THE PREDICAMENT OF CHUKOTKA'S INDIGENOUS MOVEMENT

The Predicament of Chukotka's Indigenous Movement is the first ethnography of the Russian North to focus on post-Soviet relations of domination between an indigenous minority and a nonindigenous majority in an urban setting. As Patty Gray investigates indigenous attempts in Chukotka to overcome this domination, she develops an anthropological approach to social movements that captures the “in-between” activity that is more than everyday resistance, but less than a full-blown movement. In the process, this book explores the post-Soviet transition as it occurred in the part of Russia that is America's closest Eurasian neighbor: Chukotka nearly touches Alaska across the Bering Strait. Gray charts the political transformation in Chukotka as its administration sought to represent itself as “democratic” while becoming ever more repressive and demonstrates how the indigenous population in particular suffered under this new form of domination. The “predicament” refers to how the nascent indigenous movement was prepared to address Soviet-style domination and instead was confronted with this “new-Russian” style.

Patty A. Gray is Assistant Professor of cultural anthropology at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks. She was Post-Doctoral Fellow 2000–2003 at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle, Germany, and Coordinator of the Siberia Project Group at that institute in 2002–2003. She is the recipient of grants from the Fulbright Program, IREX (International Research and Exchanges Board), the MacArthur Foundation, and the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research.

To Anatoly M. Khazanov, with affection

The Predicament of Chukotka's Indigenous Movement

POST-SOVIET ACTIVISM IN THE RUSSIAN FAR NORTH

Patty A. Gray
University of Alaska, Fairbanks

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First published 2004

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Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

Gray, Patty A. (Patricia Anne), 1960–
The predicament of Chukotka's indigenous movement : post-Soviet activism in the Russian Far North / Patty A. Gray.
p.    cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-521-82346-3
1. Ethnology – Russia (Federation) – Chukotskii avtonomnyi okrug.    2. Indigenous peoples – Russia (Federation) – Chukotskii avtonomnyi okrug – Government relations.    3. Indigenous peoples – Russia (Federation) – Chukotskii avtonomnyi okrug – Politics and government.    4. Indigenous peoples – Russia (Federation) – Chukotskii avtonomnyi okrug – Social conditions.    5. Chukotskii avtonomnyi okrug (Russia) – History.    6. Chukotskii avtonomnyi okrug (Russia) – Politics and government.    7. Chukotskii avtonomnyi okrug (Russia) – Social life and customs.    8. Soviet Union – History – 1985–1991.    9. Soviet Union – Politics and government – 1985–1991.    10. Russia (Federation) – History – 1991–    11. Russia (Federation) – Politics and government – 1991–    I. Title.
GN635.C5.G73    2004
305.8′00957′7–dc22         2004040398

ISBN 0 521 82346 3 hardback

CONTENTS

ILLUSTRATIONS AND TABLES

Preface

CHUKOTKA IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY

A Place on the Edge

Chukotka is a region of Russia located at the intersection of Russia’s north and east coasts. A huge territory of 737,700 square kilometers (about two-thirds the size of Alaska), it is situated as far north and east from Moscow as one can physically travel and still be in Russia – any further, and you would tumble into the Bering Sea. Along with Alaska, it divides the Pacific Ocean from the Arctic Ocean, and provided one-half of the land bridge that underlies the most popular theory of the peopling of North America. Chukotka lies on the leading edge of time; that is, the Chukotka Peninsula occupies time zone number 1 in the system of twenty-four time zones that girds the earth. In this sense, each new day of the earth begins when the sun hits the Chukotkan island of Big Diomede. When a sea mammal hunter from Chukotka working in the Bering Sea catches sight of the coast of Alaska, which he is quite likely to do, he is looking at yesterday.

   In spite of the close proximity of this region of the Russian Far East to the United States (the Chukotka Peninsula is less than one hundred kilometers from Alaska’s Seward Peninsula at its closest point), when the border was closed and tightly guarded during the Soviet period, the distance may as well have been thousands of miles for anyone but the few local indigenous residents who managed to slip back and forth occasionally across the border illegally under the cover of fog (Schweitzer and Golovko 1995). The distance from Chukotka to the Russian capital of Moscow is thousands of miles (Chukotka is in fact closer to Washington, D.C.). Thus Chukotka occupies a position on the edge in a multiple sense – it is literally on the border between two continents and figuratively on the edge of two worlds. However, once the Soviet Union collapsed, the border opened and these people who were once so marginalized found themselves for a time occupying a space that was an international crossroads (Fitzhugh and Crowell 1988). A flood of relatives, tourists, environmentalists, and journalists, not to mention anthropologists, began to inundate coastal Chukotka, creating what some described as a carnival atmosphere.

