Customer Reviews

Arctic Mirrors: Russia and the Small Peoples of the North

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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.

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

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.

In contrast to Forsyth's History of the Native Peoples of Siberia, this is Siberia as seen by the bureaucrats and thinkers who tried to administer and understand it. There are many detailed quotes and anecdotes, but it does not add up to a coherent history. For the beginner, there is not enough background on who and where the peoples were. Students of the soviet period will be interested the the problem of collectivizing nomadic hunters. So: a good backup, but read Forsyth first.