Article body

Kraevedenie—usually translated as “local history” (Smith-Peter 2004) or “local studies” (Evtuhov 2012)—refers to a specific Soviet project of knowledge production that has been contested at times by various actors and differed from region to region (Gavrilova 2021; for more on kraevedenie, see Johnson 2006; Loskutova 2009, 2011; Melnikova 2012; Donovan 2015). Kraevedcheskii museums were and remain the material forms of kraevedenie, depicting a typical portrait of a place and guiding research activities.

The nature of kraevedenie in each specific Soviet region and its role in the local economy, society, and culture, varies dramatically—a phenomenon that has attracted the attention of many regional historians. For example, kraevedenie in what is now the Republic of Karelia (situated to the north of European Russia) is conventionally traced back to the intellectual enquiries of monks of that region in the twelfth century, while that in West Siberia is commonly associated with the intellectual activities of revolutionaries and politicians who were exiled there in the nineteenth century.

The word kraevedenie emerged in 1921 during the first conference of regional and local researchers, and in contrast to individually produced regional histories by kraevedy (individuals in the periphery) in the 1920s–1930s, the Soviet state established a modernist project of data collection based on these peripheral intellectual activities, centralized these efforts, and introduced a wide range of new institutions and methods to govern them (Gavrilova 2021).

Between 1921 and 1927, often referred to as “the Golden Decade of kraevedenie”, this period was characterized by a rapid growth in the number of museums and institutions, and the development of its theoretical and methodological base. However, in the beginning of the 1930s, the previous course of the kraevedenie project was rejected, and the Soviet authorities announced further centralization of the regional and local research activities, thus developing the “New Soviet” kraevedenie. Among other initiatives and developments in its institutional network, the New Soviet kraevedenie established a particular way of presenting the place by what is called “a golden triad”, or as I’ve named it, “a Soviet taxonomy” (Gavrilova 2021): History of a place, Nature, and Socialistic present. This network of kraevedcheskii museums did not just represent the place, but also imposed a socialistic spatial identity of a place by exhibiting how the history and nature of a place led to its socialistic present.

The Soviet kraevedenie project ran until 1955 and dramatically influenced the cultural, social, and intellectual life of almost every Soviet region. One of the most evident and widespread changes that occurred was the establishment of formal kraevedenie institutions throughout the Soviet Union. These took the form of scientific and research institutes, kraevedenie offices and bureaus, and research clusters in schools, universities, and factories. The most widespread and numerous formal institutions were and remain the kraevedcheskii museums, which are still found in almost every post-Soviet country[1]. These museums were characterized by very different histories; some were founded during the Russian Empire and were later forced to impose the new Soviet regulations and orders (Sovietization), while others were set up under the Soviet regime or were even founded after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Soviet authorities assigned the kraevedcheskii museums two main roles: manage and organize the kraevedenie in a region and create a permanent exhibition that would represent the “socialistic krai”.[2] How the krai were to be studied and represented was set in stone by the Soviet central authorities, who imposed strict guidelines in this regard. Following the death of Stalin in 1953, the kraevedenie project began to run out of steam (for the after-Stalin period of kraevedenie development, see Donovan 2015), leaving kraevedcheskii museums across the former Soviet Union without further centralized governance. In present times, in the majority of museums, the triad of nature, history, and society is still reproduced, while certain others have begun to work toward alternative representations.[3]

Today, the kraevedenie project has been almost completely taken apart and decentralized; most Soviet research institutions have been shut down, aside from the museums, which still function in the majority of sizeable settlements across the country and in many post-socialist countries. It is often the case that Soviet guidelines imposed more than 70 years ago to produce a socialist portrait of life in a Krai have not been changed and are not contested, even in today’s Russia. The museums were originally subjected to strict Soviet exhibition policies that dictated how museum collections could approach phenomena such as nature, history, and social constructions, and they still tend to reproduce this Soviet design.

There are exceptions, however, such as when a museum decides to reshape the depiction of a krai and contest the Soviet imposition. The provenance of these changes varies; it can be a grassroots initiative (as in Tomtor or Yagodnoye in Yakutia, or the museum in Perm) or the result of the planned research and step-by-step implementation of a new exhibition (such as that in Tomsk), or may arise due to the design agencies a museum has employed (for example, in Nakhodka). Some museums continue to play an outstanding role in the regional cultural and intellectual scene (e.g., the museums in Tomsk and Perm), while others are completely cut off from the contemporary intellectual scene (e.g., the museum in Yakutia, which has not engaged in the region’s current cultural agenda) or are significantly changed due to recent renovations and redesigns (e.g., the museums in Anadyr and Nakhodka, which underwent a complete rebuild in the 2010s by museum agencies).

