Yesterday’s Memories, Today’s Discourses: The Struggle of the Russian Sámi to Construct a Meaningful Past1

Deconstructing the Imagined Community

Where is the ‘Golden Age’? A rift of worldviews
Well, opinions differ, but I kind of liked the Soviet rule better because there was true leadership. Now people have to live and cope on their own. The more you grab for yourself, the better off you are. . . . We had a millionaire sovkhoz, it was the richest sovkhoz [state farm] in the region. . . . But where has all that gone now? When the Soviet rule crumbled, everything disappeared. They ruined everything, just everything! At the time there were very good directors [of the sovkhoz and of the district], the leadership had a firm hand (Interview of an elderly Sámi woman by the author, Murmansk Region, 2008).⁶

Of course life wasn’t easy in terms of living standards, and I would never want to see the Soviet times back, never! Today, we are much better off. It’s unimaginable that I should want to get back to the Soviet Union (Interview of an elderly Sámi woman by the author, Murmansk Region, 2013).

“In any culture, people (whether peasant, workers, academics, bureaucrats, business persons, or national leaders) do not just act, they act in particular ways because discourse makes these forms of action meaningful, appropriate, and valued” (Ries 1997:20). With changing discourses, the notions of what counts as meaningful, appropriate and valued change accordingly. The choice to do certain things—or also not to do them—is made, and motivations for it are given within the realm of talk.

Ironically, one of the more recent discursive rifts among the Russian Sámi has been created by the Nordic discourse about an imagined Russian Sámi “community.” Berg-Nordlie (2011) has

extensively described this discourse about Russian Sámi in Nordic media and calls it a “discourse

of need and misery.” What has to be added here is that the starting point for this “Western” dis-

course was an “Eastern” newspaper article, which had appeared first in the local Soviet newspaper Lovozerskaia Pravda (Vatonena 1988). This “raw material” for a new discourse, as it were, was exported to the West (Vatonena 1989) and, after having been digested and assembled in the Nordic countries to a fullfledged discourse of need and misery, was reimported from the Nordic countries back to Russian Lapland by Westerners, as well as by locals with connections to their Nordic kin and other Western supporters of the new Russian Sámi ethnic revival movement. I propose to see this phenomenon as a nonconventional center-periphery vector. Instead of transporting universalized ideas of indigeneity and accordingly formulated policies from capital cities to remote regions (Stammler

et al. in press), this center-periphery movement goes transnationally from one region to another. Both regions are seen by the capital cities of their respective countries as remote peripheries, and they share the same ethnic kin. However, one of the two regions sees itself as more developed in terms of wealth, infrastructure and civic society, and thus less peripheral than its counterpart on the other side of the border.

With this schematic description of a back-and-forth movement of thoughts over a state border, I wish to emphasize that discourses of lament are not a purely internal phenomenon of socialist and postsocialist society. However, such discourses certainly already had their independent social life during Soviet years—not in public, but in private discussions and practices (cf. Ries 1997).

Let me shortly discuss this very first article about the social hardships of the Soviet Sámi, which was published under the title “There are such Problems” (Vatonena 1988) in the height of the glasnost’ (transparency) and perestroika (restructuration) policies. It was exactly in this year that revelatory works of history became a mass phenomenon throughout the media in the whole country (Ries 1997:92). The Lovozerskaia Pravda was (and is) the main informational organ of Lovozero and its district, where most of the Russian Sámi live since they had been removed from their traditional siyts due to collectivization and, later, Khrushchev’s agricultural amalgamation policy (ukrupnenie), as well as due to the needs of Soviet military, industry and infrastructure projects (Afanasyeva 2013; Allemann 2013; Gutsol et al. 2007; for more information on these policies and similar effects in Russia’s North as well as its central regions see Anderson 1996; Olson and Adonyeva 2013; Paxson 2005; Slezkine 1994; Vitebsky 2002,

2010; Vitebsky and Wolfe 2001). Vatonena’s (1988) short article outlined the main negative aspects of the contemporary situation of Soviet Sámi people, such as the division of families, lack of housing, alcoholism, and suicides. In referring to these sufferings for the first time in an official newspaper, this article was indeed a ground-breaking piece of information.

