The Socialist Way of Life in Siberia: Transformation in Buryatia

Conclusion

Conclusion While conducting research in Buryatia, I spent many days in the Dissertation Room at Buryat State University when the National Archives of the Republic of Buryatia, the National Library, and the library at the Buryat Scientific Center were closed. My time in the Dissertation Room (where a poster on the wall menacingly asked “Are YOU writing your dissertation?”) revealed much about scholarship in the post-Soviet period that sought to understand both the contemporary and historical identity of the Buryat people. The research projects housed there showed how local graduate students at Buryat State University and other regional institutions were conducting studies that examined this question in a variety of ways. The collection illustrated the emerging trajectory of research on Buryatia. Some dissertations carried out elaborate surveys that sought to gauge the actual usage of the Buryat language or to uncover Buryat attitudes toward citizenship in the Russian Federation .1 Others had undertaken projects to evaluate and analyze demographic statistics, as well as examine such topics as the history of rural education in Soviet Buryatia.2 Many of these studies were begging the question in different ways, who are the Buryat people? The Buryats have certainly not been the only ones to ask questions about identity nor did this kind of questioning occur only in 1 See, for example, Tsydypzhapovna, “Izmeneniia traditsionnykh”; R. V. Bukhaeva , “Etnokul’turnaia marginal’nost’ v usloviiakh modernizatsii” (PhD diss., Irkutskskii gosudarstvennyi universitet, 2003). 2 See, for example, Afans’eva, “Osobennosti sotioal’no-demograficheskikh”; Bocheev, “Osobennosti protsessa.” 262 The Socialist Way of Life in Siberia the post-Soviet period. Soviet modernization produced identity confusion and transformation for people across the Soviet Union throughout its history. However, this process was particularly acute among the indigenous Siberians whose small numbers have meant greater threats to their cultural preservation. In addition, Soviet authorities viewed Siberians as especially backward and primitive and therefore took great lengths at attempting to alter their societies and discredit their pasts. Officials believed that Siberians needed to rapidly modernize, a process that they argued would bring people like the Buryats, out of their “dark and smoky yurts” to catch up with and integrate into a rapidly industrializing, modern Soviet world.3 Soviet scholars, as the politics of the time demarked, presented this leap to modernity among indigenous Siberians as a great evolutionary process from a negative past to a positive present and future . While their conclusions may have been tainted by ideology, they were not incorrect in their observations that society was quickly changing. The Soviet scholar, Vladimir I. Zateev, whose research examines urbanization, industrialization, and social mobility among the Buryats, argued that the Buryats had become a developed socialist nation by the 1970s because Soviet policies and institutions had “intensely internationalized” (i.e., made more panSoviet and thus more modern) their everyday lives.4 His conclusions were not off base. At the same time, however, Soviet researchers and officials were restricted in how they analyzed modernization , as well as deciphered unofficial behavior. For example, scholars and officials alike were encouraged to interpret religious practices, which were conducted by some in Buryatia throughout the entire Soviet period, as unfitting of a modern, socialist state. Western and/or post-Soviet scholars, exempt from Soviet ideological constraints, have made their own attempts to analyze the existence of both Soviet and non-Soviet influences in society. After conducting fieldwork on Buryat collective farms in the 1960s and 1970s, Caroline Humphrey concluded that Soviet ideology had not 3 See, for example, Grant, In the Soviet House of Culture and Slezkine, Arctic Mirrors. The quote comes from Zateev, Natsional’nye otnosheniia, 98. 4 Zateev, Dialektika natsional’nykh, 152. Conclusion 263 simply replaced Buddhist and shamanist beliefs or general folk customs. Instead, she argued that there existed in society a “complex cross-cutting of ideas” that allowed people to merge different belief sets.5 She also explained that while the collective farm worked as a tool of integration into Soviet society, older traditions continued to exist and a clear Buryatness remained. Other scholars have also noted complex identities among indigenous Siberians in the Soviet Union. David and Alice Bartels claimed that economic and social development created a process that combined sovietization and ethnic and national consolidation among northern Siberians .6 Bruce M. Grant, who examined the Nivkhi through the course of the collapse of the USSR, contended that various Soviet policies were essentially state campaigns to invent and...