The history of any given regional kraevedenie—particularly those in the Russian Arctic, Siberia, and Far Eastern regions—is therefore a history of its Sovietization. This article presents a critical review of the kraevedenie history of Chukotka under the imposed Soviet power in the region, against the backdrop of the region’s conventional history, and provides a critical analysis of current exhibitions held in the kraevedenie museums of Anadyr, Provideniya, and Lavrentiya to examine to which extent the post-Soviet incarnations of these museums have challenged the representations imposed in Soviet times.

To this end, I have drawn on materials from the State Archive of the Russian Federation (GARF), from regional and local archives from the museums of Anadyr, Lavrentiya, and Provideniya, and from an analysis of recent exhibitions in the aforementioned museums, which I visited during my fieldwork in 2016. The first part of the article addresses the Soviet national question, how it influenced kraevedenie as a knowledge production system, and how nationalities were represented in museums, including kraevedcheskii ones. The second part of the article focuses on the history and current state of kraevedenie in Chukotka, to which extent the heritage of Soviet taxonomy is still present in today’s museums, and whether local and regional museums have evolved to become a place for Indigenous narratives and voices.

The Soviet National Question and Kraevedenie: The Construction of Nationalities in Soviet Regional Museums

Although the role of kraevedenie in Soviet national policy development and its connection to the rise of the “national institute” has not been widely discussed in the literature (Melnikova 2012, 219), national policy and “enlightening policies” of the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union and its association with the school of ethnography have been extensively examined in various works (see, for example, Cvetskovski and Hofmeister 2014; Hirsch 2000, 2005; Slezkine 1991, 1994). The main problem for governments throughout the years was uniting various ethnicities and nationalities under one umbrella to strengthen the position of central governance in distant areas; once the kraevedenie project was established, it was widely used in national regions for various purposes.

According to Cvetkovski and Hofmeister (2014), ethnography is often involved in state building (particularly in imperial processes), and is most often understood as a discipline to justify new imperial instruments of control over colonial territories by engaging with quasi-ethnographic engineering and supporting the development of ethnography as an academic discipline. They view ethnographic knowledge (notably in Russia) as being mostly politicized. This argument is supported by many scholars, including Hirsh (2000, 2005) and Slezkine (1991, 1994). The latter argued that the Soviet regime developed a clear concept of nationality precisely because it wanted to overcome it. Slezkine (1991, 480) also describes Soviet national policy as one “devised and carried out by nationalists.” Indeed, the nations in the Soviet Union were seen as a “historically evolved, stable community based on a common language, territory, economic life and psychological make-up manifested in a community of culture.” Despite the range of disagreements present in debates, Leninist-Stalinist national policy was based on this understanding of how these nationalities functioned (ibid, 482).

One of the main contradictions identified by Slezkine is evidenced in the juxtaposition of the Soviet claim that “all nations are equal” but that there exists “backward” and “civilized” nations with so-called civilized nations using various institutions, including kraevedcheskii, to enlighten the so-called backward ones (ibid., 480). This process of selective enlightenment was part of Stalin’s cultural revolution, in 1929, to bring all regions and peoples to socialism; in national regions, kraevedenie and its institutions played a crucial role in this process. They did not only hold functions of enlightenment but were also part of a bigger project of creating and imposing national identities in the socialist state. By saying that, we can claim that kraevedenie and kraevedcheskii museums in the1930s–1950s were powerful social and political instruments of construction for the images of the other nationalities, in compliance with the overarching state program. Melnikova (2012) provides a good example of how kraevedcheskii institutions in the Caucasus functioned in the 1930s–1940s, how their research activities were guided, and how ethnographic collections were formed.

While raevedenie was seen as a method of knowledge production and thus of education in the “backward” regions, kraevedcheskii museums were creating a certain representation of these nationalities. The aim of this representation was to show “the historical path of a krai in the post-Revolution period in inseparable connection with our great Motherland” (Dobrusnikin and Plenikin 1942, 3). Museums were required to build exhibitions with the encompassing theme that the new socialistic face of a krai was a result of “the politics of the Communist Party and the Soviet state, the result of Lenin-Stalinist theory, and the program of solving the national question” (ibid., 42). Moreover, kraevedcheskii museum exhibitions in these regions were required to present specific materials that showed the friendship and assistance that they were granted by more “developed” Soviet nations—and above all by the “Great Russian Nation”, which helped the rapid development of their culture and economics (ibid., 59).

As I have mentioned, these policies dictated exhibition construction in the museums of the former USSR—both in terms of their educational mission and their enlightening function—as the set-in-stone representations of non-Russians. Hirsch (2005) analyzes the role of ethnographic knowledge in the ethnography exhibitions of the early Soviet era and their correspondence with national policy, and provides a useful overview to understand how kraevedcheskii museums functioned in this context. In her research, however, Hirsh mainly addresses the Ethnography Department of the Russian Museum in Leningrad and traces how changes in Soviet national policy influenced the agenda and design of its exhibitions. She describes the shift from presenting the “the exotic dress, traditional culture, and religious beliefs of the diverse peoples” in the 1920s to representing the same groups as people “experiencing a period of unusually rapid economic and cultural uplift”, but who “still needed assistance to overcome the powerful pull of traditional beliefs and customs” in the 1930s (ibid., 190).

