Red Ties and Residential Schools. Alexia Bloch
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in more lucrative spheres. One artist who had been trained as an architect joined the town planning office. A musician employed at the House of Culture admitted to me with a note of shame that he had decided to leave his job to shovel coal in one of the town boilers. His new position would pay four times more than what the House of Culture could offer him.31 The deterioration of this institution represented the demise of a broader system that had played a critical role in placing Evenk identities within a structured, shared, Soviet context.
Priests, Shamans, and Consciousness in Flux
The rapid demise and public denigration of formal Soviet ritual left a gaping ideational hole for many people in the Russian Federation. In the Evenk District in the 1990s, youth often openly derided symbols of the Soviet era, carving disparaging graffiti in public outhouses and exchanging anecdotes parodying socialist policies and Soviet leaders. Older people and Evenk intellectuals, however, often found this disrespect for Soviet cultural practice and ideology disconcerting. They spent decades taking part in a common Soviet consciousness and often proudly proclaimed themselves as Soviet citizens (sovetskie grazhdane). Such was the case of one retired reindeer herder who described himself to me as a “Soviet person” (sovetskii chelovek) in our conversations in 1993. One afternoon he proudly exhibited the medals he had won for fighting on the Western Front during World War II and for leading a successful herding brigade for a number of years.
One reflection of the widespread sense of belonging to a Soviet society was the ongoing salience of Soviet holidays. Many of these did not just disappear from the landscape with the creation of the Russian Federation. Some Soviet holidays such as May 9, Victory Day (Den’ Pobedy), commemorating the end of World War II for the Soviet Union, or November 7, October Revolution Day (Den’ Oktiabr’skoi Revoliutsii), commemorating the Russian Revolution, continued to be widely celebrated. These days were marked by concerts organized at the House of Culture and private parties. These were also occasions when Evenki living in southern cities made an effort to travel home.
Lenin’s birthday, April 22, while not widely celebrated in Tura in the 1990s and significantly not marked by an event at the House of Culture, was inscribed in local consciousness. The holiday was designated as “Labor Day” (Den’ Truda), at a time when the Communist Party was briefly outlawed in 1993–94. One “Labor Day” event in Tura in 1994 particularly illustrates how Soviet ritual practice remained pertinent for an older generation in the 1990s. Lenin’s birthday began with the daily 7:30 A.M. Evenk District radio broadcast. The feature program was a medley of former tributes to Lenin that concluded with the commentator’s note of relief that the days of requisite odes to Lenin had come to an end. That afternoon I learned from the young commentator that she had been personally threatened by a group of people identifying themselves as members of the Communist Party. Soon after the program they barged into her office and began to berate her for her views; they emphasized that without Soviet power and Lenin’s vision the Evenki would not be at the “level of development” that they were today. She was warned to avoid such disparaging remarks or else her job would be in danger.
Some people in the Evenk District, however, were not finding comfort in the structures and ideologies of Soviet cultural practices; they were looking for new ways to make sense of their world, and organized religion became one of these. Prior to 1993 there had never been an organized religious group in Tura, although there had been occasional missionary outposts in the region in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as mentioned earlier in this chapter. In the summer of 1993, Russian Baptists and Dutch Evangelical missionaries made their way north from Krasnoiarsk to bring the word to the people of Tura and to several surrounding villages. While there was no church in which these groups could gather, they erected tarps on the residential school grounds and began giving sermons. The group of Evangelists from the Netherlands made a particularly strong impression upon one young Evenk man who had grown up in Tura. He recounted how they gave out free Bibles printed in Russian and how everyone was extremely friendly. An Evenk educator also remarked that she was impressed that the missionaries took an interest in translating the Bible into Evenk; the Evangelists even approached her about possibly working on this project.32
In the fall of 1993, people continued to discuss the missionaries’ summer visits, but by November the focus turned to a small group of Turintsy who decided to form a Russian Orthodox community. Although the local administration had not granted a permit for the group to meet, about forty interested people gathered in the House of Culture on one chilly evening in November. The majority of the group were Russian women, although there were a few elderly men and Evenk women. Most attendees sat dressed in fur hats and boots, shivering in the freezing, cavernous cement building. A radio correspondent taped the discussion about establishing the first church ever to exist in Tura. The primary organizer of the gathering requested ten names of people for a petition that would provide justification for the Russian Orthodox Archdiocese in Krasnoiarsk to support the fledgling group. The evening concluded with a conflict between the organizers and the director of the House of Culture. The director became concerned about repercussions from the town administration and claimed that a nongovernmental organization, the church group, could not legally meet in a government building. Despite this tension, the group continued to meet once a week and even held Easter services in the town administration’s office building.33 By the spring of 1994, there was also a Baptist group meeting weekly in a Tura apartment.
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