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 around the spring. The complex has become a and forced to log in extreme cold, the prisoners place of pilgrimage, attracting supplicants not died at a rate of about 35 a day. Their bodies were only from the Omsk region but also from all left to rot in ditches, and the territory became over the Orthodox world. a closed zone until 1991, when local officials I witnessed pilgrims bathing in the rock- showed the ravaged territory to a profoundly rimmed hot pool created by the spring and shocked Metropolitan Feodosii of Omsk. He re- taking away “sacred water” in jars. Elegant, sep- quested that a memorial cross be placed on the arate men’s and women’s baptismal fonts inside island by the local Lesnoi collective farm. the chapel were linked to the water of the spring In stages, about 50 hectares of land were in an ingenious system. Our reverent nun donated for agriculture, convent housing, and stressed that the land and water had become religious architecture. Church officials raised loci of spiritual renewal, where the ghosts of the money throughout the former Soviet Union dead could be put to rest by the benevolent use to make the territory into one of the few con- of the site of their sacrificial suffering. She em- vents in Russia. It houses several gate chapels, phasized that the site’s bitter history “must never temples, and one red brick Cathedral of As- be forgotten.” 102 | Marjorie Mandelstam Balzer

Figure 1. Sacred Spring at Achair, with chapel. M.M. Balzer, 2003 Local legacies of the GULag in Siberia | 103

Éveny, Évenki, and Yukagir perspectives, ences quite strong, and with some learning Na- and education debates tive languages. Nonetheless, when an extensive amnesty was declared in the late 1980s, some Shifting to the territory of my more recent and of the mixed ethnic families went back to the long-term fieldwork, the Sakha Republic (Yaku- “mainland,” as European Russia, Ukraine, and tia), I learned in 2012 from a Native colleague Belarus were conceptualized. Others felt that who returned from Oimiakon, northern Sakha strong enough roots had been planted in the Republic, that a small museum on the site of the North to stay, or that they had no good pros- former Oimiakon prison camp has been cre- pects elsewhere. Home had become “Yakutia,” ated and maintained with republic money by and they sometimes called themselves “Yaku- descendants of prisoners and exiles.6 tiane.” Several years later, some of the families Passionate debates and tensions have de- who had left to try their luck elsewhere returned veloped over how the presence of the former to “Yakutia.”7 Oimiakon work camp should be taught in the Oimiakon, Sredniaia Kolyma, Verkhniaia schools. Russian teachers whose families came Kolyma, and the village of Topolinoe were sev- to the North because of the work camps or due eral of the nodes of GULag work camps. While to Soviet political exile have been arguing that the first three had been trading posts that grew the full horror of the camps and the desolation into towns, Topolinoe was expanded on the of the region should be emphasized to the lo- base of an early Soviet work camp site after it cal children, who are mostly Éveny, Évenki, and had been, in effect, decommissioned. It is the Yukagir. Native parents are suggesting a con- birth village of the Éven anthropologist Olga trasting approach that depicts the homeland of Ulturgasheva, whose doctorate is from Cam- their indigenous peoples as rich in resources, bridge University. She has written with poi- natural beauty, and spiritual power. Although gnant power about the widespread resentment they do not want their local history to com- that local current and former reindeer-breeding pletely ignore Sovietization and the flood of Éveny feel at being coerced into having a former newcomers who were integral to all sides of camp site as their main administrative center. the GULag system, they would prefer that it The decision was made far from local leaders, be framed as an historical anomaly that has in Yakutsk and Moscow. Olga Ulturgasheva been transcended. They prefer that their chil- (2012: 132–133) explains that Éveny discom- dren memorize the poetry of local indigenous fort with “trespassing on previously occupied writers lauding the landscape, rather than the spaces, and the pervasive presence of ghosts of verses or prose of famous outsiders who with- former (blonde, Russian-looking) GULag pris- ered in nearby camps. oners in the village buildings, invokes a sense Some of these Native parents are themselves of curse (in the Éveny language, ningichaen) children of mixed ethnic marriages, formed among the local population … This space is full when people released from the camps were not of malevolent forces of the deceased which still permitted to leave the region. Éveny-Russian continue to bring misfortune and unhappiness and Éveny-Ukrainian families were accepted to the world of the living.” Éveny youth are jug- in northern communities, where often some- gling ways to transcend their problems, espe- what better educated Native women chose cially since the post-Soviet chaos of disrupted non-Native husbands. Although the commu- transport and political-economic uncertainty nity knew who had mixed family backgrounds, has made intense unease in the village more, many mixed ethnic children were perceived in not less, relevant. This is true elsewhere in the their villages as Native, with maternal influ- republic as well. 104 | Marjorie Mandelstam Balzer