The Ethnography Department of the Russian Museum was one of the main state-building institutions between 1923 and 1934. Hirsh claims that the Department’s influence reached far beyond Leningrad; apparently, the representatives of distant regional museums travelled to the USSR just to see its collections and exhibitions (ibid., 190). In other words, Hirsch approaches the Ethnography Department as a model for all regional museums, including kraevedcheskii museums, although these museums were never directly governed or controlled by the Russian Museum but were rather under the control of Narkompros[4] even earlier than the Ethnography Department and followed guidelines issued by the Central Bureau of Kraevedenie (before 1937) and the Institute of Kraevedenie (after 1937). It would thus be an oversimplification to view the ethnography departments of kraevedcheskii museums as attempts to replicate the Ethnography Department in the Russian Museum. Kraevedcheskii museums adhered to specific principles (described below), which aimed to strengthen the Lenin-Stalin nationalities’ policy concerning places and to create exhibitions with goals and methods other than those at play in Moscow and Leningrad.

Apart from that, the relationships between communities and regional museums were quite often far more complicated, as the museums were founded directly in the communities to represent them, rather than have the collections taken to Moscow or Leningrad. The rise of regional museums in the autonomous regions in the 1930s shall not be mistaken for the rise of local and regional voices. On the contrary, the development of the kraevedcheskii network in the independent autonomous regions was in fact imposing—from above—the socialistic modernist portrait of a place, including (as I later discuss) the portrait of a “nationality” in a Soviet present.

The protocols and discussions concerning the depiction of nationalities in kraevedcheskii museums began to appear relatively late, as the majority of their archival documents on ethnographic materials date back to the late 1940s. The reason for this is that the members of the first museum conference in 1930 were strongly against displaying ethnography in a museum, stating that “we can build a real socialist museum only so long as we don’t insert ethnography into it” (Takoeva 1949, 2–3). Presumably, these new Soviet kraevedcheskii museums were redefined as institutions looking at the present and toward the future rather than presenting the past. This approach was later criticized and ethnography became an integral part of the museums, although it was presented as part of history, with ethnographic materials used to trace the historical development of different ethnicities.

According to Takoeva (1949) and Levin (1948)—both authors of guidelines on ethnography in kraevedcheskii museums)—the main principle should be historical, and a nation should be shown in its development from pre-Revolutionary times to the Soviet era. Attention should be paid to the economic construction of a nation and its everyday life according to a “historical method.” (Takoeva, 1949, 35; Levin, 1948, 75).

Later, in the 1950s, Soviet departments were supposed to show how the national question was handled by building up the representation and portrayal in museums according to the following guiding principles:

  • Because the October Socialist Revolution and the enforced dictatorship of the proletariat resulted in the total elimination of national oppression and the establishment of national equality, exhibitions should therefore highlight that this was only possible because the 1917 Revolution stripped power from the exploitative classes;

  • Exhibitions should show how the Soviet multinational state developed historically and how it united Soviet national republics in 1922;

  • Exhibitions should present the different stages of construction of socialism, how Soviet social nations were consolidating, and how the historical program of the elimination of real inequality, economical, and cultural backwardness was carried out; and

  • The entire exhibition should be infused with the idea that only under the peoples’ united front could the national state system, economy and culture of nations of the Soviet Union be possible.

From these principles, we clearly see that the overarching idea of Soviet national policy was firmly embedded in every museum exhibition. One of the main principles of these departments that sets apart kraevedcheskii museums from possible ethnographic comparisons is that they should have presented the “typical objects rather than ‘curiosities’” (Levin 1948, 7).

It is very important to understand that local communities in Soviet times had very little influence on the way their lifestyle was portrayed in the country’s museums. The essence of the kraevedcheskii museum collection was always based on public input and on artifacts provided by the general population. Nevertheless, how an exhibition was built was defined by the curators according to the issued protocols. The Indigenous population was involved in the expeditions of the 1930s–1950s by showing the routes, thus contributing to museum collections by sharing oral histories and family artifacts. Tserkovnikova (2020, 188) states that “the representatives of the northern entities who were engaging further with the museum in Anadyr (…) were becoming ethnographers themselves and were sharing their knowledge with museum workers.” However, there is no evidence that they could in fact influence the exhibitions and take part in creating the way they were represented. Quite the opposite, archival data and the history of the museum in Anadyr show that it was created according to the same recommended national guidelines.

Historical Overview of the Development of the kraevedenie Project in Chukotka

The history of the kraevedenie project in Chukotka can be divided into two strands: the history of Russian exploration (both military and scientific) of what is now the country’s Far East and Chukotka and the history of Soviet kraevedenie itself. I examine how these two histories are interconnected, present a critical perspective of the development of kraevedenie in Chukotka, and provide an overview of the current state of the museum network in the region.

