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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.

1) The First Siberians

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 10^th and 13^th 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 16^th and 17^th 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 19^th 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 14^th 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.

2) Cultures on the Edge of Extinction

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.

Assimilation of language and of culture has affected all of these small ethnic groups to one extent or another, but so has such assimilation also affected – if less seriously – the more numerously significant groups, such as the Buryats (listed in the census as numbering 417,425 persons), the Yakuts (380,242), the Tuva people (206,160), the Khakass people (78,500) and the Altai people (69,409). Today, just one small proportion of Siberia’s original inhabitants preserves an ancient and traditional way of life, continues on a daily basis to practise and to teach its ancestral rituals and language. But such efforts are puny in the face of what is massed against them, notably the effects of ‘modern life’ and ‘technological development’ (which include an increased mortality rate, severely depressed morale, stress disorders and diseases, alcoholism, high unemployment, soaring suicides and other measures of progress). It was the frenetic pace at which assimilation was overtaking all these various ethnic groups that caused them to be featured in The Red Book of Ethnic Groups on the Verge of Disappearing, published during the last years of the Soviet Union.

To understand how this demographic and cultural erosion came about, it is necessary to turn back and look once more at history.

Vasily Surikov, Siberian Beauty, 1891.

Oil on canvas, 50 × 39 cm. Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow.

Unknown artist, Portrait of Yermak, early 18^th century.

Oil on canvas, 70 × 57 cm. V. P. Sukachev Art Museum, Irkutsk.