Sakha (Yakut) perspectives, collaboration atmosphere where everyone knew everyone and moral debilitation else’s business, and where Soviet socialization encouraged everyone (including children) to While I have not visited Topolinoe, I twice have turn in traitors (including the children’s par- done fieldwork in Sredniaia Kolyma villages, in ents), it was hard to harbor an escapee for long.9 part because it is the home region of my close Even more morally debilitating was the pres- friend and sometime co-author Uliana Vinoku- sure that Sakha local leaders felt to cooperate rova, a Sakha sociologist and former republic with prison authorities or to become prison parliamentarian. As I was walking with Uliana’s administrators and guards themselves. While Sakha husband Petr in the summer of 2003 on this was rare, it did happen, especially in im- the main street of Sredne Kolymsk, he suddenly poverished villages where the number of hunt- said: “You know we are walking on the bones ers on payroll, receiving steady money from the of slave laborers? The GULag built this road. Soviet monopoly that bought fur products, was Sometimes it is unbearable to think about how limited and shrank over time. Official employ- this town was built up.” His comment flooded ment of some Sakha in the Communist Party my brain with thoughts of Varlam Shalamov’s elite structure became one more aspect of no- Kolyma Tales (1994) and my distant relative the torious interethnic tensions between Sakha and poet Osip Mandelstam, who died in a prison other Natives, as well as between Sakha and lo- clinic in Vladivostok, where a monument was cal Russians, Ukrainians, and Belarusians who raised to his memory in the mid-1990s.8 I were former prisoners. In such contexts, Sakha mused on the contrast between the anonym- officials were more mobile, considered “out- ity of so many of the innocent but condemned, siders” in some mixed ethnic villages, and fre- whose names and numbers are too numerous quently requesting transfers. These Sakha, a few to have been accurately fixed in the greater of whom later became my friends, behaved vari- Kolyma region, and the honor for Mandelstam­ ously, occasionally allowing their wives to live to have been memorialized. We discussed how in the capital, Yakutsk, while they served in the rarely Sakha mention the camps, possibly be- North, an unhealthy situation that bred resent- cause they have been ashamed of this part of ment and infidelity on all sides. their local history, including notorious attempts Awkward ramifications of semi-ethnic- to make Siberian Natives into collaborators in based employment structures included the ne- Stalinist crimes. cessity to live with serious splits in Soviet official One counternarrative has been that Sakha jurisdictions. In the Stalinist period, lower-level villagers sometimes tried to save escapees from Communist Party officials, more likely to be the camps, in emergencies when it was a mat- Sakha, sometimes chafed against the more pow- ter of their freezing to death or being rescued erful centralized GULag apparatus. Higher-level with warmth and food. But the Sakha were GULag officers were more likely to be outsider petrified—the survival hospitality law of the Russians or Ukrainians, functioning with direct North had become quite frayed with Soviet orders and support from Moscow. Toward the propaganda that such escapees were murder- end of the Soviet period, well after the omnivore ous traitors to the country. Such propaganda and economically ineffective prison labor GU- was also poisonously laced with direct threats Lag system had been somewhat reined in, the that Sakha family members, especially heads of legacies of such splits had become notoriously households, could be arrested if they harbored dysfunctional, as was poignantly illustrated by a such “criminals.” And indeed, some of the pris- disgruntled Soviet army officer’s description of oners were genuine criminals. Thus the pressure chaotic disaster relief.10 to turn people in after their lives had been saved A Sakha friend who grew up in a local town was great—and morally debilitating. In a village near a prison camp in the 1950s explained Local legacies of the GULag in Siberia | 105 that no one who had experienced the camps, Stalin in front of a centrally located government whether of Slavic background or Sakha, could building housing the Volunteer Army and Sea talk about them. Far from a matter of personal Service headquarters. Communists had hoped preference, it was forbidden to discuss any as- to install it near Lenin Square on the symboli- pect of the camps during the Soviet period. cally salient Russian Revolution anniversary, 7 When this friend was a schoolgirl, some pupils November. A car with the bust was on the way in her school were multiethnic children of exiles to the site, where a few stalwarts had gathered, or of former camp inmates, but it was unthink- but the car was stopped and turned back, creat- able to bring this up or question the children ing a delicious scandal that made the generally about their parents. “We were afraid. Terror ineffective mayor somewhat more popular. simply