The history of kraevedenie in the Russian Far East is complex and follows several patterns. A number of museums were established during the Tsarist era, during which scientific societies emerged, such as the kraevedcheskii museum in Vladivostok, named after the famous Soviet ethnographer and explorer Vladimir Arsen’ev and founded in 1884 as part of the Research Society of the Amur Region. Another museum that can be traced back to exiled intellectuals is that of Sakhalin (founded in 1896). The history of kraevedenie in the northern part of Russia’s Far East is somewhat different, being associated with Soviet colonization and the top-down imposition of Soviet institutions.

Any history of kraevedenie must distinguish between two separate strands: the emergence of the museums and institutions of Soviet kraevedenie in the local region and the intellectual activities (mostly scientific expeditions) that were retrospectively labelled kraevedenie by Soviet scholars and historians. In that respect, while kraevedenie institutions only formally emerged in Chukotka in the 1930s when the area came under complete Soviet control, many research and exploration activities conducted in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries came to be labelled as kraevedenie. For example, the 1890–1891 ethnographic research and collection conducted by Leonid Grinevetskiy, the first mayor of Anadyr district (then still part of the Magadan region), which was first taken to Vladivostok before being returned to Anadyr in the 1930s, is grouped under the label kraevedenie. Research explorations of Chukotka during Tsarist Russia and the first years in which the Soviets established control over Chukotka have also been seen as part of the region’s kraevedenie.

A number of Sovietization policies were implemented in Chukotka, such as the forced relocation of the Indigenous population, the establishment of a range of boarding schools for Indigenous children, the imposition of a collective “Eskimo” identity on a number of peoples in the region, and changes in the local economy (however, unlike the situation in other Arctic regions, the negative repercussions of these imposed policies has never been acknowledged by either the Soviet or Russian governments).

The kraevedenie project accompanied the Soviet governance of Russia’s Far Eastern regions and came to Chukotka in November, 1931, when the first kraevedenie office was established in Anadyr following recommendations made during the First Soviet Museum Congress held in Moscow that same year. In the late 1920s, the Northern Committee had already begun setting up the so-called cultural bases to “enlighten and educate the backward nations” of the Soviet Union across its northern and southern peripheries. The first such base was established in Uelen in 1931, involving a kraeved (a person who was practicing kraevedenie) who conducted research and education activities among the local population.

The first kraevedenie base in Chukotka was situated in Lavrentiya, the first capital of Soviet Chukotka, and was deliberately located there as part of the Soviet intent toward peripheral enlightenment. The central kraevedenie office in Anadyr formed local units that catered to almost every branch of the regional economy, with more than 300 volunteers conducting research deemed necessary for the social development of the region. Similar to every other kraevedenie institution during the Soviet period, the research conducted could take the form of any type of data collection or aggregation. Regional and federal archives of Chukotka notably credit the input of kraevedy during the organization of arctic fox farms and collective reindeer herding.

Kraevedenie are often mistaken for Indigenous forms of knowledge production. Although both the scientific director of the Anadyr museum and historians from kraevedenie museums in Chukotka have stated that the network was specifically formed to preserve Indigenous cultural traits and are quick to mention the active participation of the Indigenous population in the formation of museum collections, in actual fact Soviet policies and initiatives were not universally welcomed in this region and were frequently contested. For example, in the 1960s, the Anadyr museum hosted a “travelling” exhibition which, according to Romanova (2005), was intended to educate the Indigenous population about the Sovietization of the Far North regions, such as Kolyma and Chukotka. For this purpose, the exhibition staff gathered new objects and artifacts but also accepted donations from the Indigenous population. However, off the record, the local population often complained that the ethnographic expeditions of the late Soviet era and early years of the Russian Federation showed little respect for the sacred places of the Chukchi and Yupik peoples, as they dug up recent graves and took valuable artifacts to Moscow and regional centres, leaving local communities with replicas.

To be able to trace to which extent the museums’ current exhibitions reproduce or contest the Soviet-imposed guidelines, it is necessary to first examine the ways in which exhibitions were created in Soviet times. I have already mapped the role of kraevedenie in Soviet Chukotka as an expansive colonial practice brought to the region as part of a broader Soviet culture pack. These museums were subjected to the same protocols as those elsewhere in the former Soviet Union in that they were obliged to present the socialist transformation of Chukotka. Briefly, the imposed guidelines on how museums were to represent history, society, and nature were based on the dominant theories within the respective disciplines. Nature was depicted via the landscape approach and in a very anthropocentric manner; History represented the history of a place before the Soviets gained control; and the Construction of Socialism division charted the changes occurring in the everyday lives of a krai’s population throughout the early decades of socialism. In other regions, this Soviet taxonomy was contested by the locals who had run the museums prior to the Soviet period, but this was not the case in Chukotka, where Soviet kraevedenie was implemented on a tabula rasa.

In other articles, I argue that kraevedcheskii museums differed dramatically from the cabinets of curiosities and ethnographic collections in European museums of that time because the artifacts and objects held in kraevedcheskii museums had not been taken from elsewhere but rather remained close to where they had been found or collected.

