Nationality, Territory, Language:
Locating “Buryatia” and Buryat in the World
This chapter describes the unique regions that Buryats have called home, the steppe, taiga, and industrial cities and towns around Lake Baikal. An initial section introduces the Russian Federation’s three principal Buryat territories, the Republic of Buryatia, Ust’-Orda, and Aga, the administrative status of which changed significantly over the course of research. I explain the peculiarities of the model of ethnonational autonomy that the Russian Federation has inherited—and seems now to be transitioning away from—and the ambivalent position of ethnic Buryats on the geographical and metaphorical border between Russia and Mongolia, Europe and Asia. This border, I argue, provides terms in which Buryats can experience, interpret, and discuss their cultural and linguistic assimilation, as well as articulate a place (or ideal future place) for Buryat ethnicity and the Buryat language within the world.
The middle sections of the chapter describe Buryat-Russian language shift, multilingualism in Buryatia, and efforts to maintain and revitalize Buryat through language legislation and institutional ‘language work.’ A final section briefly describes several interlocking ‘crises’—Russia’s demographic crisis, the global financial crisis, and the global crisis in journalism—that formed the backdrop of field research. I argue that
daily decision-making in early-21st-century Buryatia has been suffused with a historically specific desire to live a “normal” and quiet,
peaceful life in the face of chronic crisis.
Figure 2.1. Buryat territories of the Russian Federation in 2011. Aga and Ust’-Orda were
dissolved as autonomous administrative units in 2008, but they remain important to local conceptions of Buryat territory. (Map by the author; base layers from the Central Intelligence Agency, courtesy of the University of Texas Libraries, and OpenStreetMap and contributors.)
The Buryat territories of the Russian Federation
The largest and most powerful of the Buryat territories is the Republic of
Buryatia, a semi-autonomous ethnic republic with its own state legislature (the People’s Khural)1 and president, who was formerly elected and is now appointed by the President
1 The “People’s Khural” (Aradai Khural, R. Narodnyi Khural) functions like a parliament or a
Russian duma. In Tsarist Russia, local Buryat-Mongolian politics was organized around smaller such bodies called “steppe dumas.” The khural, however, can trace its roots back to 12th- and 13th-century
of the Russian Federation. Buryatia is undeniably beautiful, with a long coastline along Lake Baikal, the “blue pearl of Siberia,” and a varied landscape consisting of mixed taiga in the north, steppe in the south, and the jagged peaks of the Sayan Mountains rising straight out of a plain in the southeast. Its capital—and my research base—is Ulan-Ude, roughly comparable in size, population density, and industry to Wichita, Kansas.
Compared with other regions of Russia and with the federation as a whole, the Republic of Buryatia is markedly rural and poor. According to preliminary results of the 2010 census, the Russian Federation’s population is 72% urban and 28% rural, while the Republic of Buryatia is 58.4% urban and 41.6% rural (Rosstat 2011).2 More than one third of the republic’s 1 million residents are officially registered as residents of Ulan- Ude (Burstat 2010). However, so many people disregard the cumbersome registration system and live in Ulan-Ude ‘illegally’ [bez registratsii] that the city’s population is probably much higher. Complicating the picture is the fluidity with which many residents—ethnic Buryats in particular—move seasonally between the city and the
countryside through extended kinship networks. The city empties out in the brief Siberian summer, when children commonly spend their school holidays with relatives in the villages, and adults enjoy long vacations at dachas, relatives’ homes, or tourist camps on the shores of Lake Baikal. In the winter months, when the work year is at its peak, residents of Ulan-Ude offhandedly estimate the city’s size at as much as 450,000 or signaling indigenous authority. The term is also used in Buddhist contexts in Buryatia and Mongolia to mean ‘religious services’—i.e., when a group of monks gathers to read texts and prayers. See the use of khural in Radio sample 1, Appendix C.
