Red Ties and Residential Schools. Alexia Bloch
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in Process
For the first two months of my fieldwork, I observed as many aspects of Tura society as possible while also collecting some basic statistical data. Although I had official letters of introduction from the Russian Academy of Sciences and several key contacts in the town, I felt awkward going through overly official channels each time I wanted to “observe” in a given setting. First of all, in a town such as Tura that exists largely as a bureaucratic center, I was worried that my presence might become too closely allied with official personalities and thereby endanger the trust of “common” people. Second, I was hesitant to impose myself on people merely because their superiors had approved the interaction. Therefore I established my entrée by introducing myself to the immediate superior in a given setting, such as to the head doctor in the pediatric division of the hospital or the head administrator in the orphanage. Occasionally she or he requested to see my letters of introduction, but more often than not, after our brief discussion, he or she simply approved my request to observe on an informal basis. Thereafter, I made individual arrangements to meet with specific people in the organization.
During the early months of my research, I visited day care centers, became acquainted with the schools and divisions of the hospital, shopped and waited in line in small stores and kiosks, attended the first Russian Orthodox church services ever held in Tura,10 bathed in the public bath house, toured the oil exploration headquarters, attended birthday parties and funerals, dined with new friends, and regularly attended festivals and concerts at the House of Culture (dom kul’tury), the Soviet version of a community center. Gradually I began spending increasing amounts of time in the residential school, orphanage, and pediatric/obstetric division of the hospital as I narrowed the focus of my research.
As my research progressed, it centered around informal and structured interviews with people invested in the relationship of the Evenk community to the Soviet and post-Soviet state. I found “casual chat” to be an invaluable research method permitting the speaker to be in more control, for as Humphrey has written, in this way the interviewee “evokes her own attitudes and draws her interlocutor into relationship with them” (1994b: 77). I conducted extensive interviews with activists and local administrators, but the more compelling material that forms the crux of this book was gathered in conversations with ordinary people drawing on and thinking about the place of government structures in their everyday lives. In an attempt to meet a range of people who were interested in thinking about identity and socialization, including ideas about motherhood, family, and schooling, I visited the orphanage, residential school, and pediatric/obstetric division twice a week. In each domain, I engaged in informal conversations, observation, and interviews with parents, staff, and administrators. The residential school and clinic were especially key as places where I was able to meet Evenki from various segments of the population. Evenki from different regions of the Evenk District and, more importantly, Evenki belonging to both high-status and more marginalized social strata frequented these institutions.
In the residential school, I became familiar with the daily routines, the interactions between teachers and students, and the broader place of the institution within the town. The residential school also provided me with an initial identity as a teacher that was comprehensible for the community at large. Most people quickly grasped the purpose of my research in Tura as a social science study. They could not fathom, however, what a young woman without a research team was doing in their town. Although ethnography and sociology are disciplines well understood by the broad public in Russia, the standard conception is that such studies focus on “traditional” culture, like shamanism or reindeer herding, take a few months at most, and are done in teams of researchers.11 This was the pattern followed by Soviet ethnographers. Although I taught only two English classes a week for a total of one and one-half hours, people in Tura came to think of me as the American who teaches in the residential school.
While the school provided me with a locally meaningful identity, the pediatric clinic was important for expanding my contacts. The clinic was a point of entrée for contacting parents, and predominantly young women, who had attended the residential school recently (in the past ten years or the early 1980s). These parents often had children who were currently attending the school as well. Twenty out of twenty-four women approached agreed to be interviewed in the privacy of a room provided by the clinic, and a few invited me to their homes. The initial structured interviews were conducted in the clinic, on occasion with a tape recorder, but generally women asked that this not be used. In the subsequent open-ended life histories with the six women who chose to take part, they all felt comfortable with the tape-recorder. For these more extensive interviews, we met regularly in each woman’s apartment. Usually we met alone, but on occasion the women were joined by family members or friends.
Attending public meetings and social gatherings provided a broader sense of the place of Soviet cultural practice and a sense of the collective in Evenk lives. Through the contacts developed at these gatherings, I was able to collect life histories of older Evenk women. I collected eight extensive life histories of Evenk women aged 65–75. All of them attended residential schools in the Evenk District from the late 1930s to 1940s. Ultimately, these narratives about lives lived over decades of radical change in central Siberia gripped my imagination and propelled me toward writing this book.
Locating the Project in Theoretical Frameworks
Throughout the early and mid-twentieth century, the creation of socialist societies brought about radically new ways of life for populations across the world. In establishing revolutionary governments, socialist nations also radically altered the shape of every day life and the sense of belonging for each and every person. In the case of the Soviet Union, the country was configured out of vastly different regions and the government sought to forge a completely new national identity. Incorporating peoples of different backgrounds and languages, such as indigenous Siberians, was a monumental task facing the Soviet Union when it sought to create a new nation. A painful legacy of collectivization of lands and animal herds, nationalization of private property, and compulsory schooling for indigenous people were all part of this Soviet campaign to sweep the population into a new society and establish the contours of a new nation-state.
The Soviet attempts to create a new society, including altered social hierarchies and imposed structures of learning, were rife with challenges. As a range of authors have documented (Serge 1937; Pika 1989; Conquest 1990; Nove 1993), in the wake of enthusiasm for creating an equitable society, vast injustices took place and political idealism gave way to opportunism. By the late 1930s, millions had lost their lives as the newly entrenched Soviet policies drove apparatchiks and citizens at all levels of the social hierarchy to exercise power against their rivals and those people perceived as endangering the national interest. By the mid-1940s, which brought the devastation of World War II, the country was in ruins, but a nation of “Soviet” people had emerged.
It is a paradox that so many people in the nearly 75 years of Soviet power suffered government-sanctioned injustices of various degrees and yet by the late 1980s relatively few were seeking to jettison their allegiance to the nation. In fact, by the mid-1990s in various regions of Russia only a handful were openly decrying the former Soviet way of life, and more commonly there was widespread support for reinstituting aspects of the Soviet system. This book examines this paradox, specifically asking how a common sense of belonging to a Soviet society took shape in a region of Russia in which indigenous people suffered a specific form of repression—the dispossession of their land, cultural practices, and rights to self-government. Instead of homogenizing indigenous Siberians’ experience of Soviet power as one of belonging, this book also considers the ways in which resistances to state power, particularly in schooling contexts, took shape and why resistance was not automatic.
From another perspective the book is an examination of “habitus,” the creation of social patterns and structures through the everyday practice of actors (Bourdieu 1977). I am also critical, however, of how the idea of habitus tends to homogenize actors (see Bourdieu et al. 1973). In this book I aim to demonstrate that individuals’ actions and beliefs are shaped in society but not in a homogenous way. Specific subject positions influence how individuals transform society, for instance, by mobilizing constituents or by contributing to the smooth workings of institutions such as the residential school. I draw on perspectives of individual indigenous