Russia's small peoples: The policies and attitudes towards the native northerners, seventeenth century-1938

In the mid-1920s the Soviet government singled out about 150,000 of its citizens in a special administrative category designated the "small peoples of the north." The main criterion for inclusion was not so much the size of the ethnic groups involved as the degree of their economic and cultural underdevelopment. The "small peoples" were the indigenous inhabitants of the Arctic and sub-Arctic zones of the Soviet Union who subsisted on hunting, fishing, and reindeer herding and were seen by the bolshevik officials as the most backward peoples of the new republic. As such, they needed to be understood as a peculiar phenomenon and governed differently from their more "cultured" countrymen.;The Soviet administrators were not the first ones to assign the circumpolar peoples a special (and the lowest) place in the state hierarchy. Since the early eighteenth century the northern tribute payers had repeatedly provided a testing ground for various theories of progress and development. This dissertation is a history of these policies and their implementation; a study of the place of the circumpolar peoples in the Russian empire and in the Russian mind. It begins with the conquest of Siberia in the seventeenth century and ends in 1938, when the small peoples lost their special status and were declared completely free of both backwardness and foreignness. Part I describes the introduction of a system of native administration in the north; Part II follows the changing roles of the circumpolar peoples as tribute-paying imperial subjects, objects of scholarly research, literary characters, and sporadically baptized "pagans"; Part III discusses the postrevolutionary debates on the fate of the "tribes of the northern borderlands" in a Marxist state; Part IV analyzes the Stalinist war against the "backwardness" of the northern peoples and the "wrecking" of those who were in charge of their welfare; and the Epilogue depicts the symbolic rebirth of the small peoples in the literature of socialist realism.