hung in the air. For example, even acci- Finally in 2013, under a newly elected, dental insults to the image of a high government younger Sakha mayor, Aisen Nikolaev, negotia- official could get one in trouble.” tions “released” the imprisoned bust, allowing A few hard-core, loyal members of the Com- it a more private spot in front of a new bank, munist Party are left among the Sakha and Rus- owned by a Sakha businessman in the diamond sian elite in the republic, as revealed by the back industry. A small group of elderly, mixed Rus- story of an ultimately successful 2013 memorial sian and Sakha veterans led by Viktor Guborev to Stalin in Yakutsk. The politics of this have improvised a short nostalgic ritual with red flags riveted the mostly disapproving Sakha intelli- as the undersized bust was placed in front of gentsia in the past few years. The first attempt Almaz Anabar just before Victory Day, 9 May.11 to place a leftover bust of Stalin somewhere Additional small Stalin monuments have ma- prominent came in 2007, when the Sakha terialized in the semi-industrialized regional mayor of Yakutsk was Yuri Zabolev. Horrified, centers of Amga and Mirnyi, where many of the he dramatically curtailed a plan to memorialize residents are Russian. The relic busts had been

Figure 2: Bust of Stalin in front of bank. M. Ivanov, 2013 106 | Marjorie Mandelstam Balzer kept hidden in a warehouse, and recently the call, filled with an avalanche of flowers, Zoia, one in Amga appeared in a row of other “he- an elderly trembling Ksenofontov granddaugh- roes” of the Soviet period. Sakha interlocutors ter and one of the last descendants of the once- who regaled me with these stories added: “Au- mighty clan, was called to the stage. Actors and thorities have put up other monuments recently, officials of the Megino-Kangalas region and the including one to a foal. Soon there will be one to a republic shared in the triumph, jubilant in their dog. What’s the difference between this and Stalin?” palpable transcendence of repression. Toasts at the reception valorized Gavril Ksenofontov’s volumes of folklore for cultural Muffled and unmuffled howls of the recovery and Pavel Ksenofontov’s confederal- Sakha repressed ism for political dignity. But during the inter- mission, I had a disturbing conversation with At the Sakha-language theater in 2010, I at- a healer from the Megino-Kangalas region. He tended an astonishing, cathartic premiere per- said bitterly that no amount of current expos- formance of a new historically accurate play ing of the repressions and of “uncovering blank called Kuemel (Ice Breakup), by Kharuskhal spots of history” could make up for the losses of (Vasilii Vasil’iev’s pseudonym, meaning “Protec- the most talented Sakha of the twentieth cen- tion, Defense”) about the repression in the late tury and their unborn children. “We still have 1920s of all those associated with the elite Kse- not recovered from the genetic destruction of nofontov family. Its Lena River estate-owning our intelligentsia, especially the family and clan patriarch had been Vasilii, whose iconographic and friends of the Ksenofontovs. Their whole sons included Gavril, an ethnographer; Niko- clan was nearly destroyed, even the brothers lai, a lawyer; Arkhadii, an engineer-dreamer; who tried to cooperate with Soviet power. Think Pavel, a revolutionary who broke ranks when of all the Sakha who could have been born but the Bolsheviks refused confederal status for Ya- who were not, due to the cutting off of the kutia; and Konstantin, who escaped to America branches of the best Sakha minds before they via China. Their repression has been termed in were able to have their own families.” I tried and the republic, first sotto voce and then at full cry, failed to comfort him by explaining that missing “Ksenofontovshchina.” It eventually swallowed genes in a diverse population cannot genetically and destroyed around 300 people with ties to the destroy a whole, admittedly small, people. He well-educated and wealthy family. Many were and many others are “scientifically certain” that sent to the notorious Solovki camps in northern a special kind of elitocide has occurred. Later I Russia, where most perished and three made a found that many of my friends were divided on dramatic escape to Finland. A special delegation this “genofond” ramification of the repressions. of Sakha went to the territory to place a memo- Some also argued that an important lesson of rial cross and plaque there in 2010.12 the play was that new generations continue to Kharuskhal’s play, vividly portraying mul- be unreconciled: “trust between the generations tiple generations of Ksenofontovs and their was broken,” and traditional Sakha values of friends, was directed by the legendary theater love and tolerance were lost. director turned Minister of Culture Andrei Bor- In the 1920s–1930s, other major networks isov. When its curtain came down, the mostly of accused and jailed oppositionists revolved Sakha audience rose to its feet with a sponta- around the Sakha revolutionary and poet Oi- neous surge of clapping, sobbing, and shouting unskii (a penname combining “Shaman” with a unlike anything I have ever seen in the theater. Russian ending), whose birth name was Platon Uliana Vinokurova called it an “egregor” mo- Sleptsov, and the prominent Bolshevik leader ment, using the Greek term for intense com- Maksim Ammosov.13 The numbers of associ- munity solidarity. During the joyous curtain ates killed as followers of these early heroes of Local legacies of the GULag in Siberia | 107

