Mixed Messages

Mediating Native Belonging in Asian Russia

Kathryn E. Graber

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781501750526
• Topic: Scienze sociali
• Subtopic: Antropologia culturale e sociale

Focusing on language and media in Asian Russia, particularly in Buryat territories, Mixed Messages engages debates about the role of minority media in society, alternative visions of modernity, and the impact of media on everyday language use. Graber demonstrates that language and the production, circulation, and consumption of media are practices by which residents of the region perform and negotiate competing possible identities.

What languages should be used in newspapers, magazines, or radio and television broadcasts? Who should produce them? What kinds of publics are and are not possible through media? How exactly do discourses move into, out of, and through the media to affect everyday social practices? Mixed Messages addresses these questions through a rich ethnography of the Russian Federation's Buryat territories, a multilingual and multiethnic region on the Mongolian border with a complex relationship to both Europe and Asia.

Mixed Messages shows that belonging in Asian Russia is a dynamic process that one cannot capture analytically by using straightforward categories of ethnolinguistic identity.

Part I

SIBERIAN MODERNS

1

NATIVE AUTONOMY IN A MULTINATIONAL STATE

One snowy afternoon in a friend’s apartment in Ulan-Ude, I met a remarkable octogenarian whose wealth of knowledge about local Buryat culture was surpassed only by his presentational style. We whiled away several hours over steaming cups of milky tea as he spun tales of distant kin, endless steppes, and Buddhist lamas of yore who could, he claimed, cross all of Lake Baikal metaphysically, in meditation. My friends and I sat rapt, in the thrall of an accomplished storyteller. He spoke about the Buryat past in an admixture of fact and fiction, science and magic, historically verifiable event and legend.

One story he told that day concerned the shou symbol in figure 3b, often used as a talisman for longevity. This symbol has long been popular in China and Mongolia and has also become popular in Buryatia, where cultural and linguistic connections with Mongolia are being enthusiastically revitalized. Chinggis Khan, the elder said, had taken the symbol of the imperial Chinese army, cut it in half, and put it on the soles of his warriors’ boots, so that they might walk on the Chinese army with every step. Now, he continued, most people don’t know this, but that is why it is such a powerful symbol of the Mongols.1

Around the same time in 2009, renovations to several government buildings and Ulan-Ude’s main square (figure 3a) were underway. The Square of the Soviets is the site of the world’s largest head of Lenin, which some local residents were beginning to find an unwelcome piece of kitsch. Chunks of old asphalt were hauled away, and the city hired a team of Chinese workers to install a new tiled surface that was supposed to be reminiscent of ethnic Buryat patterns. I frequented one of the government buildings under renovation, and one afternoon, I happened upon some shiny new tiles with the same shou symbol.

FIGURE 3A. The newly tiled Square of the Soviets in Ulan-Ude. (Photo by author, 2009.)

A passing man in a suit, who I later learned worked in one of the republic’s ministries, paused where I stood. “A Mongolian symbol!” he explained, nodding enthusiastically and pointing to the floor.

“Yes, I recently heard a story about this,” I said, and I briefly recounted the Buryat elder’s tale about Chinggis Khan’s boots.

“Ha ha, yes!” the ministry worker cried, breaking into a wide grin and chortling, so that the security guard looked up. “Chinggis Khan,” he said to the security guard. “You know, his mother was a Buryat.” He leaned in toward me, his eyes sparkling. “We Buryats were no forest tribe [plemia]!”

