The Social Life of the State in Subarctic Siberia (review)

In scope and content, this work is a case study of relations between the Russian "center" and non-Russian "periphery" of the Russian Empire (including its Soviet and post-Soviet incarnations) from the 1890s to the 1990s. It looks particularly for continuities and novelties in the two-way relationship between "state culture," centered in the European capital cities of St. Petersburg and Moscow, and the regional culture of the Evenki ethnic minority, scattered among the remote forests along the Podkamennaia Tunguska River—a tributary of the Yenisei River.

The book examines the center's objectives in trying to impose its values and institutions on the Evenki during the reign of three governments (Tsarist, Soviet, and Russian Federation), and it also examines the ways in which the Evenki adapted to various aspects of "state culture." Much of the book explains how Soviet state policies transformed Katonga—an uninhabited storage point in 1917—into a town by organizing the population into a "primitive production unit" (1930–1938), a "collective farm" (1938–1967), and a "state collective farm" (1967–present). The Soviet government achieved its objective of creating a stable populated town from which it could rule and through which it could distribute and collect information and material. But, while the regime sought to homogenize the Evenki, at least superficially, into "the new Soviet man," the regime's practice of using the ethnicity of a regional population as the major means of determining its relationship with the center (including establishing the boundaries and name of the administrative subdivisions of the Soviet empire) further strengthened some of the characteristics of Evenki traditional culture.

In the post-Soviet period an infusion of multinational, non-Evenki "newcomers," especially former prisoners in concentration camps and workers fleeing the resource-extracting industries that once functioned in inhospitable northern Siberia, increased the size and ethnic complexity of Katonga.

The study is based on extensive field work among the Evenki. In 1988/89, as a researcher at the Moscow Institute of Ethnography, the author lived among the Evenki with a family of fur hunters and reindeer herders. He considered the Evenki "an enclave of 'traditional lifestyles' surviving at the forest margins of the socialist state" that were "less affected by the Soviet policies of forced collectivization of the 1930s and the villagization of the 1960s" (16–17). He returned to the same area in 1993–1995, living with another family of fur hunters and reindeer herders related to his previous hosts.

The author places his observations against a vast literature that ranges from the classics in social theory through sociology, anthropology, and ethnography, some of it in specialized journals published by Russian research institutions. Particularly interesting is his use of comparative studies of center-periphery relations in other ethnically diverse states, such as Indonesia.

Although the book has its fair share of terms with specific meanings in sociology, social theory, ethnography, and anthropology, its main ideas will be clear to specialists in other branches of the social sciences. It complements other works in the rapidly expanding literature in English on Soviet policy towards Siberia. For examples, this study complements the two-volume study by James Hughes—Stalin, Siberia and the Crisis of the New Economic Policy (New York, 1991) and Stalinism in a Russian Province: A Study of Collectivization and Dekulakization in Siberia (New York, 1996)—as well as Fiona Hill and Clifford Gaddy, The Siberian Curse: How Communist Planners Left Russia Out in the Cold (Brookings, 2003).