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Russia’s Colonial Legacy in the Sakha Heartland

A former Russian diamond mine in Mirny, Yakutia. Photo: Staselnik

Indigenous peoples have inhabited the Arctic since time immemorial, establishing rich regional cultures and governance systems long before the introduction of modern borders. The Arctic Institute’s 2022 Colonialism Series explores the colonial histories of Arctic nations and the still-evolving relationships between settler governments and Arctic Indigenous peoples in a time of renewed Arctic exploration and development.

The Arctic Institute Colonialism Series 2022

• The Arctic Institute Colonialism Series 2022: Introduction
• Neo-Colonial Security Policies in the Arctic
• Brussels Looks North: The European Union’s Latest Arctic Policy and the Potential for ‘Green’ Colonialism
• Poverty, Well-Being and Climate Change in the Arctic: a Musical Perspective
• Colonialism and Reproductive Justice in Arctic Canada: The Neglected Historical and Contemporary Analysis of Genocidal Policies on Arctic Indigeneous Reproductive Rights
• The Delicate Work still undone in the Church of Sweden’s Reconciliation Process
• Selling Stolen Land: A Reexamination of the Purchase of Alaska and its Legacy of Colonialism
• The Old Colonialisms and the New Ones: The Arctic Resource Boom as a New Wave of Settler-Colonialism
• China, Circumpolar Indigenous People and the Colonial Past of the Arctic
• Language, Identity, and Statehood: A Brief Insight into the History of the Minoritization of the Komi People
• Russia’s Colonial Legacy in the Sakha Heartland
• How to Develop Inclusive, Sustainable Urban Spaces in the European Arctic and Beyond – Insights from Kiruna
• The Arctic Institute Colonialism Series 2022: Conclusion

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Russia is often sidelined in discussions of colonialism in the Arctic, most often due to a lack of linguistic and/or physical access. However, Russia also has a colonial legacy, with many parallels to colonialism in other Arctic contexts, for which it deserves to be included in the conversation. Since the sixteenth century, the Russian state has been trying to secure a(n ethnically) Russian presence across the Eurasian landmass. The first period of expansion occurred during the Russian Empire¹⁾While it can be argued that the Russian Empire did not begin until the seventeenth century, I chose to designate the sixteenth as the beginning of the imperial era because that was when Ivan the Terrible launched expansionist endeavors across the continent. as an imperialist colonialist endeavor.²⁾See, for example, Silva P A M (2022) The Old Colonialisms and the New Ones: The Arctic Resource Boom as a New Wave of Settler-Colonialism. The Arctic Institute, 25 October, https://www.thearcticinstitute.org/old-colonialisms-new-ones-arctic-resource-boom-new-wave-settler-colonialism/. Accessed on 12 November 22 The second period occurred during the Soviet era. The central leadership began a new wave of colonialism within the borders of the USSR, in the form of internal colonization. This wave of colonization had a variety of different names: “collectivization,” the “involuntary resettlement” of prisoners to gulag camps, Stalin’s “population transfer” of non-ethnic Russian groups near borderlands and repopulation of those areas with “loyal” ethnic Russians,³⁾Polian P (2004) Against Their Will. Budapest: Central European University Press and the “Northern Benefits” voluntary resettlement programs.⁴⁾Reisser C (2017) Russia’s Arctic Cities in Sustaining Russia’s Arctic Cities. New York: Berghahn, 1-22

This article illustrates how the Russian state’s colonization campaigns manifested toward one specific ethnic group, the Sakha, in one specific place – Yakutia/YASSR.⁵⁾The Sakha ancestral homeland has been called different names throughout history. Here, references are based on the official name at the time period under discussion. For the imperial era, it is Yakutia. For the Soviet period, it is the Yakut Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic (YASSR). “Sakha” refers to the ethnic group. Although the Sakha and Yakutian experience of colonialism is not unique compared to others colonized by the Russian state, it has attracted less attention. Most scholarship about Russian colonialism has been centered on former Imperial/Soviet regions that are now independent countries.⁶⁾See, for example Annus E (2012) The Problem of Soviet Colonialism in the Baltics. 43(1) Journal of Baltic Studies: 21-45; Loring B (2014) Colonizers with Party Cards. 15(1) Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History: 77-102 Rarely is the concept of colonialism applied to areas and peoples that were subjugated to the Russian state during the imperial and Soviet eras and which remain within the present-day Russian Federation. This article seeks to fill that gap.

