Title Arctic Mirrors : Russia and the Small Peoples of the North

Published Ithaca : Cornell University Press, 2016

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Description 1 online resource (475 pages) Series ACLS Fellows' publications ACLS Humanities E-Book Contents ARCTIC MIRRORS; Contents; Preface; Sources and Abbreviations; Introduction: The Small Peoples of the North; PART I. SUBJECTS OF THE TSAR; CHAPTER 1. The Unbaptized; The Sovereign's Profit; The Sovereign's Foreigners; CHAPTER 2. The Unenlightened ; The State and the Savages; The State and the Tribute Payers; CHAPTER 3. The Uncorrupted ; High Culture and the Children of Nature; The Empire and the Aliens; PART II. SUBJECTS OF CONCERN; CHAPTER 4. The Oppressed; Aliens as Neighbors and Tribute Payers as Debtors; The Russian Indians and the Populist Intellectuals; CHAPTER 5. The Liberated The Commissariat of Nationalities and the Tribes of the Northern BorderlandsThe Committee of the North: The Committee ; The Committee of the North: The North ; PART III. CONQUERORS OF BACKWARDNESS; CHAPTER 6. The Conscious Collectivists; Class Struggles in a Classless Society; Hunting and Gathering under Socialism; CHAPTER 7. The Cultural Revolutionaries; The War against Backwardness; The War against Ethnography; CHAPTER 8. The Uncertain Proletarians; The Native Northerners as Industrial Laborers; The North without the Native Northerners; The Long Journey of the Small Peoples PART IV. LAST AMONG EQUALSCHAPTER 9. The Socialist Nationalities ; Socialist Realism in the Social Sciences; Fiction as History; CHAPTER 10. The Endangered Species; Planners' Problems and Scholars' Scruples; The Return of Dersu Uzala; Perestroika and the Numerically Small Peoples of the North; Conclusion; Bibliography; Index Summary For over five hundred years the Russians wondered what kind of people their Arctic and sub-Arctic subjects were. "They have mouths between their shoulders and eyes in their chests," reported a fifteenth-century tale. "They rove around, live of their own free will, and beat the Russian people," complained a seventeenth-century Cossack. "Their actions are exceedingly rude. They do not take off their hats and do not bow to each other," huffed an eighteenth-century scholar. They are "children of nature" and "guardians of ecological balance," rhapsodized early nineteenth-century and late twentieth-century romantics. Even the Bolsheviks, who categorized the circumpolar foragers as "authentic proletarians," were repeatedly puzzled by the "peoples from the late Neolithic period who, by virtue of their extreme backwardness, cannot keep up either economically or culturally with the furious speed of the emerging socialist society." Whether described as brutes, aliens, or endangered Indigenous populations, the so-called small peoples of the north have consistently remained a point of contrast for speculations on Russian identity and a convenient testing ground for policies and images that grew out of these speculations. In Arctic Mirrors, a vividly rendered history of circumpolar peoples in the Russian empire and the Russian mind, Yuri Slezkine offers the first in-depth interpretation of this relationship. No other book in any language links the history of a colonized non-Russian people to the full sweep of Russian intellectual and cultural history. Enhancing his account with vintage prints and photographs, Slezkine reenacts the procession of Russian fur traders, missionaries, tsarist bureaucrats, radical intellectuals, professional ethnographers, and commissars who struggled to reform and conceptualize this most "alien" of their subject populations. Slezkine reconstructs from a vast range of sources the successive official policies and prevailing attitudes toward the northern peoples, interweaving the resonant narratives of Russian and Indigenous contemporaries with the extravagant images of popular Russian fiction. As he examines the many ironies and ambivalences involved in successive Russian attempts to overcome northern--and hence their own--otherness, Slezkine explores the wider issues of ethnic identity, cultural change, nationalist rhetoric, and not-so European colonialism Bibliography Includes bibliographical references and index Notes English Print version record Subject Arctic peoples -- Russia, Northern Indigenous peoples -- Russia, Northern HISTORY -- Europe -- Eastern. HISTORY -- Europe -- Former Soviet Republics. HISTORY -- Europe -- Russia & the Former Soviet Union. HISTORY / Europe / Russia & the Former Soviet Union Arctic peoples Indigenous peoples SUBJECT Russia, Northern -- History -- 20th century Subject Northern Russia Genre/Form History Form Electronic book ISBN 9781501703317 1501703315 1501703307 9781501703300

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