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There are skins hanging out to dry on his izba. Inside is a great stove emanating a pleasant warmth. I gaze satisfied at my Dersu Uzala, while he while he vigorously slices up some frozen “stroganina” for us to eat raw. "I am a happy man. My life has been good. I never want for food. In summer there is fruit in the woods and in winter I can go hunting. What more should I want from life?"
He goes on to tell of the old beliefs of his people - there are now only 1,500 of them - and of shamans who spoke to the spirits, the wind and animals. He has lost count of all the bears he has killed. He has even shot at tigers, but only in self-defence. "We Udegeys respect the amba. We don't kill him. His spirit would haunt us." The Udegeys are now part of the history of trade with China, which bought their furs and ginseng, the plant of life. Of his eight sons, only two have stayed on in the taiga, the others have gone to school and live far away. "They have forgotten how to use a rifle", he sighs mournfully.
Suan-Ka is one of the last survivors of a Siberian people that is disappearing. Many other ethnic groups are suffering a similar fate: there only two thousand Ulchis left in the lower Amur valley; a hundred Orochis in Sakhalin; six hundred Yukaghirys on the River Kolyma and no more than a thousand Eskimos.
A few years ago I visited Komandorskije Ostrova, the Commander Islands, the last strip of Russian land where, with the Aleutian archipelago, Asia meets America. These islands became notorious two hundred years ago because of ruthless otary hunters after valuable furs. Historically the Commander Islands were inhabited by the Aleutians. In the early nineteenth century there were still around 25,000 of them. Today in American territory there are a dozen left, while the last pure Aleutian survivor in the Commander Islands died a few days after I had left. In these places even memories struggle to survive. One descendant gives vent to his bitterness: "It will be very difficult to revive a culture that has been suffocated for decades. Very few still know how to play music and dance the old tribal dances."
Inside the Arctic circle, to the north of Dudinka, are the Dolgans, a nomad people who live in huts mounted on ; slays covered in furs. They follow herds of reindeer, their sole resource, providing them with food, clothing, covers, bone tools and trading goods. "We are badly off" - retorts one forty-year-old woman - "We have no medicine, food, guns and ammunition. Sometimes we suffer from hunger". In this harsh world where the margin for survival is extremely slim, infant mortality is very high. With tuberculosis and the increasing death toll from the radioactivity caused by nuclear experiments in Novaya Zemlya, the average life-expectancy is as low as 45. The population has always lived in harmony with the desolate wastes of the tundra. The people have to move to find food for their reindeer. Decisions taken in Moscow, too far away to understand the real problems, have ruined their life.
One man angrily comments: "Our sons were forced to go away to school and only spend two months a year with us. They no longer know how to move about the tundra and they come back against their will from cities where
they feel outcasts. We are alone. No-one helps us and we are in danger of disappearing."
On my travels round Russia I have stopped several times in Yakutiya, an area ten times Italy with many ethnic minorities. The biggest group is the Yakuts who have lived in the Lena valley for a thousand years, after having come from further south, especially the Lake Baikal area. Another wave of immigrants arrived in 1300 to escape the Golden Horde of Genghis Khan.
The Yakuts have Asiatic traits, long faces and narrow noses. Although some also have a Baikal physiognomy: a broad face, squashed nose and prominent cheekbones. Their main occupation was once rearing Yakut horses. Those who still live by herding and farming live in the sovkhoz, while others go to work in factories, or mines against their will. The Yakuts have intellectual interests and enjoy studying, which means they can readily assume positions occupied until recently by Russians. The Evenki, a nomad people by vocation, often sought to flee from the Russians, who imposed taxes, and from the Yakuts, who invaded their hunting territories. Their beliefs were handed down orally since they had no writing system of their own. Until Sovietization the very influential shamans were the reference points for both the animistic religion and medicine.
Unlike the Yakuts, the Evenki did not embrace the Orthodox religion when it spread in the nineteenth century. Reindeer herders, excellent hunters and fine craftsmen, they only took up farming comparatively recently. Now where the authorities have abolished nomadism, they grow oats, barley and potatoes, which are compatible with the severe climate. They are peace-loving, tolerant and generous. The Evens, another Tunguso-Manchurian race, are gradually being absorbed in the settlement of Siberia by larger groups. The only people to survive this phenomenon are those who herd reindeer since, because of the migratory needs of the animals, they cannot settle in one spot.
Recently the Nivkhi writer Vladimir Sanghi warned: "Our culture has been violated, our economic system destroyed. For some time the mortality rate has been much higher than the average for the country. Collectivization and new technology, which have taken root everywhere, have improved living standards, but as often happens in such cases, progress has had a number of repercussions. It has been imposed violently and has brought irreparable damage. The sons of nomads have abandoned their traditions and their identity. They have no future."
To see the primitive peoples of Russia, I had come to the furthest reaches of the world. Leaving behind Pietropavlovsk, the chief town of the Kamchatka peninsula, I travelled first by plane, then helicopter and lastly by boat to reach Pakhachi, a God-forsaken wooden village where the roads are raised on planks because of the spring sludge and winter snows.
The river abounds in salmonid fish, and men and women often go fishing together. When they return ashore there is a great bustle to extract the precious red caviar and cut the fish in filets to be dried in the wind. Along with the ancient inhabitants, the Koryaks, are many Russians. The two peoples live in the solidarity born out of sharing adverse living conditions. "Our demands are of a social and economic nature. We want the rights to the land we have lived in for centuries, to its resources, hunting and fishing. We want help in reviving our national traditions and culture, which the Communist state suppressed. We want the study of Koryak in compulsory schools and we want papers and books in our language. We have had enough of the disastrous settlement of the pioneers who came from the West. Their industrial efforts have left ever-growing environmental pollution. All of us must act like family fathers. Nobody can only think about his or her daily gains. We must also protect the natural heritage for the future generations."
The regional authorities seem to understand, they listen and admit that the demands are just But things don't change. In the unbounded spaces of northernmost Russia, Siberia and the ex-Soviet Far East, 180,000 people belong to 26 different ethnic groups. They are often forced to leave the old world to become part of a civilization that cramps them.
In the company of the writer Victor Astafiev, who has been charting the gradual changes in Siberia, after almost two-hours' helicopter-ride from Norilsk, we reach Ust-Avam, the chief town of the Nganasans, which now only number a thousand in the whole of the Taymyr peninsula. After years of searching of I meet what may be the last shaman. Dielsumiako Kosterokin is a small fifty-year old man. He is preparing for an ancient rite that has been handed down for centuries. He wears vestments that once were his father's, draped with many metal objects. He makes an endless repetitive long chant accompanied by the rhythmic beating of a drum. Three men and two women dressed in old leather costumes with red and black hems echo a reply. In a state of trance the shaman enters into contact with the spirits. My scepticism breaks on a living reality that takes me back to an age I have never experienced. The old people in the village call him to treat their illnesses and listen to his advice on when is the best time to go hunting. Understandably, in our space age the younger people no longer believe in such things. For over seventy years the state preached atheism and brutally repressed shamanism even with the physical elimination of the shamans, who were hunted like animals. My friend Astafiev is also bitterly disappointed, he simply says.- "tradition is like a flower. Untended it dies or grows wild. It must always be cultivated." Evening comes. The summer sun goes down much slower in polar regions after the long night of winter. The purga, the blizzard that whitened and froze us, has now died down. The helicopter comes back to take us away. I leave behind the deserted tundra, the perennial ice and tremendous loneliness of a world where time seems to have stopped.
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