Siberian People Power: Indigenous Resistance Legacies

• In Event: Regions and Republics of Russia in Historical Context: Compliance, Resistance, or Liberation?

Abstract

How have Siberian communities, especially those in the republics, been caught in Russia’s assault in the Ukraine war? Are they powerless? How did earlier resistance movements begin and what is their resonance today? Burgeoning literature on indigeneity helps contextualize changing historical relationships that enable or thwart leadership, nested sovereignty (sometimes called nested federalism), and demographic viability within specific negotiated homeland boundaries. Pivotal junctures driving change can come from accumulated internal dissension, external disaster (conquest in numerous guises), and the dynamic interplay between the two, creating a range of contingent opportunities. This presentation contrasts two cases of Siberian Indigenous resistance, the Buryats during Russia’s revolutionary civil strife (in Trans-Baikalia between 1918-22) and the Sakha (Yakut) in the 1920s and 1930s, including an intelligentsia repression campaign called the Ksenofontovshina. Each historical case is based on long-term field, literature, and archival work in Siberia and with Sakha and Buryat in the increasingly large diaspora. I suggest why some groups have managed to transcend neo-colonial pressures better than others.

Author

• Marjorie Mandelstam Balzer, Georgetown U