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Local Legacies of the Gulag in Siberia Anthropological Reflections

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Local Legacies of the Gulag in Siberia Anthropological Reflections Local legacies of the GULag in Siberia Anthropological reflections Marjorie Mandelstam Balzer Abstract: This essay, based on field notes from 1976 to 2013, explores resonances of the GULag and exile system in Siberia, focusing on often ignored indigenous peoples in villages and towns. Interethnic relations, diverse community relation- ships with prison camps, and dynamics of Russian Orthodox and pre-Christian spirituality are explored. Debates about how to understand, teach, and memori- alize the significance of the Stalinist system are analyzed, as are issues of shame, moral debilitation, and cultural revitalization. Featured cases include the Khanty of West Siberia, Sibiriaki of West and East Siberia, plus Éveny, Évenki, Yukagir, and Sakha of the Sakha Republic (Yakutia). The author argues that what local people have chosen to emphasize as they reflect on and process the GULag varies greatly with their and their ancestors’ specific experiences of the camps and exiles, as well as with their degrees of indigeneity. Keywords: Gulag, indigeneity, interethnic relations, Siberia Consequences of the Stalinist GULag system personal and emotional nature of the material have reached far into local communities, leav- for many, including myself, as multiple genera- ing legacies of bitterness and occasional at- tions attempt to understand their painful mem- tempts at spiritual reconciliation. The following ories in a process that Alexander Etkind (2013) cases, drawn from intermittent fieldwork in Si- has called “warped mourning.”1 beria beginning in 1976 and extending to 2013, This article is organized thematically and reveal a range of local, interactive, multiethnic geographically, since the timing of the narratives responses to the tragedy of human suffering and vignettes is haphazard and overlapping. in the GULag. They constitute a tentative ef- While a neat chronological approach is effective fort toward multilocal historical ethnographies when dealing with changing bureaucratic poli- connecting the vast GULag system to its “ar- cies “from above,” it fails when describing more chipelago” surroundings. Traces of the GULag messy and complex responses to terror, pain, have bubbled up over the years unexpectedly, and shame “from below.” These traumas have constituting a significant body of volunteered spawned partial, sometimes distorted memories information that diverse interlocutors thought I that deserve analysis and catharsis.2 should know. This information is supplemented A major goal is to grapple with diverse kinds here by research and reflection that reveal the of interethnic relations that were generated by Focaal—Journal of Global and Historical Anthropology 73 (2015): 99–113 © Stichting Focaal and Berghahn Books doi:10.3167/fcl.2015.730108 100 | Marjorie Mandelstam Balzer the system of GULag camps and their local Khanty perspectives and “Sibiriaki” legacies community support networks. A cliché among multiethnic political prisoners, spread further During fieldwork in Ob-Ugrian Khanty vil- by the intelligentsias that tacitly or actively lages in the summer of 1976, I learned that some supported them, was that Soviet authorities Khanty reindeer-breeding families in the 1940s paid Natives well to hunt down and turn in es- had been horrified to find forced settlers de- caped prisoners, who were treated inhumanely. ported to the Khanty-Mansiiski okrug near their Some of the following accounts help belie or “culture base” of Kazym. They were told these make more complex such stereotypes about settlers were “enemies of the people” and were Siberian Natives. I suspect that camp guards frightened of them. Much worse, some of the and officials mendaciously threatened prison- settlers were housed without Khanty permis- ers with capture by “wild” Natives as a way to sion in Khanty traditional winter semisubter- instill extra fear, when they had no intention ranean homes. These basic dirt-floor homes, and no need to follow through with “bounty” rather than being abandoned as the local Rus- rewards for Natives they had already bullied sian authorities who reassigned them allegedly into submission. claimed, were instead part of the regular sea- Locally grounded, highly contextualized sonal rotation that nomadic families continued perspectives by definition defy generalizations to practice, despite official proclamations about yet can stimulate theoretical implications. I completed settlement of the nomads in the 1930s. suggest that supposedly ingrained and un- Khanty perspectives on this unexpected, jar- healthy cultural patterns in interethnic rela- ring interaction have survived in local memory. tions can be changed when people