Piers Vitebsky is Head of Anthropology and Russian North- ern Studies at the Scott Polar Research Institute, an appealing Cambridge institution whose lecture halls are hung with polar bear skins and whose staff and students are summoned to tea and biscuits every morning by the ship’s bell of the Terra Nova. Part memoir, part social study, his book is a warm and lucid tribute to the Eveny, a 17,000-strong reindeer-herding people from the far north-east of Siberia. Vitebsky has been visiting them since 1988, and thus witnessed the tail-end of the old Soviet system for dealing with the Siberian minorities and its replacement, amidst the chaos of the Nineties, with free enterprise and an embryonic native-rights movement.
Communism turned the Eveny, like most other indigenous Siberians, from self-sufficient nomads into state-subsidised ranchers, tied to new-built villages initially by threat of force and later by jobs as government clerks or meatpackers, and by the requirement that their children attend school. Until glasnost, the official line was that they flourished under this regime, enjoying ever-rising living standards and content to see their national cultures reduced to occasional pasteurised, Party-approved folk festivals.
Reality, as Vitebsky relates via his account of fieldwork with herding brigades attached to a mountain-girt village 250 miles north of the regional capital of Yakutsk, was rather different. Detached from their increasingly urbanised wives and children, many herders led lonely lives, releasing their frustration in bouts of drinking and fighting. ‘Atrocity stories’ about native schools were a conversational staple; friends remembered being put to work pulling logs between lessons, and being punished by being forced to crawl through snow wearing only pyjamas. Economically, too, the system was a nonsense, dependent on under-costed aviation and reindeer numbers so huge that they destroyed winter lichen pastures.
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