Framing Chukotka’s “Dark Decade”

This book focuses on the final decade of the twentieth century in Chukotka, its first decade after Soviet rule. This was a time of drastic changes throughout Russia, during which many suffered from shock and confusion and experienced greater poverty than in the Soviet period. However, it is generally agreed that Chukotkans were among those who suffered most, and this was in large part due to the particular audacity and corruption of its governor, Aleksandr Nazarov, and the patronage system he constructed far from the scrutiny of the Kremlin. One should not give too much credit to a single figure for monopolizing all power and causing all suffering, but it is nevertheless true that many refer to the period of his tenure as a particularly dark time in Chukotkan history.

   With rather poetic symmetry, the first decade of the twenty-first century marked a radical shift in local political dynamics in Chukotka, and before launching into the main subject of the 1990s, it makes sense to foreshadow what followed this “dark decade.” In 1999, an election was held for Chukotka’s single seat in the federal Duma (the lower legislative house), and this seat was captured handily by one of those who are known as Russia’s “oligarchs,” Roman Arkadevich Abramovich. Abramovich had previously been well-known in Russia as a “Kremlin insider” and the head of one of the country’s largest oil and aluminum companies, Sibneft, as well as a close associate of Boris Berezovskii, perhaps the country’s most notorious oligarch.¹ The two had been in business together, and later they became deputies in the Duma together. Berezovskii resigned from the Duma in July amid controversy and by the end of 2000 was living in Europe in a kind of exile, leaving Abramovich as Russia’s most visible – and most studied by the media – oligarch.²

   One of Abramovich’s first acts as Duma deputy representing Chukotka was to establish a charitable organization called Polius Nadezhdy (Pole of Hope). This organization immediately set about investigating, and then solving, many of the most pressing problems plaguing Chukotka’s population, such as salary delays and food shortages in villages – acts of charity that in many cases were financed out of Abramovich’s own pocket. A program was quickly established to send groups of children on long holidays to camps in the warm Black Sea locales of Annapa, Ivanovo, and Evpatoriya – to the delight of their parents, who felt that they would “get more vitamins” there. Abramovich also established outreach offices in every district center in Chukotka, as well as Anadyr’, where any citizen could come and present any problem that needed solving; Abramovich’s staff would then investigate the problem and seek a solution with a minimum of red tape. Abramovich himself made two trips to Alaska in 2000 to meet with the many representatives of state government, humanitarian aid organizations, academic institutions, and businesspeople who had been trying for years to cultivate relations with Chukotkans and were utterly exasperated by being thwarted at every turn. One of the purposes of his visits was to discuss joint Alaska–Chukotka projects in all these spheres.

   When I arrived for a follow-up visit to Anadyr’ in the summer of 2000, I was amazed to hear the name of Abramovich on literally everyone’s lips. All of my consultees expressed a palpable sense of optimism that had simply been nonexistent in all my previous visits, and the source of it was purely Abramovich. Rumors had already begun that this do-gooder deputy might register his candidacy for the upcoming gubernatorial election scheduled for December 2000. In spite of this optimism, hardly anyone fully trusted Abramovich. Some maintained a critical attitude toward his activities as a billionaire businessman and suspected he was interested in Chukotka for its oil and gold deposits. Others accused him of fueling the war in Chechnya for his own financial interests. One could find still worse accusations in the Russian media; many of these accusations were undoubtably false, but they did bespeak the fact that Abramovich was a controversial figure. Yet everyone I spoke to in Chukotka, without exception, said that absolutely anyone would be better than Nazarov – that they could not imagine how anyone else could be worse. They said they would vote for Abramovich if he ran, or for any other candidate opposing Nazarov. Even administration bureaucrats who in the past had never dared to breathe a word of criticism of Nazarov in my presence were now opining on aspects of his policy with which they disagreed. For the first time since I had begun my research in Chukotka in 1995, I sensed the possibility of change on the horizon. It was an intoxicating atmosphere that everyone clearly savored.