Colonialism

History schoolbooks tend to portray colonization as a nation’s organic expansion, due to places becoming crowded and people needing more room to live.⁷⁾For Russia, see Gibatdinov M (2014) Post-Soviet or Post-Colonial History in Contemporary Russian History Textbooks? 35 International Society for History Didactics Yearbook 35: 193-205 In actuality, colonization is an intentionally designed state-based practice that is enabled by a colonialist mentality. There are at least five fundamental elements of a colonial project.⁸⁾Khomyakov M (2020) Russia: Colonial, anticolonial, postcolonial Empire? 59(2) Social Science Information: 225-263

1. The transfer of people via the occupation of “external” land, which was enabled by
2. the concept of terra nullius (empty land), which denoted whether or not the land was being used specifically for what Europeans considered a productive purpose (agriculture), not whether people inhabited that space. Thus, (semi-)nomadic hunter-gatherer/pastoral societies were irrelevant to the discussion of occupation.⁹⁾Kivelson V (2007) Claiming Siberia in Peopling the Russian Periphery. London: Routledge, 21-40

States have always sponsored colonial endeavors as an investment in their own wealth generation, thus

3. colonies remained dependent on the metropole.

Colonizers typically instituted a superior-colonizer/inferior-colonized relationship through

4. hierarchical ordering based in racial/ethnic terms, with Europeans ranked superior, and
5. discourses of civilization and modernization, i.e., a “civilizing mission” to educate local populations in European ways.

As will be demonstrated below, these five elements were evident in the case of the Sakha and Yakutia/YASSR during both the Imperial and Soviet eras. More specifically, they experienced at least three different, yet overlapping, forms of colonialism.

Imperialist Colonialism. Imperialism and colonialism are discrete state-based policies that often occur together. Imperialism provides the structure and ideological foundation for control of “external” lands, looking outward from the center. Colonialism is the in situ practice of dominating and controlling “external” lands and people, on behalf of the center.¹⁰⁾Morrissey J (2014) Imperialism and Empire in Key Concepts in Historical Geography. London: Sage Publishing, 17 Unlike the maritime type undertaken by Britain, France, and Spain, which involved traveling overseas to colonies on separate continents, Russia engaged in continental imperialist colonialism. This involved land-based expansion with no obvious geographical divider between the metropole and colonies. Colonizer-colonized relations under continental imperialist colonialism were indirect in the beginning stages, which allowed the colonized to survive as ethno-cultural entities, even though they underwent significant assimilation.¹¹⁾Schorkowitz D (2019) The Shifting Forms of Continental Colonialism in Shifting Forms of Continental Colonialism. Palgrave Macmillan, 33 I consider the Russian Imperial period to be an era of continental imperial colonialism.

Internal Colonialism. The term itself is contentious as it has a variety of different meanings. I apply the termwhen discussing the Soviet era to refer to “colonization of ‘unoccupied’ lands within [a state’s] own national territory;…[and colonization] within a single set of political institutions and a unitary market, a periphery [which] could be subjected to an inferior economic status by a dominant core.”¹²⁾Calvert P (2001) Internal colonisation, development and environment. 22(1) Third World Quarterly: 51-52

Resource Colonialism. This refers to the practice of establishing natural resource extractive operations in a location peripheral to a center of power, with two resultant effects. First, it expands state power and control over both the location and the extractive operation(s).¹³⁾Gritsenko D (2018) Energy Development in the Arctic in Handbook of the International Political Economy of Energy and Natural Resources. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar Publishing, 172 Second, the “symbolic and material benefits…flow to already empowered (and usually distant) hands and local peoples…bear disproportionate environmental and social burdens.”¹⁴⁾Willow A J (2016) Indigenous ExtrACTIVISM in Boreal Canada. 5(3) Humanities I argue that this form of colonialism was evident in Yakutia/YASSR across both the imperial and Soviet periods.

