Arctic Mirrors: Russia and the Small Peoples of the North [Paperback]

Yuri Slezkine (Author)

Editorial Reviews

From Library Journal

The "small peoples" are the 26 indigenous ethnic groups of the Arctic tundra and subarctic taiga whose traditions lie in hunting, trapping, fishing, and reindeer herding. Historian Slezkine studies the relationships between these groups and the Russians, who entered their land in the 11th century, colonized it, and transformed it over the centuries thereafter. By examining these circumpolar peoples through Russian historical documents and literary accounts, Slezkine brings out images that become reflections of the Russians themselves. He is interested in both the political and intellectual nature of the encounter and seeks to reveal the importance of the complexities of this relationship through history. The study is thoroughly researched and well written for the scholar in the field or the informed reader. For larger libraries and regional collections.
Rena Fowler, Humboldt State Univ., Arcata, Cal.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Booklist

Since the groundbreaking 1922 silent documentary Nanook of the North, not much has changed in the everyday life of the Alaskan Eskimos. Nor has much changed for the Arctic people of Russia, despite the incursions of many armies, both military and missionary. Despite their obvious primitiveness, the small Russian tribes of the North saw perhaps lesser levels of brutality by the Stalin regime and beyond, and the most obvious reason for this is the weather. Slezkine spends some time on the northerners' ability to cope with the climate, but mostly concentrates on the changing face of the Soviet Union in the microcosm of the northern people: from "savage Indians" to the slow evolution from icebound hunters and trappers to industrialized laborers. The book is an intellectual treatise, and occasionally Slezkine's clinical language can be as dry as a Siberian plain, but his descriptions of the trials of the northern Russians help make this book an invaluable look at the people the totalitarian Soviets forgot. Joe Collins --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Product Details

• Paperback: 456 pages
• Publisher: Cornell Univ Pr (October 1996)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0801481783
• ISBN-13: 978-0801481789
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.1 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.8 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #793,796 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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15 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Native Siberians as Russian foil, April 9, 2004

By 

Alexander D. King "Anthropological Linguist" (Aberdeen, Scotland) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Arctic Mirrors: Russia and the Small Peoples of the North (Hardcover)

This is a great book. Slezkine has provided us with a comprehensive history of the encounter between the Russians and the indigenous peoples of the Arctic and northwestern Pacific. Based on original archival sources whenever possible, the narrative is thick in detail and rich in analysis. I enjoyed his writing style, but his arguments can be difficult to follow for non-academics. He focuses on the numerically small peoples of Siberia, who are often subordinated in accounts which privilege ethnic Russians, Komi and Sakha (Yakut) peoples in the east. Believing that ideas matter, Slezkine grounds the events and policies of his history in the intellectual fashions current at the time. Thus, we get a cultural and intellectual history of conquest and administration structuring the narrative which tacks between the Russian and native Siberian points of view.
Cossacks did not establish any New Russia because they did not understand Siberia as a discovery. The Princes of Rus long knew about Ostiaks to the east, and sixteenth century empire-building consisted of conquering foreign peoples throughout the continuous Eurasian landmass. There were no breakthroughs across great divides like the Atlantic. At the same time, the conquerors knew they were among foreign peoples, and it was imperative to get the real names from the locals. Foreigners were expected to remain foreign; they had only to pay their tribute and express appropriate obsequies to the Tsar, who discouraged the church from converting foreign tribute-payers to Orthodox Russians. Not that Russian conquest was less brutal than Spanish or English conquests elsewhere, but early Russian conquerors open-ended world-view did not force new people and territories into closed, Old World categories.
The rules of the relationship changed during the era of Peter the Great. With the coming of the Enlightenment to Russia, foreigners (of a different land) became aliens (of different birth). Peters fascination with western science led to several scientific expeditions into the north and the east to enumerate and classify everything (and every one) under the dominion of the Tsar. Groups were distinguished by language in a typology of peoples that has persisted to the present day. This second encounter between the Russian and the native northerners was that between perfection and crudity (p. 56). German anti-primitivism held sway in Russian thought, and the savages were certainly not noble.
By the close of the eighteenth century the increasing currency of the French Encyclopedists in intellectual circles paralleled the rise of Russian sentimentalism, and a different picture of natives emerged. As disease and warfare decimated the tribute payers, they became ennobled and in need of protection. Under Alexander I, reformers established the first comprehensive statement of global policy on the natives with the Statute of Alien Administration in Siberia in 1822. Classifying all (non-Russian) peoples into one of three categories (settled, nomadic, or wanderers), this statute structured native status for the next one hundred years.
Arctic Mirrors presents the story of the rise and fall of Russian anthropology for the first time. This is a significant contribution to the history of anthropology as an international discipline. More than half of the book deals with the Soviet period. Slezkine offers a lucid analysis of the surreal logic of Stalinist social policy and social science, where bureaucrats and scientists alike were often forced to recant truths they adamantly defended only months before in order to save their skins. He also traces the current nationalist ideology largely responsible for the breakup of the Soviet Union to the conscious and consistent ethnic policies of Lenin and Stalin, another legacy of romantic nationalism of the nineteenth century.
Slezkine succeeds in presenting the complexities of a complex encounter. The natives of the north are not passive dupes or innocent victims. Arctic Mirrors has already become required reading for anyone interested in the history or anthropology of Siberia, and it will soon establish itself as an invaluable contribution to the growing field of studies on the Newly Independent States. It also points up interesting parallels and contrasts with other European empires in the Americas, Africa, and Asia.

3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Must read, March 29, 2005

By 

Seth J. Frantzman (Jerusalem, Israel) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Arctic Mirrors: Russia and the Small Peoples of the North (Paperback)

This must read opens the door on the many 'small' peoples of Russias North, who live in Siberia and have for thousands of years, comparable to the native Americans, they were crushed and moved around in soviet times, wiht many different methods applied to make them 'russian' 'christian' or good 'socialists'. This is an excellent account and a great eye opener to the vastness and diversity of the Russian landscape, a tragedy unto itself but the people will be preserved through accounts such as this.

Seth J. Frantzman

4.0 out of 5 stars Russia's northern peoples, April 2, 2009

By 

T. Kunikov (United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Arctic Mirrors: Russia and the Small Peoples of the North (Paperback)

When writing about the "other" for western audiences, intellectuals tend to describe these, almost mythic, nations as full of "noble savages." Yuri Slezkine's volume on the "other" in the Russian arctic north describes over two dozen separate groups of nomads spread throughout parts of Siberia and what would become northern Russia. There are few, if any, studies of these tribes before their encounter with westerners. Only when Cossacks or Russian explorers penetrate their territory are they acknowledged and enter into literature, mainly as savages and degenerates who know little of culture or civilization. Thus, any mention of indigenous peoples is always seen through the mirror of western civilization at that particular moment in time. To understand one without acknowledging the other is to miss the forest for the trees. In this case, the Russian intelligentsia, in more ways than one, undertook the task of understanding, studying, and explaining various native tribes of the north to Russia and the world beyond. Slezkine's history traces Russia's first encounters with the small peoples of the north through the collapse of the Russian empire and into the Soviet Union and its eventual collapse as well. For those interested in how Russians viewed their own backyard 'others', this book would be a great introduction.