This characterization might not make sense to western Russians, most of whom view Buryats as simply another impoverished post-Soviet ethnic minority. But Buryats once dominated the Baikal region. The distinction of not being a “forest tribe” privileges this period of Buryat sociopolitical history, starting in the early thirteenth century, when Buryat tribes allied with other Mongols under the banner of Chinggis Khan and his sons to conquer much of Eurasia.2 When Russian authorities first learned about Buryats in 1609, it was because some forest-dwelling Ket and Samoyedic peoples living along tributaries of the Yenisei River informed would-be Russian protectors that they already paid tribute to the powerful nearby Buryats (Forsyth 1992, 87).3 This tension led to a brief battle in 1628 or 1629 on the Angara River—the first documented direct contact between Russians and Buryats (Abaeva and Zhukovskaia 2004, 39; Forsyth 1992, 89; Montgomery 2005, 62). Indeed, early political conflicts between the Russian Empire and Buryats hinged on the right to exact tribute from surrounding forest-dwelling peoples.4 Pride in being the conqueror rather than kin of forest tribes hints at one of the main reasons that most Buryats have not claimed indigenous status in the post-Soviet era, even though it might be politically and economically advantageous.

FIGURE 3B. Shou symbol. (Vector art by bc21/Shutterstock.com.)

Insisting on Buryats’ historical status as conquerors is a way of resisting dominant narratives that figure them as the recipients of Russia’s largesse and of emphasizing cultural resilience and continuity in the face of dramatic change. Over the centuries, Russian missionaries, tsarist administrators, Bolshevik agitators, and Soviet scholars and revolutionaries have all set out to reform Buryat cultural practices, and although they did so in different ways, the leitmotif of their efforts was that Buryats were in need of modernization. So to claim that Buryats were “no forest tribe” is more than an idle observation about Buryat history; it is also a rejection of the notion that Buryats needed Russia’s civilizing aid.

The narrative of modernity inscribed within the Soviet state was not exactly unique to it—it had its roots in the European Enlightenment. But the Soviet state acted on this narrative of modernity with totalizing force in Asian Russia. This and the next two chapters examine what it means to be “Siberian Moderns” by exploring the notions of modernity and progress into which Buryats have been co-opted, as well as the legacies of the twentieth century’s massive modernization efforts. This chapter examines conceptions of native autonomy in the multinational state of Russia. Each section examines a dimension of contemporary Buryat identity: as products of the civilizing mission of European Russia in Asia, as semiautonomous subjects of a newly ethnic-nationalist Russia, and as pacifistic multiculturalists. Together these factors explain why most Buryats have not taken up discourses of indigeneity and indigenous rights. Instead, Buryat efforts at maintaining ethnonational belonging continue to draw on the existing hyperinstitutional model, pursuing political autonomy and symbolic visibility for a minority public within the framework of institutionalized ethnonational multiculturalism.

Discourses of Indigeneity (or Not)

Elsewhere in the world, key goals of minority-language media have been language maintenance and revitalization (e.g., Cormack and Hourigan 2007), which in turn have been understood as issues of indigenous rights (e.g., Dinwoodie 1998; Harnel 1997; Hornberger and King 1998; Niezen 2000; Weaver 2001). Buryat speakers have not, however, generally taken up (or benefited from) the romantic rhetoric of indigenous language endangerment and death often marshaled in defense of minority-language speakers elsewhere (cf. Errington 2003; Moore 2006). Indigenous rights are not the primary framework in which Buryat leaders and activists have asserted their language rights—or their rights to political autonomy.

Indigeneity is a vexing concept in Siberia. While there is no doubt that imperial Russia colonized Buryatia, it has been difficult to locate Siberian nationalities within postcolonial discourse because it is neither clear that the Soviet project constituted a form of imperialism nor that there is anything “post” about it. This creates something of a rift in scholarship. In the post-Soviet period in Buryatia, for instance, local mainstream historians have tended to emphasize consensus and interethnic mixing in their interpretation of Russian colonization, continuing to focus on class as the basis of conflict (e.g., Zateev 2002), while foreign historians (e.g., Forsyth 1992; Montgomery 2005; Schorkowitz 2001a, 2001b) and Buryat nationalist historians (e.g., Chimitdorzhiev 2001a, 2001b) have tended to focus on interethnic conflict and cultural assimilation and have described Russian acquisition of territories around Lake Baikal as a bloody conquest. Some Buryat historians, most notably Vladimir Khamutaev, argue that Buryatia is still a colony of the Russian state. Even if we grant that the Buryats are in a colonial or postcolonial relationship with the Russian state, the criteria of indigenous recognition as they have been established within Russian law leave out many groups, including Buryats, who would qualify as “indigenous” elsewhere. Thus indigeneity remains a secondary way for peoples who might otherwise be called “indigenous” to claim rights and resources within Russia. Instead, current claims to land and mineral rights, as well as to financial resources supporting native-language education and mass media, are based on an idiosyncratic set of principles and categories established during the tsarist and Soviet periods.