2 Urban settlements include cities, towns, and settlements “of the city type” [gorodskogo tipa],
which include Severobaikal’sk and some other district capitals. Of the other subjects of the Russian Federation that are more rural than Buryatia, it is notable that they are mainly ethnic republics located in the Northern Caucasus and Siberia: the Republics of Adygei, Chechnya, Dagestan, Ingushetia, Kabardino-Balkarsk, Karachaevo-Cherkessk, Kalmykia, Altai, and Tuva, and the Altaiskii, Krasnodarskii, and Stavropol’skii Krais.
500,000, which would make it home to about half of the republic’s total population. The other half to two-thirds live in the republic’s diverse districts (raiony), the contemporary descendants of pre-Soviet administrative districts based very loosely on Mongol tribal grounds (aimags).3 The historical connection between tribe and territory is relevant for how linguistic diversity is understood in the contemporary period, because regional Buryat dialects are taken as indexical of both territorial and familial belonging.4 Districts also represent important local media markets. Although there are many urban
administrative centers in the districts, they are often spoken about in opposition to Ulan- Ude: things happen either “in the city” [v gorode] or “in the districts” [v raionakh], and the latter are figured as slightly wild places, poor, quiet, and slow, but also beautiful, “pure” [chistyi], and close to nature.
The Republic of Buryatia’s economy is complex and transitional. The rural economy is based on small-scale animal husbandry, especially cows and sheep, and secondarily on crops like wheat.5 Ulan-Ude was also an industrial powerhouse in the late Soviet period, and reminders of perestroika’s failings can still be seen everywhere, from the dilapidated heating plants belching diesel smoke to the fields of broken glass and crumbled concrete surrounding the closed glass factory. In some of the households included in this study, workers and managers who had lost their jobs during perestroika in the late 1980s and in the economic chaos of 1991 had never found new employment, relying instead on meager state pensions and kinship networks to scrape by. The city’s
3 The word aimag enjoyed some resurgence in popularity over the years of my research, as a small
reclamation of Buryat administrative terminology. In the archival materials reviewed, it was in general use (in both Buryat and Russian) through the 1950s and fell out of use sometime in the 1960s.
4 See Chapter 4, which includes a map of the Republic of Buryatia’s districts.
5 Corn was also attempted in vast fields under Krushchev, but it failed, and the attempt is still the
neighborhoods grew on the outskirts of the city around factories, leaving some—like that of the glass factory, Steklozavod, where I lived in 2007—desperately poor. Among the industries that survive are vast food, locomotive, and airplane manufacturing complexes that produce train cars, helicopters, pasta, and packaged meat for Russian and
international markets. Until 1991, the airplane factory’s focus on military aircraft and radio technology meant that the entire city of Ulan-Ude was closed to foreigners, which seems to have produced a disproportionate sense of isolation during the Soviet period, and a disproportionate sense of freedom afterward.6 There are also various mining
operations for minerals and precious metals, which operate in an uneasy tension with new projects to capitalize on the region’s natural beauty. Recently Buryatia has invested its economic hopes into ecological and cultural tourism centered around Lake Baikal’s unique ecology, fishing and hunting, national parks, and shamanic and Buddhist practices that appear exotic to the wealthier residents of Russia’s western regions.7
It is possible to visit Ulan-Ude in the summer and stroll only the bustling, clean- swept streets of the central commercial district, sampling the sparkling fruits of Ulan- Ude’s emerging service and retail (not to mention credit) economies. This study, however, was sited across different urban neighborhoods, from Steklozavod to the city center and from high-rise apartments to humble wooden buildings without indoor
plumbing. Many (though not all) of the journalists I describe in this dissertation belonged
6 I have met middle-aged Buryats and Russians in Ulan-Ude who still remember when they met
their first foreigner as a moment of excitement. On the other hand, inexperience with foreigners—and habitual distrust of them—led some to be more suspicious and standoffish than they might have been in Moscow, St. Petersburg, or Novosibirsk. On more than one occasion, I was suspected of being a spy.