Soviet Yakutia were even greater than those Vasilii Yakovlev—whose penname was jailed in the Ksenofonotovshchina. Each has a Dalan, meaning Restless Despair—wrote of museum in Yakutsk devoted to their careers. his experiences in the camps. His vignettes of Oiunskii’s is especially impressive, featuring the numerous ruined Sakha lives reveal that re- history of Sakha folklore and literature and pe- pressions extended beyond the destruction of riodically sponsoring folklore and epic singing early revolutionaries, shamans, the wealthy, competitions. Oiunskii is also remembered as and the intelligentsia. Dalan became the Sakha the founder of the Institute of Languages, Lit- equivalent of the writer Varlam Shalamov, and erature, and History, now called the Institute for reputedly they befriended each other in the Humanities Studies. Ammosov’s memorial is a camps. Dalan was accused under article 58, much smaller house museum, focused on his chapter 10, as an “anti-Soviet” student in the Communist Party loyalty and his simple roots early 1950s “Basharin Affair,” in essence a fight in the nearby Nam region. over rewriting 1920s history and one of the last In the Nam region, where civil war fighting spasms of Sakha destruction before Stalin died was particularly brutal, a giant “reconciliation in 1953. stone,” carved with the names of local “Sakha In his famous essay-novel My Destiny, Da- martyrs,” was unveiled with ceremony in the lan (1994) recalls one illiterate, non-Russian- early 1990s to honor all the dead on all sides of speaking elder, Afanasii Terekhov from Kobiai, the protracted civil war. I attended this poignant who landed in the GULag after World War II ritual, sponsored by the then-activist group (The Great Patriotic War). Terekhov, originally Sakha Omuk (The Sakha People), along with from a Sakha family prominent enough to have Sakha intellectuals whose memorial speeches been designated “princes” in prerevolutionary touched on the dashed hopes of early Sakha So- times, had long been dispossessed and poor in viet leaders, on the incomplete amnesties that the Soviet period. He had fought with the “white arbitrarily reunited families or kept them apart, bandits” in the civil war, been amnestied and and on the roundups of Sakha that began in the made a horse breeder. His true crime came in late 1920s with the arrest of the talented orator- 1948, when he made the mistake of recounting politician Oiunskii. Oiunskii’s most famous epic a dream, a charming and once healthy custom poem ([1925] 1978), called the “Red Shaman,” in traditionally oriented Sakha families. While has been enacted in many forms over the years, collecting hay with his collective, he mentioned after he was rehabilitated in the Khrushchev that before the revolution people had lived bet- period. ter. Afanasii rashly critiqued the “unprofitable” Shamans themselves were arrested in hard- kolkhoz system and noted that “during the war to-document numbers in the Stalin years, America saved us with their cans of preserves.” mostly for crimes of anti-Soviet agitation or In his dream, he rejoiced that “America had hoarding of wealth but sometimes explicitly come to occupy Yakutia, and he joined their for illegal practice of nonlicensed medicine. forces as a young soldier, to advance further They were termed “shaman-kulaks” in Soviet into war.” propaganda. Legends describing their arrests, Dalan dryly noted that anyone can dream of and how local shamans sometimes managed anything, even flying while dead, but the “Com- to foil Soviet tormentors, proliferated under- munist regime saw fit to imprison an illiterate ground throughout the Soviet period. I collect man.” Dalan’s writings are cherished by those these fascinatingly stereotyped, mystical narra- trying to understand what happened to their tives, arguing that they became morale-building loved ones. Although Afanasii was released in releases for people whose faith in shamanic an amnesty after 1953, his children only under- cosmologies survived many of their shamanic stood what happened to their father through healers (Balzer 2012: 35–56). Dalan’s account.14 108 | Marjorie Mandelstam Balzer

Several of my friends and colleagues were strangers were willing to sit with someone ru- caught in the Basharin Affair, whether as stu- mored to be “the American.” (My friends at the dents and professors at the university or schol- time were students, senior ethnographers, and ars in the Institute of Languages, Literature, and members of the Sakha cultural elite with per- History. Some were arrested for defending the mission to meet with me.) One day a disheveled historian Georgii Basharin, while others had older man, who introduced himself as Jewish, their careers derailed. Mutual enmities polar- plunked his tray down and conspiratorially, ized the small Sakha intelligentsia for many uncomfortably soon, whispered: “I know who years, and this sometimes extended to relation- you are, and why you are really here. You are ships among their children. The esteemed his- here to make contact with Yuri Orlov, right? I torian Egor Alekseev (2000) has written