themselves Khanty interlocutors felt that both they and the openly acknowledge officially sanctioned bru- settlers were being punished by officious “new- tality and actively work to expose and self- comer” Russian officials who poorly understood consciously analyze its ripple effects. This is indigenous lifestyles, motivations, and produc- the deeper meaning of the process that Mikhail tivity. Khanty recalled that they had to fight to Gorbachev and those around him set in motion get their homes back, and then they attempted when they signaled the legitimacy of recover- to help the interloping settlers build other hous- ing “blank spots of history.” The narratives and ing in time for the harsh winter.3 perspectives that follow are not simply about The legacy of working together in the sub- power and powerlessness. More subtly, they Arctic to get the settlers more appropriately convey various ways in which those with power housed is part of what has intensified over sev- interact with those without power, and how eral generations a sense of identity for those each is changed in those processes of interac- committed to living in Siberia as “Sibiriaki.” In tion. Furthermore, no one ethnic or indigenous the 2010 census, increasing numbers of mixed group should be automatically correlated with ethnic and Slavic-background inhabitants of power or powerlessness, given early Soviet pol- “Rossiia” living east of the Urals identified as icies of “advancing” indigenous peoples, and “Sibiriak,” an identity that has become quite given Russian authorities’ cruelty to their own controversial. Some of these came from early people. settlers, intermixed families from eighteenth- With these narratives and perspectives, we and nineteenth-century migrations, but many are plunged into squirmingly uncomfortable were from descendants of GULag prisoners cases of scapegoating and conspiracy (close released yet not allowed to return to European cousins), as well as learned cruelty and sadism. Russia, as well as from families of deported But we also see glimmers of community build- exiles. Their significance in Siberia has been ing and spiritual recovery. underestimated in historical literature, as has Local legacies of the GULag in Siberia | 101 the survival of Russian Orthodoxy in remote sumption (Uspenskii) with nine domes. Cha- settlements.4 pels in memory of Saints Prince Vladimir and Patriarch Tikhon adorn the territory, as well as a temple in memory of Saints Konstantin (Con- Russian Orthodox perspectives and stantine) and Elena (Helena). At the Northern miracle healing legacies Gate is a church honoring the warrior martyr Dmitrii Solunskii, where today soldiers and sol- An important Russian Orthodox complex built diers’ mothers come to pray. Nearby is a small, in the post-Soviet period reveals a contrasting simple ground-floor chapel honoring the So- resonance: how Russians and Sibiriaki have viet period Omsk martyr Sil’vestr, canonized in gradually come to terms with their local GULag 1998 as a legendary priest stabbed and crucified history. On an island near the Cossack settle- in the 1920s. This chapel is housed in a larger ment of Achair, a half-hour boat ride on the old-style Russian wooden church that honors Irtysh River from the town of Omsk, the Achair the female saints Vera, Nadezhda, Liubov, and Cross Convent was established in the 1990s. In their mother Sophia. These days, weddings of- 2003, a recently ensconced nun recalled that ten take place here. local authorities had hoped to use the land for Soon after the land was given to the Rus- something productive. “But nothing would sian Orthodox Church, our youthful, black- grow on this land of blood and sorrow,” she ex- clad nun-guide recounted, an underground hot plained to our small group of sympathetic eth- spring “miraculously burst onto the surface of nographers. Local businessmen also could find the earth.” One of the charming wooden cha- no use for the land. So Omsk officials decided pels, called Ioann Krestitel’ na vodakh” (John to donate the land to the Russian Orthodox the Baptist on the Waters), was then built at Church, especially since it had been a female this site, enabling its waters “which never freeze commune and church site in the early twentieth over, even in our harsh winter,” to become in- century. tegrated with the church building.5 The spring By the 1930s, the church was destroyed and was consecrated by Patriarch Aleksei II in 1993, the site became part of the prison labor system, and the chapel was dedicated in 2000. Locals where an estimated 200,000 people died over a consider this site to be the locus of the whole period of 16 years. Political and criminal con- sacred territory, and narratives of blessings and victs were mixed together and housed in un- miraculous cures have begun to accumulate heated, flimsy barracks. Fed poor-quality oats
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