After the Ice

by Alun Anderson

  After a few weeks on the coast where the pastures are particularly good, it will be mid-August and time to turn around and start off for Yar Sale. It is also the season for mushrooms, which reindeer love, and special care is needed to stop the herd from rushing off to search for more of these delicacies. En route those thousands of small lakes will provide fish for the herders to eat. In late September, there will be the rut, when the reindeer mate. A watch needs to be kept for wolves, which can be a threat, and for eagles, which are a danger to the young. At Yar Sale there is a modern slaughterhouse built by the Finns. Some reindeer are sold and with that, the job is done. The herders must then wait for the Ob to freeze over so that they can cross and get back to the winter pastures. Then there is time for a little rest before the cycle begins again.

  In the Yamal, reindeer herding is in good shape. Many young people live out on the tundra and they often want to stay, even though the state offers inducements for them to relocate to a town. “They all know somebody living in the city, they go to Salekhard, they go to a flat and they see people drinking vodka and watching TV and committing suicide and that is not the future they want. Even the young men who go out to the military and spend two years in Chechnya come back and say they want to be a reindeer herder,” says Forbes. “It is a hard life and it takes a lifetime to develop the skills to be successful, but they see it as better than stewing in an apartment in Salekhard or living on the streets in Moscow.”

  As an anthropologist, Stammler’s relationship with the reindeer people is especially close. He has spent many seasons on the tundra, has been adopted into a herding family, and even has his own reindeer (a gift of one reindeer has led to a larger family). But he has no illusions about what it takes to be a herder.

  “You need so much skill and so much intimate knowledge of the land,” he says. “You must know which pasture to move to at which time of the season. You must know at what time of day, in what kinds of weather, the reindeer will prefer which kinds of lands for feeding, resting, and more. My level of expertise is minor. I can help move a household, put on the simplest type of reindeer harness, and I can slaughter a reindeer, take off the skin, fur, and intestines. These are the simplest tasks one can learn. The skill of lassoing reindeer is absolutely crucial if you want to have responsibility, but it is impossible without continuous practice.”

  You must also be immersed in human-reindeer relations. “Reindeer are extremely perceptive and sensitive to anything humans around them do,” explains Stammler. “If you scare them off accidentally, you can create a lot of work. Reindeer can recognize individual humans, and the herders know reindeer as individuals. Relations can be very close. In one camp, a reindeer would come and visit people in the tent, although it would not come to me. It was a sacred reindeer. There is a hierarchy within the herd which is influenced by humans; in a well-managed herd you will find a master of the herd, a reindeer that has been selected for its character and may have spiritual significance for the herders.”

  When I first heard talk of sacred reindeers I wondered how such an apparently traditional society could possibly cope with the coming of the gas industry. I quickly learned that while the way of life might seem traditional, over the past century the Yamal herders have proved again and again their extraordinary resilience in the face of change, change that broke other reindeer-herding groups.

  Before the Communists took power in 1917, the tsarist authorities were content to tax and trade and leave the indigenous people, then the clear majority in the northern lands, largely to themselves. When the Soviets arrived, no one was to be left out of the march of progress and modernization. From the 1920s, traditional religious practices were forcibly suppressed across Siberia, and many tribal shamans were imprisoned and some executed. Herding was brought under state control; villages were relocated, and work was centralized and organized around “state farms” and “production brigades” under Russian managers and political agents sent from the south. New towns and camps were built all over Siberia for migrants and for the gulag prisoners sent to exploit the region’s mineral wealth. By the 1930s the indigenous people of the north had everywhere become a small minority in their homelands.

  The new system was resisted in the Yamal. Herders tried to move north to get farther away from the authorities. When that failed, there were rebellions in the 1930s and 1940s, both put down forcibly. Eventually, everyone was integrated into the Soviet system and became Soviet workers, which had its advantages. Reindeer herders enjoyed the same access to education and health care as workers from anywhere else in the Soviet Union, including subsidized holidays at Black Sea beach resorts. Then, in 1991, the Soviet system suddenly collapsed, along with all the support structures that the reindeer herders had been living with for more than fifty years. “Profits” and “privatization” were words that became newly respectable. The result was disaster for many of the indigenous herders across a vast swath of Arctic Russia.

  “In the post-1991 collapse of the Soviet Union,” Forbes recounts, “subsidies failed in remote areas. That meant infrastructure failed, people had to hunt and concentrate on just keeping body and soul together. People were in the villages getting drunk, herds were untended and mixed with wild animals, or they were slaughtered. Hungry soldiers came along and had just vodka and ammunition. Pretty much everywhere except in the Yamal, reindeer herding contracted and in some cases completely disappeared. The people just went back to hunting.”

  The 400-year-old reindeer revolution was being reversed in the turmoil of the new market economy. But why were the people of the Yamal able to avoid breakdown during the “decade of chaos”? There were several special things about the Yamal Nenets, Stammler says. Throughout the Soviet period they managed to hang on to a large number of their own private reindeer, alongside the state herds they were tending. They went on living in their traditional tents and kept reindeer for transport rather than using motor vehicles which stopped running when gasoline was no longer cheaply available. And they largely kept their old migration routes.