By that time it was forbidden to export local newspapers, but Vatonena’s article still made its way out of the country and caused quite a furor among Nordic Sámi activists and researchers.⁷

A year later an English version of the article was published in the International Work Group for Indigenous Affairs Newsletter (Vatonena 1989) and thus reached an international audience. Considering the informational vacuum on Russian Sámi in the West before the appearance of this article, I argue that exactly this article was the starting shot to a new Western discourse on the Russian Sámi. However, the shortness and thematic limitedness of this article laid the ground for a subsequent series of “sweeping generalizations and schematizations of a starkly black-and-white character” (Konstantinov 2015:66) in a field that was an almost total “tabula rasa” (Berg-Nordlie 2011:33) before the appearance of Vatonena’s mighty article. I am not insinuating the author had any such initial intentions but rather describing self-perpetuating tendencies.

From that moment, during more than two decades, a relatively one-sided discourse of need and misery on the Russian Sámi arose in the neighboring Nordic countries and—this is one of my major conclusions from lengthy fieldwork in Russian Lapland—started to gain increasing dominance also on the eastern side of the border. This discourse is characterized by the a priori conviction that in Russian Lapland dominating groups from outside have always appeared as oppressors and exploiters of the indigenous population, that the Russian Sámi have always been passive victims, and that the Nordic Sámi are morally obliged to give a helping hand.⁸ Referring to the situation in the 1990s, Overland and Berg-Nordlie (2012:105) rightfully say that “the need was indeed considerable in Lovozero, but hardly at the dramatic level that many people in the Nordic countries believed.” Berg-Nordlie (2011:31) attempts to name the deeper reasons for such tendencies:

Nordic Sámi self-representation has been characterized by “victim representations” focusing on past and present injustices resulting from the Nordic states’ division of Sápmi⁹ and subjugation of the Sámi. . . . The “self-imagery of a colonized

people” has become an important trait of Sámi national discourse. . . . Against this background, we may comprehend that the discourse of need on the Russian Sámi does not contrast with the Nordic Sámi self-image.

Offering a set of suitable elements of an oppressive state and being short enough to foster generalizations, Vatonena’s (1989) article was thus a legitimating starting point for the transfer of

this Nordic self-image to the suddenly opened up

tabula rasa of Russian Lapland.¹⁰

Among Nordic Sámi, as Berg-Nordlie (2011:32) puts it, the “self-image as colonized” as a dominant narrative commonplace often harkens back to an “Age of Normality,” which is nostalgically remembered as a lost “Golden Age” against a “Dark Age,” when the Sámi people lost their independence and were suppressed by modern states.

In the course of the transfer of this mentioned self-image onto the newly accessible Russian Sámi, the role of the oppressor was naturally and self-evidently assigned to the Soviet state by most Western actors. In this view, the Soviet Union, beginning from the times of collectivization, was a Dark Age that now could be overcome with the support of the Nordic “‘older brother’ of sorts”

(Berg-Nordlie 2011:31). From this perspective, the Golden Age would be located in a certainly pre-Soviet but otherwise not clearly defined faraway Arcadian past (a term already used by other authors, for example Cruikshank [1998] and Konstantinov [2015]), the essence of which is the same kind of unquestioned axiom that Julie Cruikshank (1998:59) described in another context: “the axiom that Native Americans lived in harmony with nature before the arrival of Europeans.” The present is seen as a time of traditionalist revival, not as bright as the referential Golden Age, but better than the darkest era of oppression, which lies already behind (a highly recommendable analysis of the trap of traditionalism among the Russian Sámi is given by Kuchinskii 2007).