Form	Imperial Wave	Soviet Wave
imperialist colonialism	X
internal colonialism		X
resource colonialism	X	X

Colonialism in Russia

Alexander Morrison, an historian of Russian colonialism, has commented that Russia suffers from a “colonial allergy,”¹⁵⁾Morrison A (2021) Russia’s Colonial Allergy. Eurasianet, 19 December 2016, https://eurasianet.org/russias-colonial-allergy. Accessed 2 July 2021 meaning that suggesting Russia had colonies was—and still is—usually met with denial. One historical reason why the tsarist government shied away from labelling its colonies as colonies was that it violated the autocratic principle of “the singleness of power,” thereby denying any potential consideration of decentralization for fear of loss of absolute power.¹⁶⁾Masoero A (2013) Territorial Colonization in Late Imperial Russia. 14(1) Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History: 67-68 Although the official Russian terms were – and still are – “migrant” or “resettler,” the colloquial term of “incomer” (priyezhiye) is a more revealing description for those people transferred from the core to the periphery.

The imperial era

Moscow began its territorial expansion to the north and east in the mid-sixteenth century in the pursuit of fur, which was both a product for export and an internal form of currency.¹⁷⁾Etkind A (2011) Internal Colonization. Cambridge: Polity Press The tsar sent military representatives (Cossacks) out to claim ownership of fur-rich territory that eventually extended across Asia and the Pacific Ocean. Along the way, any indigenous peoples they encountered were subjugated to the “sovereign’s exalted hand”¹⁸⁾Slezkine Y (1994) Arctic Mirrors. Ithaca: Cornell University Press and made to pay fur as tribute. During the first two centuries of rule, Moscow ordered Russian colonizers to leave the indigenous groups alone, so long as they paid their tribute. The logic was that the tsar needed working bodies to maximize its treasury revenues, so non-Russians were incorporated into the revenue system rather than exterminated.

Cossacks reached the Sakha heartland (near present-day Yakutsk) in 1632. At first contact, the Russians encountered a distinct and self-governing society of approximately 35-40 sub-groups, some with as many as 2000-5000 members,¹⁹⁾Takakura H (2015) Arctic Pastoralist Sakha. Victoria: Trans Pacific Press engaging in pastoral livelihoods.²⁰⁾See Ivanov V (2008) Yakuts in Encyclopedia of the Arctic, volume 3. London: Routledge, 2201-2203; and Okladnikov A P (1970) Yakutia Before Its Incorporation Into the Russian State. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press When the local Sakha were informed that they were now the tsar’s subjects, they staged a number of uprisings between 1630 and 1642, until the last uprising was violently suppressed. The Sakha submitted to Russian rule, and the Yakutia parish was established, named thusly because the Russians called the Sakha people “Yakuts.”²¹⁾Pesterev V (2013) Stranitsy istorii Zemlya Olonkho. Yakutsk: Bichik

Until the mid-nineteenth century, Yakutia was a resource colony. Because the soil was largely unconducive to agriculture, the land was made productive through the collection of furs. Overall numbers of priyezhiye to the region, mostly fur traders and trappers, were small during this time.²²⁾Tichotsky J (2000) Russia’s Diamond Colony. London: Routledge Many priyezhiye integrated Sakha language and culture into their daily existence, and intermarriage was common.

The practice of indirect rule, and thus Russian-Sakha relations, changed in the nineteenth century due to three developments. First, in 1822, the Imperial government passed the Statute of Alien Administration in Siberia (aka, the Speranksii Code). This Statute codified and hierarchically ordered crown subjects into two categories: “natural inhabitants” (Russians) and “aliens” (indigenous Siberians). Aliens were further sub-divided into three categories: settled, nomadic, or “wandering-or-foraging.” The Sakha were categorized as nomadic aliens, which solidified their “Other” status; no Sakha person could ever become a “natural inhabitant,” should they wish to. Second, Russian intellectuals embraced the larger European trends of nationalism and populism. These ideologies inspired a Russian version of the “civilising mission” or a sense of moral responsibility to do something about Siberia’s “alien problem.” The solution, as they saw it, was Russification:

“…the practical work of saving and civilizing…Education and Christianization—gradual, sensitive, and based on the natives’ languages and experiences…all of these things were…something that civilization owed the aboriginal Siberians…”²³⁾Slezkine Y (1994) Arctic Mirrors. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 117

Finally, the amount and type of priyezhiye to Yakutia changed. Around mid-century, banishment to Siberia became a common punishment for criminals and the politically undesirable. Exiled political revolutionaries brought their ideas, i.e., self-government and autonomy, with them to Yakutia. Some were employed as private teachers for the children of Sakha elites and helped to create a Sakha intelligentsia. The revolutionary ideas of the political exiles and Sakha intelligentsia ripened into fruition at the beginning of the twentieth century, when the latter established a number of organizations to raise ethnic-Sakha consciousness.²⁴⁾See Argounova-Low T (2011) The Politics of Nationalism in the Republic of Sakha (Northeastern Siberia) 1900-2000. Lewiston: Edwin Mellen Press; and Korobeinikov A (2017) Yakutskaya avtonomiya. 2017(3) Ab Imperio: 77-118

Then came World War I, the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, and a five-year-long civil war across the new Soviet Union. Life for the Sakha changed drastically, but Russian colonialism continued – in a different disguise.

The Soviet era

When the Yakut Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic (YASSR) was established in 1922, the Sakha received a higher degree of “emancipation” than they had had under the tsar. To gain support from the non-ethnic Russian peoples, the Bolsheviks devised a system of ethnofederalism, or administrative units that served as officially recognized national homelands for each group. Three forms of ethnic expression were permitted within each “homeland”: their mother tongue was co-official with Russian, the Party would train an ethno-national elite to lead its people’s development, and it would support their cultural identity.²⁵⁾Martin T (2001) The Affirmative Action Empire. Ithaca: Cornell University Press The type of unit awarded was based on a Marxist-modernist theory of social evolution which, like the Speranskii Code, codified peoples into three hierarchical categories – tribes, nationalities, and nations – based on a “continuum of backward to advanced.”²⁶⁾Hicks S M (2011) Between Indigeneity and Nationality (PhD dissertation). University of British Columbia, 12

The Bolsheviks determined that the Sakha had evolved to the “nationality” stage, so YASSR was established as a sub-unit of the Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic (RSFSR). Ethnic Russians were determined by the Bolsheviks to have advanced to the highest level of social evolution: the nation. At the time, this setup was considered to be progressive and a sign of Bolshevik good faith towards limited and conditional autonomy. However, hindsight allows us to see that such a top-down approach could “just as easily be understood as a form of foreign domination”²⁷⁾Beissinger M R (2006) Soviet Empire as ‘Family Resemblance.’ 65(2) Slavic Review: 302 because the solidification of boundaries—political, geographical, and social—reinforced ethnic difference and because the government controlled which ethnic expressions were allowed.

Within one decade of socialist rule, the narrative changed from emancipation back toward Russification. Emblematic of this switch was the introduction of the “Friendship of Peoples” (FoP) narrative. The Soviet leadership created FoP to inspire patriotism for the multi-national Soviet state by revising Imperial Russia’s historical record in two mutually reinforcing ways. First, it used terminology that implied that non-Russian ethnic groups chose to join the Empire, as opposed to being violently annexed through conquest. FoP revised the seventeenth-century conquest of the Sakha as a “voluntary incorporation” with Russia, and the tsar’s military representatives were “pathfinders, [who] knocked on the doors of the distant country of the forest pastoralists.”²⁸⁾Okladnikov A P (1970) Yakutia Before Its Incorporation Into the Russian State. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 448 Second, it emphasized the “positive” outcomes of subjugation, such as Russian military protection from other would-be conquerors.²⁹⁾Tillett L (1969) The Great Friendship. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 3 In Yakutia, Russians were credited with introducing agriculture to the Sakha, as well as formal education and a written language.