  After the collapse of Communism, they did not try to return to the way they had lived in the distant past, but retained what worked from the Soviet system. The land of the Yamal is still owned by the state, and the herders continue to organize themselves and their herding areas in three groups (the Yarsalinsky, who we’ve met already, the Yamalsky, and the Panaevsky) around three state farms that were set up under the Soviets and are now in the hands of local government. Only a few herders tried to cut ties with the state altogether and buy their own private land when that became possible. Instead, herders increased the size of their private herds living on state land. Under the Communist regime, 70 percent of the reindeer were state-owned and 30 percent were private. Now the percentages have reversed.

  This mixture of “private” and “state” reindeer is the most bewildering aspect of the Nenets’ life on the Yamal. How can you tell in a giant herd of fast-moving animals which are “private” and which are “state” reindeer? When I ask Forbes, he just laughs. Stammler says that there was a joke in post-Soviet times that “private reindeer never die.” When they did, they were switched with reindeer owned by the state.

  In their classic study of the Nenets, Siberian Survival,6 Andrei Golovnev and Gail Osherenko recount the story of a herder of the Soviet era who had accumulated far too many private reindeer, 1,500 in all. When the Soviet authorities came to his tent to tell him they were to be confiscated, he sent out his best-trained dog while he talked to them. The authorities departed, leaving him with just 150 reindeer. The dog then brought back 450 more animals it had moved out onto the tundra.

  The Nenets have ways of getting around authority and are not slaves to tradition. “Leaders can be young, computer-savvy guys who were born in the tundra, educated in town, and who are comfortable going back and forth and going into offices. That is a set of skills that would not be available to an elder,” Forbes says.

  Those skills will be needed. For the p
ast four centuries, they dealt with people who wanted their cooperation, because they wanted their reindeer meat, or to trade fish and furs. With the gas industry now moving into the Yamal, the people are not just unnecessary, they are in the way, a people who don’t belong to the modern age, who “should get the picture and move to the towns,” says Stammler. “There are many people in authority who still think that we can resettle these nomads,” he explains. “They think they can fix the problem and don’t have to mess around with agreements and consultation.”

  The immediate problem is that large areas of pastures are being given over to industrial development for the gas fields. Pipelines block migration routes, and junk from exploratory wells including toxic chemicals is abandoned on the tundra. All-terrain vehicles plow tracks in the tundra and litter it with smashed vodka bottles that injure reindeer, while underpaid construction workers poach reindeer for food, take fish from the lakes, and abandon dogs that run wild and harass the reindeer. Sand blows from quarries where building material has been excavated, and degradation spreads as traffic triggers melting of the permafrost.

  It is not as though the state government has not noticed these issues. I heard Alexander Stotsky, deputy governor of the neighboring Nenets Autonomous District, list the problems caused by oil and gas exploration at the conference in Tromsø: “Hectic and not-organized rides of all-terrain vehicles, contamination of ground with drilling fluids, leaving industrial materials and equipment out in the tundra, intensive aviation activity harmful to the tundra fauna, and poaching.”

  This might sound like a classic fight between indigenous people who want to keep industry off their land and giant oil corporations that just want people out of their way. But that is all wrong. The Nenets people are not opposed to gas development; they support it. “This comes as a shock to American or Canadian people who look at the fight over whether to open Alaska’s Arctic Nation Wildlife Refuge to oil development and see it as an all-or-nothing proposition,” says Forbes. “Here, everybody knows that it is going ahead, they know it is for the good of the Russian state and it can help them get access to benefits like education and health care. But they also want to be able to herd reindeer, so what they need is meaningful consultation.”

  Sergey Serotetto, a reindeer herder from the Yamal, expressed it like this at a meeting in Nadym put together under the Arctic Council’s EALÁT project: “If a reindeer herder loses his reindeer, he will lose everything he has. For him reindeer are transport, dwelling, and food. If the pastures are destroyed, the reindeer, fish, and birds will die. And they are the basis of life, not only for the Nenets but for everyone else who lives in the North…. We don’t have to delay gas exploitation, but it must be done in a clever way in order not to damage the people who live from reindeer herding. I do not say that gas exploration must be prohibited. But what more can we lose if we lose our reindeer?”7 The gas companies do not operate in a legal void, and over the years since the collapse of Communism, indigenous people have won some new legal rights. Much of the credit for that goes to RAIPON, the Russian Association of Indigenous Peoples of the North, which has campaigned vigorously for the recognition of traditional use of lands and rights to those lands.

  Elena Andreeva of the Institute for System Analysis of the Russian Academy of Sciences in Moscow has seen all the changes of Russian life in the north. She explains that they have been partly successful, at least on paper, in gaining laws to protect the rights of indigenous people and traditional land usage (not ownership, as the land still belongs to the state) passed in 1999 and 2001. But one bill to protect reindeer herding has been under consideration for ten years, while another to strengthen indigenous peoples’ rights to reject harmful development was thrown out in 2007, she says.

