David G. Anderson - The 1926/27 Soviet Polar Census Expeditions

First published in 2011 by

www.berghahnbooks.com

2011, 2014 David G. Anderson
First paperback edition published in 2014

All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without written permission of the publisher.

The 1926/27 Soviet polar census expeditions / edited by David G. Anderson.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-84545-766-2 (hardback) -- ISBN 978-0-85745-044-9 (institutional ebook) -- ISBN 978-1-78238-097-9 (paperback) -- ISBN 978-1-78238-098-6 (retail ebook)

1. Indigenous peoplesRussia, NorthernCensus. 2. Indigenous peoplesRussia (Federation)SiberiaCensus. 3. Ethnological expeditionsRussia, NorthernHistory20th century. 4. Ethnological expeditionsRussia (Federation)SiberiaHistory20th century. 5. Indigenous peoplesRussia, NorthSocial life and customs. 6. Indigenous peoplesRussia (Federation)SiberiaSocial life and customs. 7. Siberia (Russia)Discovery and exploration. 8. Russia, NorthernDiscovery and exploration. 9. Siberia (Russia)Census. 10. Russia, NorthernCensus. I. Anderson, David G. II. Title: Soviet polar census expeditions.

GN585.R9A18 2011

305.800947dc22

2010051903

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN: 978-1-78238-097-9 paperback
ISBN: 978-1-78238-098-6 retail ebook

This book is the result of the collective work of a large team of people. The work on locating, classifying and digitising the primary manuscript records of the Polar Census began in 2000 and continues as this book goes to press. I am especially grateful to Olga Robertovna Sordiia, director of the State Archive of Krasnoiarsk Territory, and her team, for helping us design a protocol for organizing and digitising the large collection of material in Krasnoiarsk. I hope that much that we learned then will be used to preserve and to analyse other collections in that archive for future generations. I am also grateful to the team at the Krasnoiarsk Regional Museum for finding and then also designing a new set of techniques for digitising the photographs and glass plate negatives associated with the Turukhansk Polar Census expedition. From our first work in Krasnoiarsk, this project spread to work in archives in North, Eastward and Westward. I would like to thank the archivists Aitalina Afanasevna Zakharova (Iakutsk), Sergei Gennadevich Ovchinnikov (Irktusk), Anatolii Alekseevich Okuneev and Oleg Sarafanov (Ekaterinburg), Tatiana Ivanovna Lakhtionova (Sykyvkar), Olga Ivanovna Korneeva (Arkhangelsk), and Natalia Ivanovna Galaktionova (Murmansk) for helping us work with their collections. I am also thankful to the archivists in the Russian Far East who helped us for many weeks to locate material, even if there were no specific results.

This project would not have been possible without the help of several Russian scholars who devoted several years of their time to finding and interpreting the Polar Census results. All of them are published here as authors in this book, but their work in signing agreements and in digitising materials for a common catalogue went far beyond the range of their own scientific interests, published here.

A large number of computer programmers and web designers have devoted months of their time to making the archive of the Polar Census expeditions accessible both as digisitised photographs and as an online database. The three databases used for collecting the texts and statistics were designed by Nikolai Zhukov and Edoardo Pignotii (both of the University of Aberdeen) and Yngvar Natland (of the University of Troms). The web-interfaces were designed by Nikolai Vasilevich Martynovich (KKKM), Darren Shaw (University of Alberta) and Gordon Neish (University of Aberdeen).

Finally we are all grateful to our sponsors who have supported this work involving a team of forty-seven people in ten cities. The Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada supported the initial cataloguing of the manuscript archive in Canada through a module of its Major Collaborative Research Initiative (SSHRCC MCRI 412-2000-1000). The main work of photographing and entering the records from Turukhansk, Iakutsk and Irkutsk was done through a small grant from the Economic and Social Research Council of the UK (ESRC 22-0217). The digitization of the photographic archive of the Turukhansk Polar Census expedition was supported through a small grant from the British Academy (SG 35555). The Research Council of Norway (NFR 167040) supported the bulk of our work in finding and digitizing collections in the Russian North, Western Siberia, Iakutiia and the Far East. The NFR also sponsored our field research inspired by the Polar Census collection in the Kanin peninsula and in Bodaibo district, Irkutsk oblast (NFR 179316). A small grant from the European Science Foundation EUROCORES BOREAS programme supported one two-day seminar with the authors to discuss the manuscript.

A group of graduate students from the University of Aberdeen and the University of Alberta were employed in preparing this manuscript and they did an excellent job. Aline Ehrenfried catalogued the initial manuscript collections from Krasnoiarsk. Maria Nakhshina prepared preliminary translations of four chapters. Olga Pak translated one chapter. I am grateful for the help of Joseph Long for helping to alter the syntax and style of two of the chapters. I am especially grateful to Maria Nakhshina who helped to assemble the manuscript and verify the citations, and to chase down missing references.

The editor gratefully acknowledges a publication subsidy from the Research Council of Norway (NFR 202348) to support the publication of such a large number of tables and illustrations.

Words spelled in languages using the Cyrillic alphabet (Russian, and the indigenous languages of Siberia) are in italics and transliterated using a simplified version of the Library of Congress transliteration system. All iotised vowels, excepting e, are transliterated with a Latin i without the ligatures that bind the two vowels together. Therefore is rendered as Iakutiia and not kut.