Sakha culture also suffered when, contrary to the leadership’s declaration, expressions of their indigenous culture were quickly relabeled as “bourgeois nationalism” and liquidated. In 1928, at least 500 Sakha were killed in a mass-scale repression campaign, including some of the early Sakha Bolshevik leaders.³⁰⁾Hicks S M (2011) Between Indigeneity and Nationality (PhD dissertation). University of British Columbia

Internal and resource colonialism in YASSR is demonstrated by the waves of priyezhiye who arrived to colonize the republic’s “unoccupied” lands in pursuit of natural resource exploitation. In 1923, gold was discovered in the south of YASSR. By 1925, no fewer than 13,000 priyezhiye flooded in, two-thirds of whom were ethnic Russian.³¹⁾Forsyth F (1994) A History of the Peoples of Siberia. Cambridge University Press Yet, the supply of voluntary labor was insufficient to meet the state’s demands. Moscow deemed gold production as a national priority since the new country needed revenue to pay off foreign debts and to industrialize. So it “imported” involuntary labor from the Soviet corrective labor, or gulag, system. Although exact numbers are unknown, in a 22-year period, there were approximately 100 camps, prisons, and colonies in YASSR and at least 50,250 prisoners were imported.³²⁾Argounova‐Low T and Prisyazhnyi M (2016) Biography of a road. 47(2) Development and Change: 367-387 All but one of the gulag camps engaged in mining operations, particularly gold. Between the gold rush and gulag, YASSR’s total population expanded significantly. By the 1959 census, ethnic Sakha accounted for only half of the republic’s population, down from 80% in 1926, a reduction of approximately 10% per decade.³³⁾The Electronic Library of the National Library for the Republic of Sakha (Yakutia) (1928) Vsesoiuznaia perepis’ naseleniia 1926 goda, Tom 7. Moskva: Izdaniie TsSU Soiuza SSR, 169; and Sakha(Yakutia)stat (2004) Statisticheskii ezhegodnik Respubliki Sakha (Yakutia), 2004. Yakutsk: Sakhapoligrafizdat, 54

The second wave of priyezhiye came in pursuit of diamonds. Multiple rich diamond pipes were discovered in southwestern YASSR in the 1950s, spawning the creation of an entire diamond industry. Gem-quality stones were a valuable source of hard-currency revenue on the international market, an unambiguously capitalistic activity which was “downplayed for ideological reasons.”³⁴⁾Tichotsky J (2000) Russia’s Diamond Colony. London: Routledge, 104-105 The profits of their sale accrued to the federal reserve because diamonds “meant wealth not for an individual but for the state…they were to be mined and sold to acquire money to spend on defense and armaments.”³⁵⁾Argounova-Low T (2004) Diamonds in Properties of Culture – Culture as Property. Dietrich Reimer Verlag, 259

The diamond industry began after the Stalinist gulag era, so Moscow sought to entice people to move voluntarily through generous benefits packages. Soon, five single-industry, or monotowns, were built from scratch in southwestern YASSR to house the influx of workers. In fact, four of YASSR’s five largest population centers (excepting Yakutsk) were created during the Soviet era as monotowns servicing an extractive industry. As Table 2 shows, by the late Soviet era, ethnic Russians demographically overwhelmed ethnic Sakha in their own national territory. In one case, the ratio reached 56:1.

	Russian (1970)	Sakha, Yakut (1970)	ratio	Russian (1989)	Sakha, Yakut (1989)	ratio
Neryungri (coal)	79,200	2,300	34:1	72,500	1,300	56:1
Mirnii (diamonds)	77,000	5,800	13:1	70,900	4,100	17:1
Lensk (diamonds)	79,000	12,300	6:1	76,900	8,700	9:1
Aldan (gold)	81,200	4,800	17:1	77,400	3,900	20:1
Yakutsk	68,800	22,900	3:1	62,500	25,100	2,5:1

When Mikhail Gorbachev rose to power in 1985, the USSR was a country weakened by multiple system-wide problems, from stagnation to re-emerging nationality grievances. Gorbachev, intending to revitalize the country, introduced a series of liberalizing reforms. The Sakha elite took advantage of his glasnost’ (openness) reform to form “ethnic consciousness” groups to revitalize Sakha culture. YASSR took advantage of Gorbachev’s demokratizatsia reform to air its overarching economic objection to the Soviet state. Its mining operations were a large source of revenue for the USSR. However, due to the Soviet economy’s command-and-control structure, most of the revenue generated from YASSR’s resources stayed in the center.³⁷⁾Kempton D (2001) The Case of Sakha in Unity or Separatism. Westport: Greenwood Publishing The Republic wanted to retain a greater percentage of the profits being generated in its territory.