One exception to this common rule is the case of the Russian eastern and northern peripheries. Objects and artifacts gathered in these regions often made their way through various collections before they settled in regional (local) museums, where they contributed to creating the local identity. Russia acquired its first sets of scientific data (including historical and ethnographic materials) from Chukotka during the First and Second Kamchatka Expeditions (1725–1730 and 1733–1743, respectively) under Vitus Bering (Efimov 1949). According to Romanova (2005), a historian of the kraevedcheskii movement in Chukotka, it is not easy to trace the routes followed by the objects contained in expedition collections. Some of them went to form museum departments in Moscow, Saint Petersburg, and Vladivostok and were displayed as “curiosities from far away”—an approach that runs quite counter to that of the kraevedcheskii museum.

Before the kraevedenie project was established in Chukotka, all scientific artifacts found in the region were sent to the Primorskiy Governmental United Museum in Vladivostok. The development of museum collections in Chukotka began after it became an independent administrative unit within Primorskiy Kray in the Russian Empire in 1888, but the first collected data and materials were taken to Vladivostok, at that time the regional capital. These objects were returned to Anadyr only in 1939–1940 after the kraevedcheskii museum was established there. This came about soon after the kraevedenie office was established in 1935, but because Chukotka belonged to the Kamchatskii district of Khabarovskii Krai at that time, the museum worked in close collaboration with those in Petropavlovsk-Kamchatskii and Khabarovsk, where many artifacts were sent.

This created an interesting hierarchy within the centre-periphery power relationship in kraevedenie. In theory, all artifacts, objects, and specimens were to remain in the nearest museum to represent the local culture and contribute to the socialistic depiction of the krai. In practice, however, the objects were (and still are) frequently shifted from one museum to another, particularly from local to regional sites, despite local objections. At the same time, one must acknowledge examples such as the kraevedcheskii museum in Lavrentiya, which has in its collection a unique toggling harpoon topped with a flying creature, one of the rarest examples of a complete Indigenous harpoon in the world; indeed, according to locals, it is completely unique. This object was never removed from the local museum, despite its cultural and scientific value. However, the object was not actually found in Lavrentiya itself but rather in one of the Indigenous villages nearby, therefore we must accept that there is always a certain amount of approximation when we discuss the territory represented in kraevedcheskii museums, as the borders of such territories are often blurred.

Kraevedcheskii Museums in Chukotka Today

In this section, I analyze several kraevedcheskii museums in Chukotka, the contemporary exhibitions they have developed, and the extent to which they contest or reproduce the Soviet representation of the area.

There are seven kraevedcheskii museums open in Chukotka today, namely, in Anadyr, Provideniya, Egvekinot, Meinypil’gyno, Bilibino, Pevek, and Lavrentiya. I focus on three permanent displays in contemporary museums in the cities of Anadyr (The Museum Centre, The Heritage of Chukotka), Lavrentiya (Kraevedcheskii Museum), and Provideniya (The Museum of the Bering Heritage), with the intention of understanding to what extent Soviet taxonomy and Soviet representations of the Indigenous lifestyle are still in place in Russian Chukotka or whether they have been critically rethought and contested. I proceed to deconstruct the predominant narratives of exploration, the Soviet presence in the region, relocation and other repressive policies, and the joint history of the Russians/Soviets and the Indigenous population.

Let us turn to an analysis of contemporary post-soviet kraevedcheskii museums, beginning with that of Anadyr, the regional capital of Chukotka[5]. The museum in Anadyr is a rare example of a kraevedcheskii museum that has been significantly redesigned, this time by a Moscow-based team of museum curators from Pushkin State Museum, led by Olga Shishko. These changes came about as part of the broad cultural policy implemented in the region under the direction of one of the most famous Russian oligarchs, then-Chukotka Governor Roman Abramovich. As a result of this project, the classic Soviet exhibition (i.e., consisting of three departments) was challenged and replaced by numerous small installations set up in one large exhibition hall.

Although the collection in Anadyr represents the evolution of local society from prehistoric times to the present day, the familiar kraevedcheskii historical method of arranging an exhibition has been altered. It no longer follows a landscape approach to the representation of nature, and it has abandoned the previous Soviet principles for the representation of a socialist krai. All of the scenes and installations offer a mix of artifacts and objects normally associated with Indigenous lifestyles together with those typically associated with Russians. Thus, items that would traditionally characterize the lifestyles of Indigenous peoples and are associated with them are juxtaposed with those representing contemporary lifestyles (Figure 1). The placement of some Indigenous items (clothing, a carpet on the wall, an animal tusk) alongside contemporary objects or possessions (such as a pair of jeans and a t-shirt) perhaps suggests an attempt to promote the inclusion of Indigenous people in Chukotka’s modern society.