about can help you.” I was startled and immediately the whole range of repressions, helped found distrustful but allowed myself to admit that I and advise the activist group Sakha Omuk, and knew who Yuri Orlov was. I quickly declared has inspired a website to chronicle grievances, that I had no intension of seeing him and cer- called the “virtual museum of the GULag.”15 tainly had brought nothing from the West for Another scholar, Mikhail Ivanov, imprisoned him. At the time Orlov, a physicist-dissident for 10 years, is today honored for the integrity of who was a founder of the Helsinki Accord his historical interpretation and for his refusal Human Rights Group, had been exiled to the to turn on his colleagues. His modest pseud- village of Kobiai after seven years in a prison onym is Bagdaryn Siul’be, glossed as Little camp near Perm’. While ethnically Russian, Flowing Brook in the Sakha language. His life he was a defender of Jewish rights to emigra- work has become his memorial—the meticu- tion to Israel and was far better known in the lous collection of toponyms from all over the West than he was in the Soviet Union. I was republic, revealing the often Éveny, Évenki, and somewhat appalled by my sharp self-protective Yukagir roots of many geographical and settle- response. ment place names in the region.16 Later that year, with no domestic public- In sum, whether through history, theater, ity, Yuri Orlov was allowed to leave the Soviet monuments, literature, or the Internet, a pat- Union, having been saved by Western outcries tern of Sakha memorializing finally has begun and an activist wife. Orlov’s story of hard labor to give voice to the monstrosities of the Soviet followed by a series of mendacious, technically period, although it has not been able to fully illegal persecutions in his mostly “Yakut” vil- exorcise the terror. Some voices of experience lage of exile came out only in the West. In 1985, warn not to howl too loudly, lest expressions of he had been beaten at night by two youthful, specific, historically contextualized resentment drunken assailants near the police station, pos- become misinterpreted as expressions of more sibly with official encouragement (since they general, chauvinist nationalism and evidence of asked his name before they beat him), to the interethnic conflict. point where his peripheral vision was damaged. Significantly, many of the villagers were sympa- thetic enough about the beating to coax one of Famous prisoner perspectives and the never arrested suspects into behavior that interethnic tensions revealed he was ashamed, although he never completely confessed what had happened. Years An incident that still gives me the chills, from later, I learned through Sakha connections that my fieldwork in early 1986 in Yakutsk, made the incident with my Jewish mystery man had me a target of Soviet authorities’ provocateur indeed been a test to discover whether I was a scheming. I occasionally ate lunch in a squalid true ethnographer or a “Western, Jewish, impe- self-serve café on Lenin Prospect, where few rialist agent.”17 Local legacies of the GULag in Siberia | 109

Unprovoked beating of exiles released from claimed that the Russians were exploitative, camps without permission to leave their as- interfering “racist louts,” although Chernovil signed villages occurred often enough to con- carefully noted this was not everyone’s opinion stitute a pattern, rarely exposed. The testimony about every Russian. of Viacheslav Chernovil, later mayor of L’viv in In sum, this volatile mutually suspicious at- newly independent Ukraine, revealed a case mosphere was one that local authorities could that blurs the distinction between official ter- insidiously exploit if they wanted to teach an ex- ror and unofficial interethnic tensions. In the ile an informal lesson. Although many villagers late 1970s, Chernovil, a Ukrainian exile living experienced and still value the childhoods they in the predominantly “Yakut” village of Chap- remember as filled with multiethnic friendships pandu, reported that Slavic people were in and tolerance, a countertrend was just below danger if they trespassed in areas he called the the calm surface. Far from the “brotherhood of “Yakut ghettos” of some villages and towns.18 the peoples” of Soviet propaganda, interethnic After several threatening personal incidents, tensions existed in Soviet villages and towns mostly with drunken youths, the unprejudiced under certain mistrustful, conspiratorial con- Chernovil felt he had become “a victim of lo- ditions. It is tempting to broaden Katherine cal internationality tensions” and requested Verdery’s term “conspirativity” for this socially transfer. He also described sexual graffiti in- constructed pattern of suspicion.19 It was exac- sults exchanged by “Yakuts” and Russians of erbated by impoverished conditions in the Far Niurba (where he was transferred), plus mutual North, where politically maligned newcomers stereotypes. Russians called the “Yakuts” “mon- without local kinship networks were perceived keys” or “slit-eyes,” as well as “terrible national- to be extra burdens. The later, widely publicized ists” who would “still be in furs” on the edge of interethnic tensions of the post-Soviet period starvation if it were not for Russians. “Yakuts” hardly developed full-blown from a vacuum.