   Abramovich did finally declare his candidacy for the post of governor in mid-October 2000.³ On 24 October, the Russian federal tax police reportedly summoned Nazarov for questioning on what the Interfax news agency stated was “an entire array of evil deeds”⁴ that included the illegal sale of quotas for the catch of marine bioresources, tax evasion to the tune of $20 million, and misdirection of state funds in relation to deliveries of oil products to the North between 1996 and 2000. Interfax also reported that Nazarov rented a dacha in a health complex maintained by the Russian government and paid for by various enterprises and organizations, providing Nazarov a tax-free financial windfall worth 1.5 million rubles in the year 2000 alone. Nevertheless, Nazarov denied all accusations and proceeded to declare his candidacy for governor of Chukotka on 2 November 2000.⁵ But on 16 December, a week before the election, Nazarov withdrew his candidacy, handing Abramovich an easy win.

   Rumors immediately circulated that Nazarov pulled out in exchange for a promise that Abramovich would appoint him his representative to the Council of the Federation (Sovet Federatsii), Russia’s upper legislative body, in which all elected governors in Russia automatically have a seat. Sure enough, on 18 January 2001, Chukotka’s regional legislature officially approved Nazarov’s appointment to the Council of the Federation. Thus Nazarov maintained a connection to Chukotka. Yet because he was far away in Moscow and out of the public eye, he was immediately forgotten, one might almost say gleefully, by a Chukotka population that now focused all of its attention on its new hope, Governor Abramovich. Whether or not Abramovich would truly pull Chukotka out of its chronic condition of crisis remained to be seen, but as countless Chukotkans said to me, “Nadezhda umiraet poslednii” – hope dies last.

Dramatis Personae

In the chapters that follow, I explore the experience of Chukotka’s indigenous peoples in the 1990s, drawing upon a variety of sources: my daily interactions with them, my formal and informal interviews with them, things I read about them in newspapers and heard about them on radio and television, and things said about them by nonindigenous Chukotkans. I endeavor to place their experience in the wider context of Russia’s changing social and political environment at the time. It is my desire to make this general Chukotkan experience as specific as possible by providing examples from the lives of individuals. However, this is a delicate matter; although much has changed in Chukotka since the departure of Nazarov as governor, given the extent to which political repression was possible in the 1990s, and may again become possible, I am reluctant to leave my consultees and their sometimes radical views too exposed in these pages.

   The solution I have devised is to take the wide variety of individual experiences embodied in the consultees I worked with and concentrate them into a few representative dramatis personae bearing pseudonyms. Each character is fictional in the sense that there is no single person with exactly these traits and life experiences. However, each is nonfictional in the sense that the words she or he speaks were in fact spoken by someone, and the experiences she or he shares were in fact shared with me by someone. I have endeavored to create a set of characters that more or less represent the social roles that I encountered most often among inhabitants of Anadyr’, or in some cases, roles that stood out as particularly striking. Alongside these disguised figures, others will also appear under their own real names. If a person is a public figure on the regional level in Chukotka or the national level in Russia, and his or her views have been published in media sources, then I do not disguise that person’s identity with a pseudonym.

   One additional character also appears, not in the main text, but in the vignettes sandwiched between the chapters. This is Malina Ivanovna Kevyngevyt, a fictional Chukchi woman. I wanted to show somehow that, although the post-Soviet transformation was a shock for indigenous Chukotkans (as it was for everyone in Russia), this was not the only or even the most significant change for them. Indigenous Chukotkans, like all indigenous peoples of Russia, experienced a long series of transformations in their lives throughout the Soviet period. I created Malina and her life story in order to illustrate this. While the vignettes are written in a novelesque form, they are derived from life-history accounts related to me by consultees, and they even contain direct quotations from my notes and/or taped interviews. I have deliberately tried to retain the sometimes sentimental, romanticized tone in which the stories were related to me. My intention is that the juxtaposition of a single life against the factual material of the book will help to illuminate that material. In turn, I hope to flesh out Malina’s exemplary life more fully in the reader’s imagination as the material in each chapter is read.