Figure 1

Anadyr kraevedcheskii museum, 2016

Anadyr kraevedcheskii museum, 2016
Photo by S. Gavrilova

-> See the list of figures

Various installations represent specific moments in the pre- and post- Soviet histories of the krai, yet the overarching narrative remains very colonial. For example, as Figure 2 shows, one section is dedicated to pre-revolutionary nineteenth-century Russian expeditions to the Far North and the exploration of the Chukotka peninsula. The visitor is shown a set of objects revealing the experiences of a member of one of these exploratory expeditions: the display centers on a tent—symbolic of exploration in the region, a map of the expedition routes, and picturesque photos in the background. While this method of presentation notably lacks a critical vision and does not touch upon the negative aspects of the Soviet presence in the region, it does challenge the traditional Soviet representation of Russians as the “bringers of civilization and enlightenment to backward regions”. Indeed, the artifacts on display neither reveal what the Soviet presence meant for Indigenous people nor delve into the consequences of the forced relocation of these people in the late Soviet period.

Figure 2

Anadyr kraevedcheskii museum, 2016

Anadyr kraevedcheskii museum, 2016
Photo by S. Gavrilova

-> See the list of figures

The Anadyr exhibition is far removed from the Soviet way of presenting nationalities; it shows Indigenous people as part of present-day society but fails to provide a balanced historical representation of what happened to Indigenous populations during Soviet times. The exhibition neither supports the Soviet historical narrative nor contests it but its production does raise a number of questions, the most important of which concerns the extent to which it involved local curators and representatives of Indigenous communities, rather than being imposed from “above” by Moscow-based curators.

My second case study is a museum situated in Lavrentiya, the capital of Chukotka during the Soviet period and a sort of melting pot for various ethnicities that were forcibly relocated from nearby Indigenous settlements. Today, the population of Lavrentiya has dwindled markedly from its Soviet-era high, with currently just over 1,000 inhabitants. The village survives on subsistence whale and walrus hunting and there are almost no tourists—a significant potential source of income. There is no road connecting Lavrentiya with Anadyr, six to eight flights per month, and a ferry that serves the locality twice a year. That said, despite Lavrentiya’s isolation and the life it offers on the very edge of survival, a kraevedcheskii museum remains in the village, the farthest such Russian museum from Moscow.

The museum occupies several rooms on the first floor of a residential building and serves as one of the village’s cultural centers, along with the library. The museum staff are all from the area and one of the key figures, the ex-director, is a local woman by the name of Elizaveta Alikhanovna Dobrieva. The Dobriev family arrived in Lavrentiya when two brothers from Ingushetia (in northeast Caucasus) decided to move to Chukotka at the beginning of the twentieth century following an unsuccessful period prospecting for gold in Alaska. One of the brothers settled down in Chukotka and married a local woman from Naukan. This marked the beginning of the Dobriev dynasty, whose local prominence was acknowledged in various Soviet newspapers and books. Dobrieva and her family were forcibly relocated from their village of Naukan on Cape Dezhnev, then the easternmost settlement in Eurasia, in 1958. At this time, all local Indigenous people were randomly placed together in new settlements, thereby almost completely destroying Naukan’s unique language. Dobrieva was moved to Lavrentiya as a child but to this day continues to regale museum visitors with stories of how her family used to live in a yaranga[6] before being moved to Lavrentiya. This forced relocation, part of the narkompros programme implemented by Russia to “enlighten and educate its backward Indigenous people” (Krupnik and Chlenov 2007, 59–81), has not only come to define the locals’ current life but has generated a multitude of issues. The processes the locals were forced to accept during the late 1950s and early 1960s were similar to those faced by national minorities in Canada, but in Russia, their influence has still not been officially acknowledged.

The kraevedenie project came to Lavrentiya in the 1930s as part of the cultural inroads made in that area, but the museum did not open until 1969, and was shut down shortly thereafter. The museum re-opened in 1976 and the newly formed board of directors consisted of both Russians and representatives of the local Indigenous population. The first exhibition covered ethnographical and archaeological themes, nature, and the Soviet period in Lavrentiya.

Today, the museum consists of several rooms designed to reproduce the classic kraevedcheskii nature-history-society structure (Figure 3). The exhibition sequence begins with an undated Soviet poster called Pages of History, which outlines the history of Chukotka and Lavrentiya from 1909, as the borders of Soviet administrative regions fluctuated and Soviet settlements were developed. The two main mounts placed directly in the entranceway showcase the history of the settlement with posters dedicated to World War II (known in Russia as the Great Patriotic War)—not the original posters but rather black-and-white reproductions. The museum tells the story of the Lavrentiya settlement from the Soviet perspective and following Soviet ideas of how a place’s story should be represented.