Figure 3. Sredne Kolymsk. M.M. Balzer, 2003 110 | Marjorie Mandelstam Balzer

Reflections and comparisons ogist of symbolism Mary Douglas (2006) made famous. Regardless of what people confess to me, in- Where sympathetic people of Slavic back- ternal debates about “memory and forgetting” grounds were punished for not becoming are alive and well in Siberia.20 In many cases, informers, as happened with Yuri Orlov’s people who would prefer to forget the camps Ukrainian landlady, villagers have tried to sup- or their ripple effects after the Stalin period are press memories of constant moral compro- not able to forget, forgive, or foreclose their mises. Where Russian and Sibiriaki families of own mixed emotions. This torment resonates camp guards remain ambivalent about what with Alexander Etkind’s (2013) description of happened on their turf, but without their ini- Russia today as a “land of the unburied,” where tiatory “agency,” as at Achair near Omsk, they memorials to Stalin’s victims are inadequate, stress that their guard grandfathers never actu- memorials to Stalin himself are popping up ally shot anyone. Guards just helplessly stood by in unexpected places, and people continue to as people who had been reduced to subhuman, grapple with Stalinist legacies using compet- oats-eating animal status dropped dead. ing narratives of the past. Generational changes To redeem their hardened-guard souls, are crucial, as are various symbolic, socially as well as those of the unquiet dead, a sacred, and politically appropriate ways of catharti- miracle-cure-producing purifying spring has cally mourning. Memorializing has intensified sprung up. Its pre-Christian “folk religious” in many forms in the post-Soviet period, but, ripple effects are powerful and internally con- as the Sakha scholar Tatiana Argounova-Low tradictory. While a few clear- eyed Russian (2012: 129–147) has analyzed, the Sakha intel- folklorists admit to the “pagan” aspects of the ligentsia risk stimulating Russian accusations beliefs and practices that have surged around of nationalism, plunging them back into a fa- Achair, its whole rationale is couched in Rus- miliar history of patterned scapegoating and sian Orthodox convent housing. The emerging sinister misunderstanding. “folk logics” are not fully congruent with stan- Significantly but messily, what local people dard Christian messages about the sacrifice and have chosen to emphasize as they look back suffering of Jesus Christ. A dual motto of the and process the GULag varies greatly with their Achair Cross Convent is: “A place to remember and their ancestors’ specific experiences of the and not to forget. To never forgive the crimes of camps and exiles, as well as with their senses the communist regime.” At least some Russians of indigeneity. Where the “best and brightest” of Cossack backgrounds distance themselves of a small cohort of Native intelligentsia and from Soviet crimes through the symbolism of wealthy merchants were obliterated, cathartic chapels built in honor of Russian Orthodox recovery takes many generations. When Na- Church martyrs of various time periods. They tives were told (not paid) to turn in escaped do this without a self-cleansing humanistic prisoners, forcing local communities to become identification with the executioners as well as police in an already distrusted police state, re- the victims of Stalinist crimes, without repeat- sentment and interethnic tensions continue to ing Christ’s salvation mantra “Forgive them, Fa- fester. Where their very homes were co-opted, ther, for they know not what they do.” Perhaps resentment becomes astonishment at the cru- the pain is still too raw for this level of purifying elty of the official Soviet Russian “other.” Where radical empathy and release from denial (com- restless ghosts of maltreated “goners” are per- pare Balzer 1992 and 2012). ceived to still lurk, nothing seems to purify No one individual, religious movement, eth- the unclean, bloodied earth, suggesting a level nic group, or indigenous local community can and scale of “pollution” and danger beyond the serve as a model for how to transcend and put to realm of ritualized behavior that the anthropol- rest the pain and shame of victimization, moral Local legacies of the GULag in Siberia | 111 debilitation, collaboration, or multigenerational Holquist, selected articles from which appear collateral human damage. For those who remain in Kritika 16(3); and a section edited by Olga committed to Siberian homelands, whether Ulturgasheva in Laboratorium 2015(1). My relatively recent or ancient, various degrees of conventional use of Siberia includes Russia’s guilt and silence must yield to new levels of soli- Far East. 2. The literature on socially constructed memory, darity and community building. Whether done individual and collective, including problems of through sacred springs or cathartic theater, retrospective interviews, is vast. See, for exam- some kind of openly acknowledged spiritual ple, Berdahl 2010; Kansteiner and Classen 2009; reconciliation seems to be crucial to the healing and Kligman and Verdery 2011: 9–15. process. 