A Note About Terminology

The term “indigenous” is used here as a catch-all translation for several Russian terms: korennoi (“native”), aborigeny (“aboriginals”), tuzemnyi (“indigenous”), and sometimes mestnyi (“local”). Nonindigenous residents of Chukotka are most often referred to as priezzhie, from the verb priezzhat’ (“to arrive”), and the gloss used here is “incomers” (cf. Schweitzer 1993). There is some slippage in these terms; mestnyi can also refer to a nonindigenous resident who was born in Chukotka and/or who demonstrates a clear commitment to the region and its people. “Incomer” means, most precisely, those who come with a specific purpose in mind and do not intend to stay.

   There are several terms for different levels of federal territorial formations within Russia, which I render in translation as follows: territory = krai; province = oblast’; region = okrug; district = raion.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

SEVERAL GRANTS SUPPORTED the field research on which this book is based. I was able to conduct my 1995–6 dissertation research by virtue of a 1995–6 U.S. Department of Education Fulbright-Hayes Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad Fellowship and a 1995–6 Individual Advanced Research Opportunities Research Residency for Eurasian Russia from the International Research and Exchanges Board (IREX). In 1998, the National Science Foundation’s Arctic Social Sciences program (“Regional Problems and Local Solutions in the Post-Soviet Transition: A Pilot Study to Assess the Problems Faced by Reindeer Herding Communities in the Chukotka Autonomous Okrug,” award #OPP-9726308, principal investigator Peter Schweitzer, co-principal investigators Patty A. Gray and Michael Koskey) supported four months of additional research. I returned for three more months of research in the fall of 2000 and another three months in the spring of 2001, and these two trips were supported by the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle, Germany, while I was a postdoctoral Fellow in Chris Hann’s research program. Many thanks to Hann for his generosity in allowing me time to complete revisions on the manuscript. Writing of the book manuscript was supported by a Richard Carley Hunt Fellowship from the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research. I am deeply grateful to these foundations for investing their limited resources in me and making this work possible; none of these organizations is responsible for the views expressed in this book.

   In Anadyr’ I used the facilities of the V. G. Bogoraz-Tan Public Library’s Regional Collection (Kraevedcheskii fond publichnoi biblioteki im. V. G. Bogoraz-Tan), with assistance from library director Liubov Belikoneva and librarians Tatiana Emelianova and Tatiana Lukina. In Snezhnoe, I used facilities of the village library with assistance from librarian Ekaterina Kolodienko. In St. Petersburg, I worked in the Russian National Library’s Social Science Reading Room and received attentive and professional assistance from bibliographer Nikita Eliseev. I must also thank the administration of the Chukotka Autonomous Region for granting me permission to work in the region.

   Although my name alone appears on this book, I most certainly did not accomplish this work alone. The Chukotka Affiliate of the Northeast Interdisciplinary Scientific Research Institute of the Far East Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences in Anadyr’ (Chukotskii filial Severo-Vostochnyi Kompleksnyi Nauchno-Issledovatel’skii Institute DVO RAN, known locally as NITs “Chukotka”) served as my “responsible organization,” a liaison between myself and the Chukotka administration, and without such support, this research would not have been possible. Thanks to former director Aleksandr Vladimirovich Galanin and current director Vladimir Savich Krivoshchekov; to Vladimir Mikhailovich Etylin (head of the Laboratory of Traditional Resource Use and Ethnosocial Research), whose support over the years was unflagging even when he was under unpleasant political pressure from the Chukotkan administration; and to Anna Vitoldovna Belikovich, Nadia Ivanovna Vukvukai, and Tamara Vladimirovna Korave for welcome friendship.

   I owe a great deal of thanks to the residents of the Village of Snezhnoe, Anadyrskii District, Chukotka, including its state farm director, Anatoly Iakovlevich Tyneru, and its mayor, Anatolii Ilich Matveev. The greatest thanks must go to the villagers themselves, too numerous to list, who responded to me with kindness and cheerful interest. I am especially grateful to the Omrytagin family, whose many members showed me hospitality and friendship.

   I had many consultees in Anadyr’, where I conducted the bulk of my work, and I am grateful to them all. Thanks especially to Tatiana Achirgina; Zoia Badmaeva; Varya, Denis, and Maksim Litovka; Aleksandr Omrypkir; Viktor Serekov; Gennady Smirnov; Nina Suiata; Svetlana Tagek; Zoia Tagrina; Anton Tynel; Ivan Vukvukai; and Larisa and Valerii Vykvyraktyrgyrgyn.

