goral (a goat-like antelope related to the chamois), the sika deer and a great number of bird species.

Northeastern edge of the Chukotka Peninsula, 1998.

Siberia is rich in natural resources. It has minerals that can be extracted – gold, silver, tin, diamonds, nickel and phosphates; it has abundant means for supplying energy – huge reserves of oil and petroleum and of natural gas, extensive coal seams, and a great number of fast-flowing waterways; and it has a wealth of other useful and commercial materials – the timber in its forests and the pelts of its animals. In many ways, then, it is Russia’s warehouse of goodies, contributing around one-fifth of the state’s overall gross national product. One western traveller in Siberia commented,

“[Abundant animal life was there] to complete the picture. Wild ducks, with long outstretched necks, shot past us, continually in their swift level flight, uttering hoarse quacks of curiosity and apprehension; the honking of geese came to us, softened by distance, from the higher slopes of the mountains; and now and then a magnificent eagle, startled from his solitary watch on some jutting rock, expanded his broad-barred wings, launched himself into air, and soared upward in ever-widening circles until he became a mere moving speck against the white snowy crater of the Avachinski volcano. Never had I seen a picture of such wild primitive loneliness as that presented by this beautiful fertile valley, encircled by smoking volcanoes and snow-covered mountains, yet green as the Vale of Tempe, teeming with animal and vegetable life, yet solitary, uninhabited by man, and apparently unknown.”

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, live the Nenets, whose 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 19th 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 14th 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.

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 dying out altogether.

With a total of some 32 million inhabitants, Siberia can nonetheless boast no more than a million and a half of the aboriginal populations. Indeed, apart from the Buryats, the Yakuts, the Tuva people, the Khakass people, the Shorians and the Altai people, no fewer than 26 other ethnic groups are officially (according to figures taken from the Soviet census in 1989) recorded as ‘ultra-minorities’, comprising between them no more than around 180,000 individuals, and thus as groups ‘doomed to certain extinction’.

The most numerous ethnic group of these is that of the Nenets who, in the same census, were counted at 34,190 persons. Now the Nenets are one of the peoples of Siberia who have best preserved their traditional way of life and culture. The Evenki, almost as numerous (29,901 persons), have on the other hand been subject to considerable assimilation, especially into Yakut groups. Next in order of numerical importance are the Khanty (22,283 persons), then the Eveni (17,055), the Shorians (16,652), the Chukchis (15,107), the Nanai people (11,833), the Koryaks (8,942), the Mansis (8,279), the Dolgans (6,584) and the Nivkhi (4,631). The remaining ethnic groups are undoubtedly ‘ultra-minorities’:

• The Selkup, the Olchi, the Itelmen and the Udekhe make up between 2,000 and 4,000 people

• The Chuvantsi, the Nganassi, the Yukaghirs, the Kets, the Saami of western Siberia and the Uit of eastern Siberia number between 1,000 and 2,000 people

• Some ethnic groups comprise no more than a few hundred men and women: these are the Orochon people (883 persons), the Karagas people (722), the Aleuts of eastern Siberia (644), the Negidal people (587), the Enets (198) and the Oroki (179)

• One really tiny ethnic group – so small that it was not even counted separately in the census – was that of the Kereks of southern Chukotka, who in total numbered fewer than 50 representatives.