: The first Soviet Government included a
. gy S Commissariat of Nationalities Af-
7: 4 special body to enforce govern-
Ment policy.

In the North it was particularly diffi-
Ries: to carry out that policy. This was a
ing area, thousands of miles from the big
et! and cultural centers of the coun-
AY. More important, the Northern peoples’
.°V Of life and the remnants of tribalism

brit, be taken into account and dealt

The Baikal-Amur railroad on ‘its way
) “cross Siberia.
0 A Yakut (right), Siberian by birth, and a
Ussian, Siberian by adoption, both elec-
5] ttic welders, met and became good

" fiends while working on a gas pipeline.
_) leading dancer of the professional Kor-
P| Yak ensemble wears the national dress of
Kamchatka fashionable 50 years ago.
4) Yivnogorsk, on the Yenisei River, develop-
| *d with the construction of the Krasno-
h Yarsk hydroelectric project.
A carved wood panel in a Divnogorsk
i}, '@staurant.
| ‘new natural gas well on the Varanche-
o San River.

“t and photes from Soviet Life

RUD MAGAZINE

PN

One of the important principles of the
national policy was to accelerate indus-
trial development in the backward outlying
areas by establishing centers of industry
that relied, as much as was possible, on
local sources of labor.

Immediate economic problems were not
slighted in the long-term planning. One of
the many urgent problems was to free the
local population from the grip of the mer-
chants, who, before the Revolution, had
brazenly robbed local hunters by paying a

4

ROS TE REE HR DE TY

fraction of the value of pelts in exchange
for needed goods.

In the early Soviet years a network of
state trading stations was set up, with fixed
prices for pelts and goods. The poor were
helped by loans granted on easy terms. In
the North such loans totaled 300,000 rubles
in 1926 and rose to 800,000 in 1927.

Without question the poor were helped
by state loans and fair terms of trade. Nev-
ertheless, the scattered nomadic house-
holds could barely make ends meet. An old
Tungus proverb said: ‘‘He who owns a rein-

. deer is-master of the taiga.’’ Three-quar-

ters of the reindeer belonged to a few nem-
bers of the tribal elite.

Only cooperative labor free of exploita-
tion could bring prosperity to a majority of
the indigenous peoples of the North.

In those years mass collectivization
started in many regions of the country.
Peasant households joined collective farms
that owned their means of production in
common. The great help given by the state
to the new farms soon enabled them to
stand on their own feet.

In the North collectivization proceeded
more slowly because of the backwardness
of the small nations and the survivals of
tribalism; it was completed by 1940. By
that time also, a majority of the local
population had made the transition from a
nomadic to a settled way of life.

Reindeer breeding, hunting and fishing
on a cooperative basis multiplied farm in-
come threefold in the five short years from
1935 to 1940..

A general meeting of the Evenks of one
of the most remote areas of the Far North
sent a letter to the Territorial Soviet of
Working People’s Deputies at Krasnoy-
arsk. It said: ‘‘We all want a town built at
the mouth of the Tura River. Soil on the
Tura shore is good. The road there is
straight, we can get there fast. We will be
glad to have this town. It will make things
easier for us. We need a hospital to cure
the sick. We need a school where our
children can study. Let them study as long
as they need to.”

The Evenks had in mind a cultural and
educational center, the kind which in the
1920s was being opened in large numbers in
the most remote and least populated areas
of the North.

The Tura center requested in the letter
did open in 1927. It had a boarding school,
a veterinary station with a bacteriological
laboratory, a general hospital, a TB dis-
pensary, a house of culture’ and Russian
baths with a laundry. Such centers were
the bases of the cultural revolution in the
Northern areas of Siberia. This revolution
encountered tremendous difficulties. In-
deed, in 1922 there were only three pri-
mary schools and five teachers in the entire
Yenisei Northern area. And among the

pupils there were only six native children.

Most of the indigenous people were
nomads, so that their children could not go
to a regular school. Priority was therefore
giver to boarding schools, where children
whose parents lived as far as 125 to 200
miles away spent the entire year, their
maintenance paid for by the state. Sixty-
two boarding schools were opened in the
remote areas between 1922 and 1930. By
that time over 3,000 native children were
attending schools in the territory.

’ By 1940 all the children of the. indigen-
ous population of the North who were of

primary grade age were in school. Com-
pulsory seven-year schooling was then in-
troduced.

Another important problem was solved:
The small nations of the North for the first
time acquired a written language, the pro-
duct of many years of work by a large
group of Soviet scholars. The first primer
for the Northern people was published in
1927. It was followed by several textbooks
in the native languages of the North. In
1937,*23 textbooks were published (circula-

tion about 65,000) in the Even, Khanty,
Chukshi, Nenets and Evenk languages. The
written language brought to life a national
literature and made world culture acces-
sible to the local peoples.

The Moscow newspaper Izvestia wrote
in 1929: ‘“‘Even now we have every reason
to state that the extinction of the native
population of the North, about which pro-
gressive researchers wrote so much before
the Revolution, has been halted by the to-
tality of Soviet measures to improve the
economy, social system and health ser-
vices of the indigenous population.”

What is the situation now? Not only is
there a halt to extinction; our census fi-
gures show a numerical growth of the
Northern peoples.

During Soviet times the region has be-

.come an economic area, with large-scale

mining (in Norilsk, a town of almost
200,000 residents, and big mines in other
parts of the territory), woodworking indus-
try (its center is the port town of Igarka),
gas production (the Messoyakha-Norilsk
gas pipeline, the northernmost in the world,
was completed six years ago) and power
production (the Talnakh: thermal electric
station and the Khantayka hydroelectric
station). Construction will soon start on the
Lower Tunguska, Osinovskaya and Igarka
hydroelectric stations.

Progress has been made in the tradi-
tional branches — reindeer breeding, the
fur trade and fishing — and in a new and
promising one — fur farming. Today the
people of the area are as well off as those
in the central regions of the country.

All children in the Northern nations get
at least eight years of schooling. Here, as
everywhere else in the country, universal
10-year education is being introduced. Over
1,000 teachers work in the schools of the
Taimyr and Evenk National Areas alone;
more than 200 are native-born.

There are houses of culture, village cul-
tural centers, libraries and houses of folk
arts everywhere.

To find teachers, writers, composers or
artists among any of the small Northern
peoples is no longer a rarity.

That is life today in the Yenisei North-
ern regions, once the ‘‘God-forsaken Turuk-
hanka”’ of czarist Russia.

PACIFIC TRIBUNE — JULY 30, 1976—Page 5