3. Recollections of my interlocutors did not ex- tend to the exact year of the intrusions or the ethnicity of the interlopers. This may have oc- Acknowledgments curred in 1944 with Russian exiles and Kalmyk “punished peoples” settlers. See Balzer 1999 for I am grateful to Eduard Alexeyev, Zoya Alex­ context. eyeva, Golfo Alexopoulos, Harley Balzer, Michael 4. Compare http://windowoneurasia2.blogspot. David-Fox, Alexander Etkind, Bruce Grant, com/2013/12/window-on-eurasia-east-of- Alexander King, Neringa Klumbyte, Douglas urals-people.html by Paul Goble; Balzer 1994; Rogers, Vera Solovyeva, Olga Ulturgasheva, and Dymchak and Kashpur 2013; Hartley 2014: 171. Katherine Verdery for encouraging comments, 5. See http://club.eomsk.ru/?gid=291&pid=84, where anonymous authors suggest that the spring “al- as well as to the anonymous reviewers. most never freezes over.” Compare with Rouh- ier-Willoughby 2015. Marjorie Mandelstam Balzer is research pro- 6. Sakha ecologist Vera Solovyeva, August 2012 fessor at Georgetown University in the Anthro- personal communication. Oimiakon is famous pology Department and the Center for Eurasian, as a contender for the coldest continuously in- habited place on earth. Russian, and East European Studies (CERES). 7. I am grateful to Uliana Vinokurova, Olga Ultur- She is editor of the journal Anthropology and gasheva, and Gail Fondahl (1998) for insights Archeology of Eurasia and of several books, in- into patterns of mixed ethnic marriage and cluding Religion and politics in Russia (2010). migration. After the Soviet Union collapsed, Vi- Her monographs include Shamans, spirituality, nokurova (1992: 4) declared, “There are places and cultural revitalization (Palgrave Macmil- for all those in the republic who wish to see her lan, 2012); and The tenacity of ethnicity (Princ- as a mother, not a step-mother.” eton University Press, 1999). Her periodic 8. See the memoirs of Nadezhda Mandelstam fieldwork in Siberia began in 1975–1976 (with ([1970] 1999, [1974] 2011). “The Mask of Sor- Ob-Ugrian Khanty) and since 1986 has focused row” by Ernst Neizvestny in Magadan memo- on the Sakha Republic, with additional work in rializes all camp victims, as does the Solovetskii stone in Moscow placed by the Memorial the republics of Tuva and Buryatia. She has been Society. active in exchanges of Native American and Na- 9. The reference is to Pavlik Morozov, the young tive Siberian leaders. boy who, as Soviet propaganda drilled in the Email: [email protected] schools, had turned in his parents for politi- cal disloyalty and thus become a hero. Sakha friends were horrified in private over this story, Notes wondering if it was real. 10. A letter by Lieutenant Colonel A. Chomchoev, 1. Compare with Solzhenitsyn 1974. GULag “Aktual’noe pis’mo,” Izvestiia, 11 February 1989, research projects include a 2013 conference explained the dysfunctional administration of organized by Michael David-Fox and Peter disaster relief in January 1989 in the village of 112 | Marjorie Mandelstam Balzer

Chokurdakh on the Indigirka River. For the 20. On memory and forgetting, compare Ricoeur range of camps and their administrative struc- 2004 and Todorov 2010. ture, see http://khandyga.ru/?p=1106 by Andrei Starovoitov. 11. Coverage in http://rt.com/politics/north-rus- References sian-republic-sakha-yakutiya-988/ mentioned other places where Stalinist “PR stunts” have Alekseev, Egor. 2000. Federativnyi tsentr i occurred, including advertising on St. Peters- avtonomiia: Na primere Iakutskoi ASSR, burg buses in 2010 to mark the World War II 1917–1941 gg. Yakutsk: Bichik. victory anniversary. On Stalin’s popularity, see Argounova-Low, Tatiana. 2012. The politics of na- Waal 2013. tionalism in the Republic of Sakha (northwest- 12. On Solovki [Solovetskii], see Ilin, http://ilin. ern Siberia) 1900–2000. Lewiston, NY: Edwin sakhaopenworld.org/. On the dramatic escape, Mellen. see http://sitim-sir.ru/2011/09/tragicheskaya-sudba- Balzer, Marjorie Mandelstam. 1994. “Siberiaki.” trex-muzhestvennyx-yakutyan-bezhavshix-iz- In Paul Friedrich, ed., Encyclopedia of world solovkov/. cultures, pp. 331–335. New Haven: Hall. 13. Revealingly, many wrote with pseudonyms Balzer, Marjorie Mandelstam 1999. The tenacity of from the earliest days of the Soviet period. ethnicity: A Siberian saga in global perspective. 