Three aspects of the model of ethnonational autonomy inherited from early Soviet nationalities policy are important to understanding the current structural position of native Siberians in Russia. First, although words like ėtnicheskii (ethnic) and korennyi (indigenous) are used, the most salient category of identity, affiliation, or allegiance based on cultural and linguistic criteria is nationality, or natsional′nost′. In the Soviet period, natsional′nost′ was a basic demographic category deployed in many areas of daily life. It appeared on people’s internal passports, census forms, and everyday bureaucratic paperwork like housing and school registrations. Natsional′nost′ disappeared from Russia’s internal passports in 1997, a change that “faced considerable resistance from non-Russian elites” who saw it as necessary to affirming national status and maintaining titular nationalities’ hold over key government posts (Arel 2001, iii). It remains so ubiquitous that when I conducted research in Buryatia in 2005–12, it was a piece of information that people would often offer about themselves, unsolicited. It is also important that natsional′nost′ is self-reported, meaning that at the level of the individual, officially claiming membership in an ethnic minority requires only self-identification with a particular natsional′nost′. It is not, however, viewed as flexible by most residents of Russia; the controversy over whether it should be retained in passports concerned, as Dominique Arel (2001) has pointed out, whether it should be revealed, not whether it exists as a primordial category acquired at birth (see also Gorenburg 1999).

Second, the main purpose of identifying indigenous Siberian peoples in the Soviet period was to whisk them away on a grand Marxist-Leninist modernizing adventure. Numerous scholars of indigeneity elsewhere in the world (e.g., Golub 2007; Muehlebach 2001; Nadasdy 2002; Povinelli 1998, 2002) have emphasized how the legalistic demands of colonial or Western powers have significantly shaped the identities of the indigenous groups that they have claimed to “discover”—and vice versa. In the fledgling Soviet Union, native groups were elicited in terms of V. I. Lenin’s principle of national self-determination, according to which each “nation” was supposed to be granted the latitude and resources necessary to determine its own path within the new Soviet Union, thus minimizing the chance of separatism in a large and heterogenous collection of territories. Lenin and early Soviet ethnographers drew on Marx and the work of Friedrich Engels (and, by extension, Lewis Henry Morgan) to conceive of the peoples of Siberia as existing at different temporal stages of sociocultural evolution, as evidenced mainly by class stratification: some living at an “early” stage with little differentiation, others beginning to coalesce and stratify economically, and still others drawing closer to achieving nationhood. While the initial identification of ethnic minorities was imagined as a process of discovery, classifying them as peoples (narody), nationalities (natsional′nosti), or nations (natsii) and formulating policy to help them “develop” was also an explicit attempt to incorporate outlying native populations into the Soviet telos (Grant 1993, 1995; Martin 2001; Slezkine 1996; Suny 1993, 1998).