While the Western need-and-misery discourse on the Eastern Sámi was gaining momentum in the Nordic countries for about a quarter of a century, it has been taken back to the homeland of its subject both by Nordic journalists, researchers, activists, and government officials

and by Sámi activists from Russia with ties to the Nordic countries. That is why, when speaking of the Western discourse on Russian Sámi, it might be more appropriate to say Western and Western-influenced discourse. In the words of Berg-Nordlie (2011:32),

the self-image of having once constituted one unitary people, forcibly separated and repressed by alien states, serves as an ideological and rhetorical basis for political activity aimed at cultural revitalization, demands for state compensation, and increased border-transcending cooperation.

Konstantinov (2015) describes the interaction between Western and local actors in the realm of traditionalist revival during the past 20–30 years as a dysfunctional dialogue (or dialogical impasse). Although the dialogue happened within a shared need-and-misery discourse, the goals were only apparently similar. Using speech categories developed by the linguist Roman Jakobson (1960), Konstantinov (2015:66–83) shows that the two sides have different languages uses: The Western understanding of messages from the East about revival of traditions has been quite literal (“substantive” in Jakobson’s language function term). The wish to return to pre-Soviet private-economy reindeer husbandry as the only traditional way was taken for granted and literal and the help offered was often meant in a similarly literal way, “motivated by postmodern values of indigeneity, cultural survival, gender issues and environmental concerns,” mixed with Cold War “clichés and crudities,” first and foremost the one of passive victims of the state (Konstantinov 2015:71–72). However, for the ethnopoliticians on the Eastern side, the whole back-to-the-roots talk is meant on a much more symbolic (“poetic” in Jakobson’s language function term) level: return to “tradition” must be understood as poetic engagement in the Western discourse of need and misery, which depicts the Soviet time generally as a huge faux pas, and makes a more instrumental use of the need-and-misery discourse. This impasse also has historical reasons about differing communication habits and skills: the new ethnopolitical elites in Russia were recruited from the local intelligentsia; as Soviet intelligentsia they were trained in ideological talk and in Soviet-style grassroots-to-power ways of communication, which entailed being professionally skilled in poetic talk (i.e., performative skills and a certain style of “double speak”). Performing “tradition” has itself become a long-standing Soviet tradition, as part of the “national-in-form, socialist-in-content” formula, in which ethnic components were confined to museal folklore. In that sense, the ethnopoliticians are already well-trained in performing traditionality, and “the art [of poetic talk] lives on, among other domains, in the genre of project proposals to funding agencies” (Konstantinov 2015:98). Yurchak (2006) sees performativity as a key factor in the relations between Soviet people and authoritative discourse during late Soviet years. He correctly states that this performativity

did not disappear in the post-Soviet period. On the contrary, in the new context this principle continued to play a central role in shaping the decisions and activities of many members of the last Soviet generation” (Yurchak 2006:296).

While Yurchak then shortly examines the new generation of business elite who had emerged from the Komsomol youth organization under these premises, the emergence of the new indigenous elite was shaped in the same setting of performativity and trained in the same skills of poetic talk.

According to Konstantinov, many Western interlocutors of the new activists did not grasp that the back-to-the-roots talk about going “traditional” and living in the tundra should be seen as poetic

and not as substantive talk. So, for example, Kalstad (2009:64) literally understands and quotes,

Now we want to be engaged in what our souls desire. Namely, to engage in reindeer breeding, hunting, freshwater fishing, wild berry and mushroom gathering, and the production of objects of decorative and applied art. We want to be in unity with nature (quoted in Konstantinov 2015:201).

Also, Vladimirova (2006:63) noted a considerable mismatch of visions and prerogatives of the activist cross-border dialogue.

Returning to the threat of sweeping generalizations about the past, Julie Cruikshank (1998:62) adds another important nuance in her discussion of similar processes in North America: “Once appropriated, ideas can be relocated and welded to a dissident ideological agenda, a process that has been discussed elsewhere as the erasure of memory.” She further talks about

the inevitable damage that occurs when ideas are separated from the settings in which they are produced. . . . Repatriating exported products is

both naïve and dangerous, since it provides a simplified instrument of objectification” (Cruikshank 1998:70).