14. See http://sakha.gov.ru/node/16819 under “Eti Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. strashnye gody repressii,” especially the article Balzer, Marjorie Mandelstam. 2012. Shamans, by Vasilii I. Ivanov. Dalan is excerpted at Sakha spirituality, and cultural revitalization: Ex- Open World “One more secret of Stalin’s Russia” plorations in Siberia and beyond. New York: http://diaspora.sakhaopenworld.org/nl11.shtml. Palgrave-Macmillan. 15. For the museum, see http://gulagmuseum.org/ Balzer, Marjorie Mandelstam, ed. 1992. Russian showObject.do?object=483419&language=1. traditional culture Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe. 16. On the Basharin Affair and for perspective, see Basharin, Grigorii. 1996. Obshchestvenno- Argounova-Low 2012: 61–68. For his defense of politicheskaia obstanovka v Iakutii v 1921–1925 Sakha elites, see Basharin 1996. gg. Yakutsk: Bichik. 17. See Orlov 1987, http://www.nytimes.com/ Berdahl, Daphne. 2010. On the social life of post- 1987/03/15/magazine/my-life-in-exile.html? socialism: Memory, Germany and consumption. pagewanted=all&src=pm; and Schmemann 1986, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. http://www.nytimes.com/1986/02/15/world/ Dalan [VasilyYakovlev]. 1994. D’ylgham miene (My limbo-or-bitter-exile-the-dissidents-left-behind. Destiny). Yakutsk: Bichik. html. Cold-war provocations against me in- Douglas, Mary. 2006. Purity and danger: An analy- cluded a bottle thrown at my feet from a tur- sis of concepts of pollution and taboo. New York: quoise taxi that had been following me for days. Praeger. 18. V. Chernovil’s document was “Zaiavlenie ministru Dymchak, Elena E., and Vitaly V. Kashpur, 2013. vnutrennikh del IaASSR o mezhnatsional’nykh­ “Russkii Sibiriak,” ili Paradoksy regional’noi konfliktakh v Iakutii,” 30 August 1979, appear­ identifikatsii.Obshchestvennye nauki i sovre- ing in Svoboda, 22 February 1980. A Russian mennost’ 39(4): 116–129. manuscript version is in my archive. Etkind, Alexander. 2013. Warped mourning: Stories 19. Katherine Verdery 2013 uses “conspirativity” of the undead in the land of the unburied. Stan- to explain patterns of compartmentalization in ford, CA: Stanford University Press. Romania’s security services, http://www.ucis. Fondahl, Gail. 1998. Gaining ground: Evenkis, land, pitt.edu/nceeer/2013_826-01g_Verdery.pdf. and reform in southeastern Siberia. Boston: The larger issue becomes how intimidation, in- Allyn and Bacon. formant systems, and propaganda stimulating Hartley, Janet M. 2014. Siberia: A history of the suspicion led in many socialist countries to the people. New Haven: Yale University Press. popularity of conspiracy theories. The political Kansteiner, Wulf, and Christoph Classen, eds. 2009. and cultural contexts of “conspirativity” remain Historical representation and historical truth. a disturbingly productive direction for analysis. Oxford: Blackwell. Local legacies of the GULag in Siberia | 113

Kligman, Gail, and Katherine Verdery. 2011. Shalamov, Varlam. 1994. Kolyma Tales, trans. John Peasants under siege: The collectivization of Glad. New York: Penguin. Romanian agriculture, 1949–1962. Princeton, Solzhenitsyn, Alexander. 1974. The Gulag Archipel- NJ: Princeton University Press. ago, trans. Thomas Whitney. New York: Harper Mandelstam, Nadezhda. [1970] 1999. Hope against and Row. hope, trans. Max Hayward. New York: Atheneum. Todorov, Tzvetan. 2010. Memory as a remedy for Mandelstam, Nadezhda. [1974] 2011. Hope evil. Calcutta: Seagull Books. abandoned, trans. Max Hayward. New York: Ulturgasheva, Olga. 2012. Narrating the future in Atheneum. Siberia: Childhood, adolescence and autobiog- Oiunskii [Platon Sleptsov]. [1925] 1978. Stikhot- raphy among the Eveny. Cambridge: Cambridge voreniia. Leningrad: Sovetskii pisatel’. University Press. Orlov, Yuri F. 1987. “My life in exile.” New York Verdery, Katherine. 2013. “Romania’s Securitate Times Magazine, 15 March. Archive and its Fictions: An Introduction” Ricoeur, Paul. 2004. Memory, history, forgetting. NCEEER Working Paper. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Vinokurova, Uliana. 1992. “Yakutiia velika i bogata.” Rouhier-Willoughby, Jeanmarie. 2015. “The GU- Yakutiia, 1 January, 4. Lag reclaimed as sacred space: Negotiation of Waal, Thomas de, ed.. 2013.The Stalin puzzle. memory at the holy spring of Iskitim.” Laborato- Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment for rium 7(1): 51–70. International Peace. Schmemann, Serge. 1986. “Limbo or bitter exile: The dissidents left behind.”New York Times, 15 February.