More obliquely, Lenin’s idea of the “nation” to be achieved was rooted in a powerful ideology of the ideal nation-state, generally credited to Johann Gottfried Herder, in which the bounds of the nation correspond with those of a discrete people (Volk), a discrete language, and a discrete culture. According to this view, the ideal political unit consists of a linguistically and culturally homogenous territory that is supposed to reflect an existing, perhaps rightfully existing nation. As most famously pursued and encapsulated in France with its lingua franca, a common language fosters a sense of belonging in multiple ways: by enabling communication but also by symbolizing, metonymically, more thoroughgoing similarity and fellow-feeling (Grillo 1989, 22–42; Woolard 1998a, 16–17; see also Silverstein 2010). Early Soviet nationalities policy promoted Herderian nation-state ideals on similar premises: nationhood would be the natural endpoint of Siberian peoples eventually anyway, and the job of Soviet modernization would be to help that process along. The best strategies for doing so would be delimiting ethnic territories, establishing standardized national languages, and investing in native cadres and institutions. Over the ensuing decades, Lenin’s ideal of national self-determination from the 1920s gave way to a different goal, of interethnic mixing such that separate nations (and languages) would meld into a single, pan-Soviet people (and language). Nonetheless, the notion that there were discrete peoples at definable stages on parallel trajectories of sociocultural evolution continued to hold sway. These distinctions still matter a great deal, and many people within Buryatia—including scholars—talk about development of nation and culture in terms of prescriptive stages, from the more “primitive” to the more “civilized.”

A third legacy of Soviet nationalities policy that is crucial to understanding contemporary minority politics in Siberia is that the principle of ethnic autonomy has been written onto the landscape as territorial autonomy. Siberian peoples that were believed to be further developed on the cultural evolutionary timescale and closer to being full-fledged nations, like the Buryats, were granted Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republics and oblasts (roughly equivalent to states or provinces), most of which became ethnic republics of Russia in the early 1990s. (One, the Jewish Autonomous Oblast in the Far East, has remained an autonomous oblast.) Native peoples believed to be less developed, especially those living with lower population density in rural areas and the far north, were granted autonomous okrugs (territories or enclaves). This has led to the peculiar status of Russia’s “ethnic” republics and territories, including the Republic of Buryatia and the formerly autonomous okrugs of Aga and Ust′-Orda. Although this principle of governance is now being partially dismantled, its legacies are strong and help explain why the position of Buryats in twenty-first-century Russia feels qualitatively different from the position of ethnic minorities in other parts of the world.

Embedded in the Marxist-Leninist timescale of sociocultural evolution is the notion that some proto-ethnonational groups of people are more advanced than others—not as a product of race or biology, but more advanced nonetheless, by virtue of material, historical experience. While on this scale all Siberian peoples were in some sense considered “backward,” some were considered more backward than others. Buryats had been exacting tribute in furs from surrounding tribes; some of them practiced sedentary agriculture; and, like the Mongols to the south, they showed enough class differentiation to be termed “feudal” by early Soviet ethnographers. For these and other reasons, they ultimately became the titular minority of their own republic, a far cry in Soviet evolutionary terms from small communities of reindeer herders.5 This is the source of pride in not being members of a forest- or tundra-dwelling “tribe,” and it is a powerful reason Buryats have hesitated to align themselves with other Siberian ethnic minorities.

Members of some post-Soviet Siberian nationalities have successfully claimed indigenous status to productive ends. In the early 1990s, groups like the Sakha (Yakuts) were proactive in reaching beyond the Russian state to tap nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and international organs like the United Nations for the resources—both material and discursive—to win rights to land, subsurface minerals, and cultural projects. They were instrumental in the Russian Association of Indigenous Peoples of the North (RAIPON), until it was disbanded by the Russian government, and they have actively directed Russian policy on the intergovernmental Arctic Council, comprising eight nations of the circumpolar North. Through the proactive use of international pressure, the Sakha Republic (Yakutia) has managed to retain control over diamond mines and oil fields, while elsewhere in the Russian Federation similar resources have been nationalized.6

Some Siberian native peoples have been able to advance such claims from within the Russian Federation. A notable case is the Soyots of the Sayan Mountains, located between Tuva and Buryatia. The Soyots were identified in ethnographic surveys in the nineteenth century but were heavily Buryatized and considered “extinct” in the early twentieth century. Then, in 2002, the Russian state recognized their claim to a separate ethnic identity...