What is said here, applies not only to all kinds of people from the West who deal with the situation of the Eastern Sámi. Also, many Russian Sámi people have themselves adopted and repatriated these viewpoints. The sum of these viewpoints I call the “activist worldview.”

My observation, however, is that by far not all Sámi people share this view, or they share it only partially, depending on the topic or on the occasion. Especially elders or those living in settlements less covered by ethnopolitical activism, and hence less influenced by the need-and-misery discourse, have a “shifted” view concerning what to regard as the Golden and what as the Dark Age. In these lifeworlds, the “Golden Age” is in many aspects situated in the Soviet times. This belief is a prevalent attitude in many post-Soviet settings. In her analysis of the lives of Russian rural women, Paxson (2005:88–119) calls this Soviet-time Golden Age a “radiant past” (svetloe proshloe), which today reflects the formerly ubiquitous Soviet concept of a “radiant future” (svetloe budushchee), the idealistic promise of a future day when fully developed communism would be achieved. Hence, this view is very common among those (mostly elderly people) who see themselves as having been honest and hardworking, devoting a lifetime to the achievement of a prospect radiant future. The topic of post-Soviet nostalgia and a corresponding Golden Age has been discussed widely and for many regions of the former Soviet Union, among others by Jõesalu (2009), Konstantinov (2015:24, 60–65), Nadkarni and Shevchenko (2004), Yurchak (2006:8), and Ziker (2002:83).

Depending on the occasion or the topic, the Soviet Golden Age can be associated with Stalin’s rule as a time of discipline and order, or, what I have met more often, the calmer Brezhnev era, mainly during the 1970s. This time is commonly designated as the period of stagnation when speaking about the whole country. In the case of Russian Lapland, it is mainly remembered as a period of relative stability, when the last resettlements—which affected an estimated 70 to 80% of the whole Eastern Sámi population in the 20th century (Bogdanov 2000)—were already completed (Afanasyeva 2013:29–32; Allemann 2013:91–94, 121, 137). This time is associated with common notions like collectivity, solidarity, lack of envy and greed, and regular income—everyday life qualities that are supposed to have vanished in the liberal, post-Soviet times. In the context of Northern rural regions, where most of the Russian Sámi live, this period has been very fittingly baptized by Konstantinov (2005, 2007, 2015) as the era of sovkhoism (derived from sovkhoz (sovetskoe khoziastvo), meaning state farm). Sovkhoizm’s main characteristic is a private-in-the-collective social economy. In this system, limited private possession is allowed, which in the case of loss is informally compensated from state farm property.

This process is strictly speaking not legal, but it is not seen as morally illegitimate (Konstantinov 2015:16–17). Following Dunham (1990), Fitzpatrick (1994), Mitrany (1951), and other authors looking at the agency of “simple” people in negotiations with state power, Konstantinov (2015) sees the practice as part of an unwritten social contract and argues that the changes of the 1930s and later, in spite of their consequences, contained elements of compromise or deal and were not just ruthless imposition from above. However, such deals are tacit; they do not come into being through overt (again, “substantive”) communication. The communication between the pinnacles of power and the grassroots is not direct but reflected in the ad hoc implementation of central decrees, which came from distant power. The private-in-the-collective principle in herding, which means that losses of private reindeer would be compensated by taking animals from the much bigger collective herd, is an example for that. The phenomenon equals to a mutual absolution from responsibility, with a shared preference for security as standing higher than freedom, as understood in modern Western terms. A further implication of that arrangement, however, is potential social, economic and legal vulnerability of the individual. Should an individual displease, punishment is easy because everybody is a transgressor. These outlines of conversation between power and grassroots have been described by Konstantinov as general traits of grassroots-to-power ways of negotiation in authoritarian or mildly authoritarian regimes (Konstantinov 2015:62–65). In short, sovkhoism can be described as a view of the world reflected in practice, in which a state entity manages the total life of a community, allowing its members to maintain private domestic economies, informally at its expense” (Konstantinov 2005:173). Concerning people whose lifeworlds are situated far away from the main areas of ethnopolitical activism, Konstantinov (2005:173) speaks of a “prominence of sovkhoist nonethnic traditionalism, the persistence of sovkhoism itself as a dominant worldview and practice, and, consequently, the negative position of the majority community as regards pre-Soviet ethnic traditionalism and related resurrective projects” (see also Vitebsky 2002:187). This means that, firstly, in the sovkhoist mindset people do not so much group themselves along ethnic boundaries as it is the case in the activist mindset; secondly, “traditionalism” here means a back-to-the-Soviet-roots nostalgia. In reindeer husbandry on the Kola Peninsula, forms of sovkhoism have

