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

Acknowledgments

This paper is dedicated to the memory of my dear uncle, Bernardo Ghionda. I am grateful to Julie Cruikshank, Yulian Konstantinov, Florian Stammler, Karina Lukin, Stephan Dudeck, Cristina Allemann-Ghionda, and the two anonymous reviewers for commenting on earlier

drafts. I am grateful to the Academy of Finland and the University of Lapland for the funding of this research.

Endnotes

1. 
   This paper is part of a series of publications focusing on Arctic Oral History. The series is one outcome of the Finnish Academy Project ORHELIA (Oral History of Empires by Elders in the Arctic), decision number 251111. Papers in this series will be subsequently published in this journal.
   
2. 
   In this paper the term of Russian Lapland is chosen for designating the traditional living area of the Eastern Sámi. Unlike the majority of texts about Sámi people in Russia, I avoid using the term Kola Peninsula when speaking about their traditional living area. Geographically, the Kola Peninsula is only the larger eastern part of what we call today the Murmansk Region, which is a political entity of the Russian Federation and largely corresponds to the terminus Russian Lapland as it was predominantly used in prerevolutionary ethnographic literature (cf. Took 2004:xi). I therefore also avoid saying Kola Sámi and use Russian or Eastern Sámi instead.
   
3. 
   In this paper, I will discuss a Western or Nordic discourse about the Russian Sámi and, in this context, use “Western” or “Nordic” in a synonymous way. With these terms, I refer less to the provenience of the persons engaging into this discourse but to a conceptual framework that I will outline in this paper.
   
4. 
   According to the all-Russian census of 2010, there were 1771 Sámi in Russia, of which 1599 lived in the Murmansk Region. Of these 1599 people, 947 were living in rural areas (which includes 873 in the Lovozero District) and 652 in urban areas (Itogi vserossiiskoi perepisi naseleniia 2010 goda. 19. Razmeshchenie naseleniia korennykh malochislennykh narodov rossiiskoi federatsii. 2010:2115; Obshchaia informatsiia o korennykh malochislennykh narodakh severa: chislennost‘ n.d.)
   
5. 
   Siyt: settlement area/common land of a Sámi community (settlement, grazing, hunting and fishing grounds and places of worship). The siyt was the original settlement and living form in the pre-Soviet Sámi social system. Known in Russian as pogost.
   
6. 
   For the sake of anonymization, no more exact references are given for this and all following quotations from interviews taken by the author of this paper. Due to the numeric smallness of the group of people discussed in this article, even the indication of the place of residence, age, or sex of the interviewee could lead to identification.
   
7. 
   From a conversation with the Sámi language lecturer and researcher on Eastern Sámi Leif Rantala, November 2013.
   
8. 
   It is noteworthy that also the paternalistic Russian and Soviet policies towards their Northern indigenous peoples have a considerable need-and-misery dimension with a century-long history. However, in the case of the Russian Sámi, it was the Nordic discourse that started seeing the Soviet power on the oppressor and not on the liberator side of this discourse.
   
9. 
   Sápmi means Lapland in North Sámi language.
   
10. 
    In 1989, a similar but longer and more substantial article was printed in the Moscow-based, countrywide newspaper Trud (Galenkin and Kovalenko 1989). Interestingly enough, this article, which was never translated into a Western language but had a potentially big outreach throughout the Soviet Union, is referred to almost nowhere. It did not in any way trigger a discourse on Sámi people within Russia that could even come close to the content and extent of the Nordic need-and-misery discourse on the Russian Sámi. Obviously, the reason is that the recipients of this article, Soviet citizens, did not have a self-image that they could fittingly transfer to the Russian Sámi, nor did they have any special attachment
    

to the Sámi as an ethnic group, nor did they have a lack of knowledge about Soviet reality. On the contrary, the reaction of an average reader to all the complaints about the Russian Sámi’s social evils might be one that I have often heard in conversations with ethnic Russians, Ukrainians and other Soviet-time settlers to the North: “So what? We all have had more than enough problems in Soviet times.” An appropriate reply to this rhetoric question was given by Vitebsky (2002:188). He suggests that “that violence [towards indigenous people of the North] should be understood in a broader sense, to include violence as desecration and denial of identity and racial value. For indigenous peoples whose territory was controlled by an ideology which was initially alien, this is something additional to the many sufferings that many Russians had to endure under the Soviet regime.”

11. 
    Without going into the details about the specific genesis of the Russian and Soviet intelligentsia, this succinct definition of intelligentsia shall be enough here: “[Intelligentsia] refers to people with higher education and is in essence synonymous with ‘academics’ or ‘intellectuals.’ It is also used self-referentially, . . . often invoking a special role and duty in society” (Overland and Berg-Nordlie 2012:92).
    
12. 
    Leningradskii gosudarstvennyi pedagogicheskii institut imeni A.I. Gertsena (Leningrad State Pedagogical Institute named after A.I. Gertsen [Herzen], today named: Russian State Pedagogical University named after A.I. Gertsen [Herzen]).
    

13. 
    One of the more recent examples is Afanasyeva’s (2013) Master’s thesis, which was completed at the Centre for Sámi studies at the University of Tromsø. While the thesis has doubtlessly many merits, such as an overview
    

of all relocations of Sámi people during the 20th century, the author throughout her work speaks of a “community” when describing the forcible resettlements of Sámi people from different settlements during Soviet times.

14. 
    In the largely Russianized curriculum, the tuition of indigenous languages as a foreign language was supposed to be the only subject specific to the cultures of provenience of the students. However, according to one interlocutor, at the Herzen Institute, Sámi language was, at times, taught poorly or not at all due to a lack of qualified teachers.
    
15. 
    Here, the word “culture” has to be understood with all its specifically Soviet connotations, as was meticulously described by Anderson (1996). Kul’tura means in fact more than culture; it means civilization. The author describes how he was often warned by benevolent advisors about the low level of kul’tura he was going to meet in the remote destinations of his planned fieldwork. This warning was concerning not so much boredom, but rather the lack of infrastructure. As evidence, Anderson mentions the Soviet late 1950s campaign to develop the infrastructure in the Siberian North, which bore the name “Measures to develop the economy and the culture of the peoples of
    

the North.” In official talk, a high level of culture in a village meant it had a bakery, central heating, a public bath, a club, a library, or a similar establishment.

16. 
    Before the immigration of Komi and Nenets people to the Kola Peninsula since 1888, Lovozero had a purely Sámi population (101 people in 1871). In 1926, after the immigration of a considerable Komi and Nenets population but before any relocations were conducted by the state, Lovozero had 436 Komi, 205 Sámi, 70 Nenets and 36 “other” inhabitants. In 1989, these numbers were 948, 1,246, 113, and 1,305 respectively (all numbers from Lovozero, Lujavv‘rsyiit 2013).
    
17. 
    Rethmann’s (2001) case study about a settlement in Northern Kamchatka at the other end of Russia, where the local population had to cope with an astonishingly similar mixing up of communities, shows in an exemplary way how decisions taken far away in a capital could affect entirely different regions in a similar way (see especially p. 36).
    
18. 
    Two other remarkable examples of the need-and-misery discourse in Western contributions on the Eastern Sámi are: Sarv (1996) who in a rather sweeping culprit–victim setting, among other things, asserts that children in boarding schools “were force fed Russian food” (136); and the documentary film “The Tundra Tale” (Harder 2013), which ignores the significant Komi-Sámi ethnic mix in the portrayed village and cements a somewhat paternalistic view of the wealthy Nordic Sámi who give a helping hand to the supplicating Russian Sámi.