Figure 3

Lavrentiya kraevedcheskii museum, 2016

Lavrentiya kraevedcheskii museum, 2016
Photo by S. Gavrilova

-> See the list of figures

Aside from the nature section, which predictably consists of stuffed animals and many items from the fur industry, the museum houses various artifacts of Chukchi and Yupik lifestyles (often referred to as “Eskimos”, the designated Soviet term to describe Indigenous populations of these territories). The Indigenous lifestyle is presented in the history and archaeology sections, rather than in the society section. Most Indigenous’ artifacts are actually replicas produced by the State Museum of Oriental Art in Moscow, where the originals are kept. As aforementioned, due to the unregulated nature of the relationships between museum directors and archaeological expeditions in the region, there are many active excavation sites in Chukotka (including graves), and many objects and artifacts found in the region have been taken elsewhere (Figure 4).

Figure 4

Lavrentiya kraevedcheskii museum, 2016

Lavrentiya kraevedcheskii museum, 2016
Photo by S. Gavrilova

-> See the list of figures

Neither the collections on the history of the region nor the Soviet displays provide a balanced representation of everyday lifestyle, nor do they challenge the Soviet narrative of having brought civilization, culture, and literacy to their so-called backward regions. Traumatic local experiences such as the several waves of forced relocation (Krupik and Chlenov 2007; Holzlehner 2011; Thompson 2002), the boarding schools to which local children were sent, the imposed system of collective farming that nearly destroyed traditional hunting practices, and the decline of the settlement from the 1990s onwards to this day remain unacknowledged and uncommented.

This raises a very interesting counterpoint: The museum in Lavrentiya was (and still is) run in close collaboration with representatives of Indigenous communities—directly and dramatically affected by Soviet policies—yet there is no evidence of these histories in the museum, nor are there any representations of pre-Soviet “ancient” settlements. This absence is even more conspicuous when one listens to local oral histories about these events, visits former settlements, and reads the books (see, for example, Naukan and the Naukans (2014) by and interviews with witnesses to events) that dramatically contrast the narrative put forth glorifying the Soviet presence in the region.

This museum is an interesting example of a place where oral history and personal memories coexist alongside their museum representation, even though the Indigenous lifestyle before the Soviet invasion is represented through the lens of strict Soviet guidelines and ideas. Despite the fact that the story of relocation is crucial to the identity of the local community and even to the family of the former director, this museum contains no references to the re-location nor to any other negative impacts of Soviet policies. The curators and directors of the museum have not taken advantage of the opportunity offered by the end of centralized governance to represent a more factual version of the history of their people or to preserve memories and testimonies of that epoch.

The history on display ends with the disappearance of the Soviet Union, with the era of the 1990s and present day completely excluded from the narrative. In addition to the cultural silence regarding the damaging effects of Soviet policies on Indigenous histories and societies, information about pre-Soviet settlements, everyday geographies, and the landscapes of Indigenous lifestyle are also absent from the museum in Lavrentiya.

The situation is quite different in the museum of Provideniya, the administrative center of Chukotka’s Provideniya district. This museum is still run by Russians who were sent to Provideniya by the Soviet system that distributed graduates across the country, and although the museum is officially a branch of the Anadyr museum, the changes we have witnessed in Anadyr have not occurred in Provideniya, whose museum also tells the story of the settlement and the surrounding areas based on a Soviet chronology. The museum display begins with materials from the early 1930s—as though nothing existed in the region before then—and portrays the Soviet presence in the region as a story of the “discovery” of these lands by the Russians and Soviets. It includes various objects associated with discovery expeditions and colonial discourses, such as a globe, maps, binoculars, maps, and postcards, with all items presented as part of a typical Soviet explorer interior (Figure 5).

Figure 5

Provideniya kraevedcheskii museum, 2016

Provideniya kraevedcheskii museum, 2016
Photo by S. Gavrilova

-> See the list of figures

However, the Provideniya museum does feature the history of the forced relocation of local peoples, or to be more precise, it admits to the presence of “ancient settlements” in the region. The mount entitled Ancient and Contemporary Settlements in the Southeastern Area of Chukotka, framed by whale bone remains (Figure 6), presents several black-and-white historical images alongside a map depicting the historical locations of Indigenous settlements, along with a present-day overview of some of them. Although the display describes the relocation, it provides no information on why and by whom the Indigenous people were moved, to which location they were moved or how the relocation influenced their identity, language, and traditional lifestyle; it simply mentions the fact that this happened—in a room set between the Soviet exhibition and the Indigenous’ section.

Figure 6

Provideniya kraevedcheskii museum, 2016

Provideniya kraevedcheskii museum, 2016
Photo by S. Gavrilova

-> See the list of figures

In other words, the relocation itself is not featured in the exhibition, which instead covers the so-called ancient settlements as part of the history and landscapes of the region. This method of presenting a narrative is an unequivocal example of what I call “bubbling” (Gavrilova 2021): introducing events as a simple matter of fact, without cause or consequence, in a way that disconnects them from their broader historical and societal context and provides no explanation as to their origins. The visitor is not informed about the circumstances and traumatic experiences of the forced relocation of Indigenous people, their names and personal histories, their subsequent imposed integration into new cities, or the culture they lost in the process. This display is the sole reference to the Soviet approach to national minorities, and the decision to “advance backward ethnicities”. These narratives are completely absent, apart from the brief admission that there were other, non-Soviet settlements and that the Soviet state did not find a completely empty land when they took control of the region. Indigenous people living there before the Soviets are presented in a predictable classical, topological, and ethnographic manner through sets of tools of production placed in typological order in collections of cultural artifacts. One small separate installation (in fact, the museum visit begins with it) presents some traditional Indigenous crafts. This installation aesthetically recalls the souvenirs available in the museum’s gift shop.