   I reserve my greatest tribute of thanks for my very treasured friend in Anadyr’, Margarita Belichenko, her late husband Vladimir, and their daughters Tanya Bardashevich and Natasha Belichenko. I simply could not have accomplished this work without the support of this family.

   I am grateful to my graduate advisor at the University of Wisconsin, Anatoly M. Khazanov, whose matter-of-fact confidence in me surprised me at first and later gave me the courage to forge ahead in my work. His ongoing support remains extremely important to me. I am also grateful to the rest of the faculty of the Department of Anthropology at the University of Wisconsin for their guidance and support during my six years as a graduate student there. I am grateful also to my language teachers at Madison – Aleksandr Dolinin, Gary Rosenshield, and especially Judith Kornblatt – who helped me understand Russian ways of seeing. I had many additional advisors along the way, who had no official obligation to me but nevertheless responded openly to my pleas for advice. Chief among these were Mark Beissinger of UW–Madison and Jon Hill and Jane Adams of Southern Illinois University–Carbondale (where I started my graduate work). Peter Schweitzer has provided treasured comradeship and many opportunities to develop professionally, and Debra Schindler, Anna Kerttula, and Michael Fortescue generously shared advice about the logistics of working in Chukotka. Schindler in particular blazed a trail for research in Chukotka with her dissertation, which was a great inspiration to me. I offer particularly affectionate thanks to Nikolai Vakhtin and Igor Krupnik, who offered me advice and reassurance before, during, and after my fieldwork and who have become valued colleagues. These are fine scholars, but first and foremost they are compassionate human beings. Would that all in academia had their priorities in this order.

   Two of my colleagues at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology were generous in reading sections of the manuscript and offering their comments, as well as engaging in endless discussions with me that in the end influenced the book. For this I am grateful to Deema Kaneff and Florian Stammler. Thanks also to Barbara Bodenhorn and Tatiana Bulgakova for useful critical readings of the manuscript.

   I also wish to acknowledge two Alaskans, Nancy Mendenhall and Jim Campbell, who have for many years worked tirelessly and efficiently to provide humanitarian aid and support for budding social programs in Chukotka. From their position in Alaska, they were able to maintain much closer ongoing contacts with Chukotkans, and they have often provided me with updates about events in Chukotka when I have not been in the field.

   Thanks to Jessica Kuper at Cambridge University Press for shepherding my book through the initial stages and to my other editors at Cambridge University Press who oversaw the final stages. Thanks to Edda Schroeter of the Institute of Geography at the Martin Luther University in Halle, Germany, for creating the maps. I received extremely helpful comments from two anonymous reviewers whose suggestions substantially shaped the arguments in the book, and I am tremendously indebted to these fine scholars.

   Finally, I cannot overlook the role of my own family. Their support far predates the actual execution of my research and is largely responsible for enabling me to make the journey to Chukotka. For this I will always be indebted to my parents, Myles and Marilyn Gray, and to my then-husband, Phil Brinkman. They know what they did and what it cost.

NOTES ON TRANSLITERATION

THIS BOOK USES a system for the transliteration of Russian words adapted from the Library of Congress system, with slight adjustments. This transliteration system is violated in cases of familiar words and names whose standard transliteration has already been well established in the media. For example, the name of the former president of the Russian Federation is rendered the familiar Yeltsin, rather than the more correct El’tsyn. Moreover, the Russian soft sign, which is represented in transliteration by an apostrophe (’), is generally omitted for the sake of readability, especially in the case of proper names. This has been done at the request of the publisher.

   The Chukchi language, whose written form uses the Cyrillic alphabet, presents special problems. In particular is the prevalence of the hard letter e (often as a word initial), which appears only rarely in the Russian language. The unique spelling of many Chukchi words is therefore poorly represented – and in any case, even Cyrillic poorly represents their pronunciation.

   Names of ethnic groups in Russian, upon translation to English, are pluralized according to the rules of English grammar (for example, koriaki becomes in English “Koriaks,” chukchi becomes “Chukchis,” eskimosy becomes “Eskimos”). The singular generally has two forms, masculine and feminine (for example, koriak/koriachka, chukcha/chukchanka, eskimos/eskimoska). These forms are actively in use in Chukotka but are ignored here for the sake of readability.

PLATE 0.1. “Victory! 1945, 9 May”: life-size mural commemorating World War II on Otke Street in Anadyr’

MAP 1.1. The Russian Federation, Showing the Location of Chukotka