Two Lenins by Ssorin-Chaikov Nikolai;

Author:Ssorin-Chaikov, Nikolai;
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780997367539
Publisher: Hawoo Publishing Company
Published: 2018-06-15T11:35:48+00:00

chapter 5

Hobbes’ gift

We, non-Russian aliens [inorodsty], the Tungus, illiterate but feeling deeply, deeply honor the Soviet power. We, the aliens of the Third Clan Soviet Meeting bring our “thank-you” to the Soviet power for the help that was provided to us.

. . .

We all desire that the town is built in the mouth of the Tura river. The land is good here—hunting of squirrels will be good . . .

We all are glad about the town, our life will be easier. Commodities will be cheaper [which is good as] we all have gotten poorer in recent years.

We wish to have a hospital, to cure the sick people.

We need a veterinary, to cure the sick reindeer.

We need school, to teach the natives [tuzemtsy] so that they themselves become literate and learned. We will be sending children to school. However many years it takes, let them study. (Gosudarstvennyi Archiv Krasnoyarskogo Kraia [State Archive of Krasnoyarsk Region], fond [deposit] 1845, opis’ [description] 1, delo [file] 22, list [page] 3)

This is an excerpt from a meeting resolution of the Ilimpea “Clan Soviet,” one of the institutions of indigenous governance that came into being in Siberian north not long after 1917. The meeting took place on February 9, 1926, in Chirinda, a trading post to the north of the area where the Evenki “Lenin” was from, and two years after the Soviet leader Lenin died. This resolution registered an overwhelmingly positive response to the new Soviet governmental campaign to construct a “culture base” (kul’tbaza) on the Nizhnaia Tunguska, the “Lower Tungus” river in the northern part of the Yenisei river basin. Here as well as across Siberia, the Soviet government was planning to set up a network of outposts where socialist trade (“cheaper commodities”) would signal hope for an “easier life” among the exploited, and where schools, hospitals, veterinary science, and hygiene—all that in the language of that time was called culture (hence the “culture base”)—would be given to the so-called backward and the nonmodern. This was the beginning of the construction of the new time—a state order that identified itself with the epochal novelty. This is an instance of what I have analyzed in this book as the “Soviet gifts of modernity.”

Gift theory is a useful lens for conceptualizing such forms of rule (cf. Grant 2009). It draws attention to the paternalistic giving that comes hand in hand with taking control over territory, population, and resources. In the Siberian indigenous case, the giving of Soviet modernization that started with such culture base projects was continuous on a new scale and with new intensity with the imperial giving of Enlightenment and protection, and with the “pacification” (zamirenie) under the Czar’s “exalted hand,” which was imposed on indigenous fur hunters together with the fur tribute when Russia conquered this region in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (Ssorin-Chaikov 2000, 2017; Konev 2017; Sirina and Davydov 2017). However, in this chapter I will take this Siberian example not back in time to historicize this kind of

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