a strong standing to this day. The adaptation and reinterpretation of the private-in-the-collective principle in post-Soviet times can be seen as an effective grassroots survival strategy in uncertain times (Konstantinov 2015:180–275).

In this worldview, which Konstantinov sees as the most widespread one among the Russian Sámi, the idea about an indefinite pre-Soviet Golden Age counts much less compared to what the Western discourse of sufferance suggests. What is retrospectively seen here as a Golden Age, consists largely of the mature Soviet times as a lived period of relative prosperity, or at least stability, epitomized by the main employer in rural settings, the sovkhozy. As Yurchak (2006) correctly criticizes, such views have all too often been disregarded by Western scholars by reducing them to results of indoctrination of beings without agency, within binary views of an oppressor vs. oppressed relation. However, “for great numbers of Soviet citizens, many of the fundamental values, ideals, and realities of socialism were of genuine importance” (Yurchak 2006:283). The Dark Age, in the sovkhoist view, began with the reforms of Gorbachev and more or less lasts until now (cf. Konstantinov 2015:61). For the sum of such attitudes, I shall use the term “sovkhoist worldview,” which I schematically oppose to the already introduced “activist worldview.”

Berg-Nordlie (2011:32) states that the
[Nordic] retellings of Sámi history are common enough to be considered a “national myth”—applying Kaufman and Edelman’s terminology, in which “myth” denotes not a falsehood, but a narrative that forms a part of an ethnic group’s “national mythology”: it infuses actual or imagined events with meaning, creating a “shared history” for a group of people, and hence unifies them around an historical experience.

It is exactly this mixture of the actual and the imagined that forms a pivotal point in our interpretations as oral historians. What has been mostly ignored by the Western discourse on Russian Sámi is that there does not exist one Golden Age to which more or less everybody would refer, and hence there is also no common, unifying national myth.

Thus, I have outlined one important rift in the Russian Sámi society: the one between the “activists” and the “sovkhoists.” However, I am far from claiming that these are distinct groups and that each person sticks strictly either to one or the other worldview. Even within one and the same person these two worldviews very often coexist.

Similarly to the situation among the Russian Sámi, Gallinat (2009) noticed that there is a dominating victim and survivance discourse among former GDR citizens in rather official settings, whereas in more intimate settings they might also talk about the pleasant aspects of their lives in the GDR (see Stammler et al. 2017 for a deeper analysis of this phenomenon, which they call frontstage and backstage memory). The choice of saying something in the activist or sovkhoist code—speaking in semiotic terms (cf. Eco 1976; Manning 1987)—depends on the intentions, which in their turn depend on many factors, such as the current relationship between the interlocutors or the presence or absence of other people. Many variations and fluctuations exist between these two conceptual poles, which in their “pure” form are formalized theoretical entities and serve as analytic categories. In this paper, I will use these two terms for denominating these worldviews and for people tending in this

or that situation to one or the other perspective. In order to avoid confusion, I will use the term “ethnopolitical activists” when talking about activists in the more common and direct sense of ethnopolitically active persons.