Another feature of the Provideniya museum is a mount dedicated to Beringia—a self-defined region uniting Alaska and Chukotka—that presents the story of their interconnection. Against a backdrop of the unsettled relationship between Russia and the United States, the presence of this interconnection is at the very least brave as it boldly jumps out of the museum’s overarching narrative. The other impression generated is that this display seeks to mask the traditional lifestyles and ancient histories of the Yupik and Chukchi people by replacing these important histories with another one: the created and enforced collective Beringia identity.

Conclusions

Today, reconsideration of the center-periphery (and of the imperial-colonial) relationship regarding the questions of national heritage and the formation of museum collections has become of key importance in museum studies (see Pimenova 2019). Two notable aspects of this reconsideration are examining the provenance of the artifacts and closely collaborating with the Indigenous population, particularly with regard to the shared guardianship of the most valuable and sacred objects. However, as Pimenova also notes, these trends have not yet become a trend in the post-Soviet context. The questions pertaining to the decolonization of the museum collections in Moscow (The State Museum of Oriental Art) and Saint Petersburg (Kunstkamera) have yet to be first acknowledged, then managed. This issue is even more complicated regarding kraevedcheskii museums, which, as I have outlined in my works, have emerged in various regions following different patterns, and therefore it is hard to come up with one single program in terms of their desovietization.

The kraevedenie project arrived in Chukotka in the mid-1930s as part of Soviet colonization and played a significant role in the Soviets’ mission to “enlighten” Indigenous populations as they were brought into the fold of Soviet citizenry. The Soviet authorities presented this process as the “glorious” absorption of northern and eastern peripheries into the Soviet state, when in fact, it resulted in many dramatic and negative consequences for the regions’ first residents, namely, Indigenous people. Museums—the key kraevedenie infrastructural centers in the region—were established to present a socialistic portrait of Chukotka, display the advantages of socialist society, and reproduce the conventional Russian history of these territories as terra nullius that needed to be controlled, explored, and exploited.

The museum in Anadyr presents such a case. Although it has moved away from the established Soviet taxonomy and has taken a completely different approach to the kraevedcheskii exhibition, and despite changes to aesthetics and design, the underlying historical and societal narratives in place echo their Soviet counterparts by failing to cover Indigenous lifestyles, the history of the forced relocations, and the current situation in these regions. The recently redesigned collection does not even acknowledge the colonial presence of Russians and Soviets and the central state’s attitude toward Indigenous people.

In the museum of Provideniya, although former Indigenous settlements are included in the exhibition and are acknowledged, they are not fully embedded in historical narratives, which fail to mention the history of the forced relocations, the imposed national policy of selective “enlightenment”, and the negative impact of Soviet economic development in the region.

The museum in Lavrentiya goes even further by constituting the most radical example of a gap between local histories, oral histories, and histories represented in museums, as it merely reproduces the Soviet history of the area, with no critical distance or reflection. The absence of such changes is quite often claimed to be due to economic difficulties or a lack of qualified staff. However, we see that in two of the three examined museums, there have been recent updates in terms of content (significant redesign in the case of Anadyr and the inclusion of new objects in Provideniya, particular the mounts displaying former Indigenous settlements). From my experience working in other regions,[7] the economic factor is not always the one slowing down the process. I would say, rather, that the historical role of kraevedenie in a particular region—and to which extent the locals feel that their museums reflect their history—defines whether the exhibitions are changed. In the case of Far Eastern regions, and specifically in Chukotka, the colonial aspect of the Soviet kraevedenie project may have influenced the way it is still perceived.

The museums examined in this study all present the story of the Soviet presence and accomplishments in the region (history, narrative, and national policy) in a predictable manner, with no accurate critical reflection on this period of the region’s history. Needless to say, no efforts have been made to integrate any archival documents that touch on the process of forced relocation or to present alternative points of view on the subject of the Soviet “enlightenment of backward nations.” Despite the fact that Indigenous people have frequently come to play key roles in these kraevedcheskii museums, the content these institutions choose to display still adheres to the Soviet narrative, which continues to be supported by the current Russian government. This approach brings us to question to which extent these museums seek to provide a space for Indigenous perspectives—if it is possible for alternatives to Soviet (and Russian) narratives and histories to be presented at all—and whether local kraevedcheskii museums can ultimately face de-Sovietization to become the rightful places for Indigenous voices and local memory.