  The reindeer herders do have one big thing going for them in that their “demands” are so moderate that no one can really object to them in principle. They want land to be reclaimed once work has been finished, old exploratory drill sites and other abandoned industrial junk to be removed, poaching to stop, industrial areas where reindeer might be harmed to be fenced off, ways across pipelines to be provided for the herds, and protected corridors left for the migrations.

  No one disagrees: it is implementation that is the issue. Solving these problems is made more urgent by the first signs of climate change. Reindeer herders are adaptable and are accustomed to unpredictable shifts in the weather, but they are now beginning to encounter rivers that are still running long after they should be frozen. Sudden warm periods or rain, followed by a freeze, can create a top layer of hard ice that the herds can’t break through to feed. If these events grow more common, herders will need the flexibility to move their reindeer around as changing circumstances dictate. That will be more difficult if they are hemmed in by industrial development and pipelines, and if pastureland shrinks.

  The reindeer herders’ future will emerge from the interaction between local government, industry, indigenous leaders, environmentalists, and, of course, the people themselves. In 2008, Stammler and Forbes took a step that few academics would be willing to take, going beyond studying the reindeer people to seeing if they could provide some practical help. “For me personally,” says Stammler, “I believe you can’t really do anthropology disengaged from your research partners. When you live there for such a long time you make friends, you get close to the people. You want to contribute so this place develops as best as possible, although it doesn’t pay off academically. You are measured by publications and that’s it.”

  Back at their Arctic Center at the University of Lapland, they organized a multistakeholder comanagement seminar and flew in reindeer herders from the Yamal, local officials, and representatives from Russian gas companies and pipeline companies. Not everyone showed up (some gas officials could not get permission from their bosses, and some herders were held up by a river that refused to freeze on time), but the meeting did produce a declaration of principles for development in the area in February 2009. The declaration looked for “fruitful coexistence of indigenous livelihoods and oil and gas extraction” and acknowleded “freedom of choice to lead a nomadic or sedentary way of life.”8 The hope is that the principles will help discussion among the local people, government, and oil companies, but the next steps will have to come from the local people themselves.

  Forbes and Stammler remain persistently optimistic that the Nenets will find a way forward. “This could be a place where it is very possible to show that the coexistence of these two ways of using the land is achievable, given the commitment of the reindeer herders to work together with the industry and administration, and even their readiness to make sacrifices,” says Stammler.

  Three thousand miles away, in Chukotka, in the most easterly part of Russia, there is also some optimism for the future of reindeer herding, although this is where the “decade of chaos” hit most cruelly in a savage odyssey of abandonment, collapse, vodka, and despair.

  In Soviet times, Chukotka was the number-one reindeer herding province, with 560,000 reindeer. That number fell quickly to 100,000 head. Some herds were slaughtered for quick profits in dubious business deals, while others were killed so people could survive, and many reindeer ran off and joined wild herds. The Communist ideology that gave value to indigenous people was also abandoned.

  Patty Gray, now at the National University of Ireland, Maynooth, lived in Chukotka at the worst of times, working with indigenous activists and reindeer herders.9 “The indigenous people were sent to the bottom of the heap, publicly denigrated, viscerally disenfranchised—both politically and economically—and impoverished,” she says, with anger in her voice. “The particular regime that took over in 1993 was so corrupt, so belligerent, and so much of a patronage system that it excluded everybody except the favored few. It had no qualms about bankrupting the whole region.”

  Some in the West thought that the end of Communism would allow the herders of Chukotka to return to a romanticized, pre-Soviet idyll. “It wasn’t in anyo
ne’s memory,” says Gray. “The last old guys who had that knowledge died in droves in the 1990s and a lot just killed themselves because they were in such despair.”

  They were not the only losers in a corrupt “market economy.” Many people who had migrated to Chukotka packed up and returned to the south. In 1939, before the migrants arrived, indigenous people made up 60 percent of Chukotka’s population. By 1959, they were down to 25 percent, and by 1989, less than 10 percent. Now they are back up to 30 percent of the region’s 58,000 inhabitants.10

  Thankfully, there is a happier twist to this story that will delight soccer fans. Chukotka was eventually rescued by Roman Abramovich when he was elected governor in 2000. The billionaire oligarch, best known as the impassioned owner of the Chelsea Football Club in London, continued in power until 2008. Abramovich poured money into Chukotka, and the impact on its capital, Anadyr (population 12,000), has been striking, with much rebuilding taking place. In Chukotka, Abramovich is worshipped as the great hero who came and saved the people.

  Virginie Vaté, an anthropologist at the Centre National de la Re-cherche Scientifique in Paris, has spent time recently in Chukotka, traveling with herders near Amguema and living in the traditional yaranga or nomadic house. “The situation has improved at least in terms of number of reindeer,” she says. In Chukotka reindeer herding was more closely controlled by the state system than it was in Yamal, and the collapse was more severe. Now, once again, people are getting salaries and there are incentives for brigades to increase the number of reindeer, says Vaté. According to the Chukotka governor’s office, the number of reindeer, virtually all owned by the state, has climbed back to 180,000—nowhere near the glory days of 560,000, but back on the road to recovery.