The Chukchi: a people who would not submit

Alexander Dolinin, author of Against Destiny

(print ISBN 9781601641731, Adobe ebook ISBN 9781601643261, Kindle ISBN 9781601643278, Sony ISBN 9781601643285)

The colonization of Siberia and North America followed roughly the same pattern: the European settlers built for themselves a better, freer and more prosperous life at the expense of the subjugated aboriginals, who were territorially as well as culturally displaced. There was however one Siberian aboriginal nationality that was not subjugated and fully incorporated into Russia until well into the 20th century: the Chukchi.

This small nationality, which historically numbered between 8,000 and 15,000 people, inhabits the extreme north-east of Siberia, roughly from the lower Kolyma river in the west to the Bering Strait in the east and from the Arctic coast in the north to the Anadyr River valley in the south. The Chukchi belong to the so-called Paleoasiatic peoples, the most ancient population of north Asia, to which probably the ancestors of American natives also belong. In appearance too, the Chukchi resemble North American Indians more than people of Mongolian or Chinese stock. By the time the Russians came, they lived, like most other north Siberian aboriginals, by raising reindeer herds, each of which numbered many hundreds or even thousands of deer.

From the mid-17th century to modern times, the Russians failed to subdue the Chukchi. By using tactics from both conventional and guerilla warfare and by taking advantage of their superior knowledge of their rugged land, they defeated many Russian government units and settlers’ militias. Like the Prairie Indians of the American West, they bothered Russian settlers with raids. Catherine the Great of Russia even signed a decree authorising their total extermination. She sent a military expedition, headed by Major Pavlutsky, remembered in Chukchi folklore as the most cruel of the Russian officers who fought them. Like its predecessors, the Pavlutsky expedition was beaten, and Pavlutsky perished; according to Chukchi narratives, he was captured and brutally executed. The genocidal order of the empress was never implemented, because of the vastness of the mountains, tundra and woodlands, which provided shelter not only to small guerrilla groups but even to whole tribes, and because of the Chukchi’s acquisition of fire-arms, probably from European traders via the North Pacific.

By the beginning of the 19th century, the Russian imperial government was finally forced to make peace with the recalcitrant people. It recognized their independence, and until the very end of the imperial period they, unlike other Siberian aboriginals, did not pay tribute to the imperial treasury and lived by their millennia-old customary laws. In return, Russians got the right to trade and build settlements in Chukotka. This situation persisted not only until the 1917 revolution, but for more than a decade after it. During the Russian civil war (1917-1923), some units of Whites from time to time came to Chukotka and tried to plunder Chukchi, but were repulsed. The Red Army units that arrived later in this period also did not interfere with the traditional Chukchi lifestyle and customary law.

Drastic change came only in the early 1930s with the start of collectivization. The Siberian Soviet authorities successfully imposed collective farms and the Soviet system in general on the previously fiercely independent people. For the first time in history, they could not resist the conquerors. Unlike Russian forces of earlier periods, these invaders were armed with machine guns, armoured vehicles and a few air squadrons. From the 1930s on, the Chukchi shared the fate of other rural Soviet people, Russian and non-Russian alike: forced collectivization, internal exile or labour camps for many, execution of others (particularly all shamans), work on Soviet construction projects. Their children, like many native children in Canada, were forcibly sent to boarding schools, with similar widespread abuse by school authorities. However, a few graduates of these boarding schools rose to prominent positions in Soviet society. The best known is the famous writer Yuri Rytkheu, whose writings are widely read throughout the former USSR and have been translated into European languages.

In the post-Soviet Russia of the 2000s, Chukotka, the most remote region of this country, paradoxically became, under the governorship of the ex-business magnate Roman Abramovich, one of its most prosperous regions, comparable to Moscow and the oil-rich regions of Western Siberia. This prosperity resulted from the successful management of the businessman-governor, who skilfully ran the regional economy and who used his government connections to negotiate a share of profits for the region from its mineral resources. Thus the ancient aboriginal people now enjoy a level of prosperity unknown in any previous period, whether pre-contact, imperial or Soviet.