Within the Russian Sámi society, the activist-sovkhoist opposition is primordially an elite versus nonelite one. It is a vital interest of many Russian Sámi ethnopolitical activists—who in most cases are part of the intelligentsia¹¹—to engage into the Western need-and-misery discourse and use it in their agenda (for example through articles on the Norwegian online newspaper Barents Observer, like Artieva 2014). This attitude of some Sámi politicians, who are among the most well-known both in the West and at home, has only recently started to meet criticism by Western scholars such as Scheller’s multiple disapprovals

in scholarly publications (Scheller 2013), newspapers (Scheller 2011), and an open letter (Scheller 2014). However, many locals, particularly those who tend to rather sovkhoist views, often feel misrepresented by their Sámi politicians. Dismissive attitudes for the need-and-misery discourse and the ethnopolitical activists engaging in it go hand in hand: “The imported Western discourse is locally perceived to serve mainly a small number of urban-based ethnic activists,” was already noticed by Vladimirova (2006:341). The undertakings of those engaged in activism are seen mainly as a pursuit for personal material or social gain. In this sense, also the ethnopolitical activists are perceived as behaving in a sovkhoist way by applying the private-in-the-collective principle to ethnopolitical projects: from the projects of the “community,” they feel allegedly entitled to “saw off” their personal share (Konstantinov 2015:199–200). However, sovkhoist criticism of the private-in-

the-collective economy of ethnopolitical activists applies moral judgment, which it does not apply to own private-in-the-collective actions in tundra-related activities.

In this view, the use of the need-and-misery discourse by Russian Sámi ethnopoliticians—and the instrumental use of a resurrected ethnic self-identity in general (see Karaseva 2012 for a comparison of the use of resurrected ethnicity among the Komi and the Sámi in Lovozero)—can be seen as an acquired cultural capital in Bourdieu’s (2002) sense, which under given circumstances can relatively easily be converted into economic capital. As Schweitzer et al. (2015:127) put it, “identity choices can be strategic.” This negative attitude is important to mention because in interviews I met it so frequently among Russian Sámi towards some of “their” ethnopoliticians and towards Sámi activism in general. Here is one example:

A: Now listen what I’m telling you: They send money [the Nordic Sámi]. Those who take that money, they dole out a small part of it, and the rest lands in their pockets. That’s how they line their pockets.

Q: And the foreigners can’t control that?

A: No, they can’t. Our folks write some reports, put together some stories. . . . Everybody thinks about their own pocket (Interview of an elderly Sámi woman by the author, Murmansk Region, 2008).

I wish to enter two caveats here. First, by far not all ethnopolitically active Sámi people live and act in the realm of need and misery. Many see the onesidedness of such a discourse in that it fosters support from the West but obstructs a constructive dialogue with the Russian authorities. They prefer a more constructive approach of

cautious negotiations with the Russian authorities instead of conjuring a Soviet-Russian continuity of oppression and constant public blaming of the Russian authorities; as an example for such an approach could serve Iakovleva’s (2014) speech at the UN World Conference on Indigenous People. This difference between the “radicals” and “pragmatists” is a considerable line of rupture among the ethnopolitical activists. Second, despite some proven affairs of self-enrichment (cf. Overland and Berg-Nordlie 2012:96–97), the alleged opportunism is by far not always a demonstrated fact.

Independently of proof, it is relevant here as a matter of perception by others and thus a significant reason for the general lack of cohesion between parts of the ethnopolitical leadership and those who should benefit from their activities. As a rule, misdeeds of politicians stick to them much longer than their successes.