Ironically, the reforms intended to strengthen the Soviet system, accelerated its collapse. Upon realizing their collective grievances, national groups began to seek independence. The various union republics seceded from the Soviet Union until, on December 25, 1991, the USSR ceased to exist. YASSR became the Republic of Sakha (Yakutia) (RSY), a subordinate unit of the new Russian Federation.

Was it colonialism?

Each of the five elements constituting colonialism was present in Imperial-era Yakutia and in Soviet-era YASSR. While substantively different in each period, the transfer of ethnic Russians to the “external” Sakha ancestral lands occurred during both. The “empty” land was converted to productive use through the extraction of natural resources, first above ground (furs) then below (mining). The profits from Yakutia/YASSR funded the central treasury, not the regional budget, which rendered the region financially dependent. Discourses of civilization and modernization emerged in Russification policies and the FoP narrative. The relationship became hierarchically codified, as evidenced by the Speranskii Code and, later, ethnofederalism. Russian ethnocentrism was demonstrated by their placement at the top of the hierarchy, by calling the Sakha by a Russian name (Yakuts), and by basing the ideal of Soviet citizenry on an ethnic Russian blueprint.

The evidence available sufficiently fills in all of the elemental categories. Thus, it is viable to conclude that the relationship between the Sakha and the (ethnic) Russian state was indeed colonial throughout both the Imperial and Soviet eras. Yet, despite such a readily recognizable case of colonialism, there is almost no acknowledgement of it as such.³⁸⁾One exception being Tichotsky J (2000) Russia’s Diamond Colony. London: Routledge Perhaps the most fundamental explanation for this is that the Sakha are still under the authority of the Russian Federation, where the “colonial allergy” thrives to the present day. To be fair, scholars have critiqued the colonial order in other ways. Recent scholarship has sought to reframe Sakha identity as part of a pan-Arctic identity.³⁹⁾Burnasheva D (2019) Arctic Identity: Between Frontier and Homeland. 58(4) Anthropology & Archeology of Eurasia: 271-307 Rights-based terms regarding self-determination⁴⁰⁾Sidorova E and Rice R (2020) Being Indigenous in an Unlikely Place: Self-Determination in the [YASSR] (1920-1991). 11(3) International Indigenous Policy Journal: 1–18 and ancestral lands⁴¹⁾Belolyubskaya G (2021) The Far-Eastern Hectare Law and land in the Sakha Republic (Russia). 29 Polar Science: 100683 have been invoked, but it is notable that the scholars giving voice to them are physically outside of Russia.

A Third Wave?

In lieu of a conclusion, I wish to highlight some trends that could foreshadow a third wave of colonialism in contemporary RSY.

The 1990s were economically brutal for Russia, but also politically empowering for RSY. Glasnost’-era ethnic-consciousness movements retained their momentum and led to Sakha cultural revitalization. The Republic enjoyed greater financial autonomy over the profits of its natural resources, thanks to an agreement signed between RSY’s leader and Boris Yeltsin. Although Russians still continued to overall outnumber them, the Sakha regained some of their demographic strength, as tens of thousands of ethnic Russian priyezhiye returned to the “mainland” (as the European Slavic heartlands are often nicknamed) after the collapse.

These trends began to reverse when Vladimir Putin took office. Under his regime, Moscow has re-centralized power over its peripheral areas. The state has commandeered controlling interest in RSY’s diamond industry by becoming the majority shareholder of its monopoly company. Most recently, in 2016, the federal government initiated a homesteading act that is attempting to repopulate Russia’s peripheral areas by granting free land to citizens willing to resettle there. While these acts remain insufficient to assert that there is a new wave of colonialism, they do not lend confidence to the idea that the epoch of imperial and colonial domination is relegated to history.

Kara K. Hodgson is a PhD candidate and research fellow at UiT – The Arctic University of Norway.