To be sure, the need-and-misery discourse in the representation of Soviet realities also plays an important role in oral history interviews. Constructing a Soviet-Russian continuity of oppression by engaging in the need-and-misery discourse serves the contemporary goals and interests of parts of the intellectual elite while pursuing their ethnopolitical agenda. The world of lament of the Sámi intellectual elite, which I describe here, has striking analogies to the dominating discourse of lament during perestroika among Muscovite

intelligentsia, as it was brilliantly described by Ries (1997). “In a period of profound social revolution, this voice was full of lamentation, alarm, cynicism, and despair,” and, citing Moshe Lewin’s “Russia/ USSR/Russia: The Drive and Drift of a Superstate,”

Ries (1997:17) adds: “The contribution of some of the media and many of the intelligentsia to a

panicky view of things is undeniable.” Continuous lamentation, posits Ries (1997:17, 120), happened at the cost of a reasonable social evaluation and reformulation.

Ries’s observations about the Russian intelligentsia can be rightfully applied to the first generation of Russian Sámi ethnocultural and ethnopolitical activists because their educational backgrounds and careers were essentially conformed to the Soviet, culturally Russified, trajectories of intellectuals (Overland and Berg-Nordlie 2012:83; Vitebsky 2002:188; Vitebsky and Wolfe 2001:85). They almost all obtained a higher education in Murmansk or Leningrad, in most cases at the Faculty of the Peoples of the North at the Herzen Institute¹² (cf. Overland and Berg-Nordlie 2012:55, 75).

The difference between the activist and sovkhoist stances, which I encountered so much in my narrative interviews, leads us to the inherent relationship between oral history and political agendas. In political struggles, oral testimony very often plays an important role. Remembrance already acquires a political dimension through

Figure 1. Image depicting one of two conceptual poles of Eastern Sámi society. Here, urbanized activists (mostly women) with higher education are shown in their roles as ethnopoliticians epitomizing the activist worldview. Figure 2. Image depicting the conceptual pole of Eastern Sámi society opposite to the one shown in Figure 1. In this photograph are rural men (in this picture Sámi and Komi herders working together) with a lower

level of education, which epitomizes the sovkhoist worldview.

the mere fact that every look at the past inevitably occurs from the standpoint of the present. In the process of politicization of oral testimonies, different social players mobilize their energies towards a given cause. Social movements, nongovernmental organizations, and of course the state apparatus, are agents of political ideas and manipulate the past in order to achieve their goals (Lorenz 2011:125–26). “Manipulate” is a strong expression, but we need to keep in mind one of the basic principles of oral history, namely that there is no one objective truth when it comes to the representation of history (Allemann 2013:17–21). Hence “manipulation” here means gaining others’ approval of an agent’s meaning-giving constructions, and thus can be explained as a process that is legitimate from the standpoint of an agent.

In the discourse of need and misery, the continuing use of generalizations not only cemented the opinions of the Western recipients of such talks. It has also shaped the tellers’ memories of the past. However, as oral historians, we are far from regarding statements in a pronounced activist or sovkhoist view as lies. “Narrated life stories are bound, at their origins, to the present time of their production. The narrator’s current life situation and his current perspective on life determine the way he reflects back on the past” (Fischer-Rosenthal and Rosenthal 1997:148–49, translated by the author). Nor is memory engraved in stone, nor is it just a static mirror of facts in the past: “Errors, inventions, and myths lead us through and beyond facts to their meanings” (Portelli 1991:156).

Over the years, the activist viewpoints have seen a popularization among the Russian Sámi from the first generation of Sámi ethnopoliticians towards a broader public, and the rift between activist and sovkhoist worldviews became an important element running through several other social fault lines dividing the Russian Sámi society: the generational, the gender, and the territorial rifts, which I shall touch upon in the following sections.

Figures 1 and 2 symbolize the two conceptual poles of Eastern Sámi society presented in this article: urbanized Sámi ethnopoliticians, predominantly women, with higher education, with

a highly visible publicly performed indigenousness, epitomizing the activist worldview versus the publicly almost-invisible rural men, grouping much less along ethnic lines but rather along common tundra-related occupational interests (in this picture Sámi and Komi herders working together), with a lower level of education, epitomizing the sovkhoist worldview.