7 It must be added that Buryatia’s exoticism extends to the sex trade. Pornography businesses
market Buryatia’s “Asian women” to western Russian men, and prostitution is a minor industry in Ulan-Ude and the rural summer resorts around Lake Baikal. This dynamic informed the 2009 syphilis stories described in Chapter 7.
to the intelligentsia and emergent middle class, their membership conspicuous in their centrally located apartments, “biznes lanch”es, and memberships in American-style gyms. But most of the city’s residents, including most members of the journalists’ audiences, could not take advantage of fancy coffee or chic vacations to Thailand, and were benefiting only peripherally, if at all, from the republic’s supposed economic progress.
Between 2005 and 2008—during research for this dissertation—two additional Buryat administrative territories, the Ust’-Orda Buryat Autonomous Okrug (B. Ust’- Ordyn Buriaadai okrug, R. Ust’-Ordynskii Buriatskii avtonomnyi okrug) to the west and the Aga Buryat Autonomous Okrug (B. Agyn Buriaadai okrug or toirog, R. Aginskii Buriatskii avtonomnyi okrug) to the east, were dissolved and absorbed into the
surrounding Russian-dominated territories. Dissolution marked the controversial end of a long and interesting experiment in indigenous government, explained in the pages to come.
Geographical and cultural differences between Ust’-Orda and Aga synopsize the breadth and range of the Buryat territories. Ust’-Orda is mainly agricultural, with green, rolling hills and fertile soil. Traditionally home to western Buryat tribes including the Alar’, Bulagat, Ėkhirit, and others mentioned in the coming chapters, Ust-Orda’s Buryat population adopted settled agriculture earlier than the Buryats east of Lake Baikal, trading round felt yurts, or gers,8 for unique octagonal log dwellings with earthen roofs. Western Buryats converted to Russian Orthodoxy in greater numbers, and their cultural
8 In modern Buryat, gėr refers to both this style of dwelling—a round felt yurt—and a house or
home in general. Thus a Brezhnev-era apartment is as much a “gėr” as a yurt is. For this reason, I will employ the term “yurt” to refer to the traditional type of dwelling.
and linguistic Russification was both earlier and more extensive. Today, this history is salient in the Russian and Orthodox personal names that many Western Buryats possess, and in how linguistic knowledge is distributed (i.e., western Buryats are not expected to control Buryat well). Western Buryats also had less contact with Buddhist missionaries from the south and east in the 18th and 19th centuries, retaining instead more shamanic practices—although Buddhist datsans (‘temples’) certainly exist in Ust’-Orda.9 One of the first ‘social facts’ that a visitor will be told about Buryats is that they are divided in these ways, west from east, and the division has taken on remarkable explanatory power in local self-conceptions.
By contrast, Aga is known among Buryats as an “ark” [kovchëg] of Buryat language and culture. Aga Buryats continued to practice pastoral nomadism for longer than their counterparts further west, with some families setting up winter and summer camps in addition to their ‘settled’ homes as late as the 1950s.10 Aga is mostly dry steppe land, mixed with stretches of larch forest and scattered groves of pine and birch, and is bordered on the south by the Onon River, legendary birthplace of Chinggis Khan. A harsh continental climate closer to that of Mongolia makes it best suited to animal husbandry, including cows, sheep, and camels. Low mountains and hills in Aga are important in native shamanic and Buddhist practices, and the region is home to Buddhist monastic centers, such as Süügėlėi (Tsugol) dasan and Agyn (Aginskii) datsan, that were
9 A new datsan, an outpost of the prominent Ivolginsk datsan near Ulan-Ude, had just been
established in Ust’-Ordynskoe when I returned to Buryatia in August 2011.
10 I arrived at this date based on comments and personal oral histories from Aga Buryats who
were born in the 1940s and 1950s. As a general rule, pastoral nomadism and the use of yurts ended in the 1930s with forced collectivization.
extremely powerful in the 18th and 19th centuries and are currently the focus of religious revitalization.
Both administrative territories were created in 1937 when the existing Buryat- Mongolian Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic (BMASSR) was cleaved into three separate territories. Each has an administrative capital, Ust’-Ordynskii and Aginskoe (almost exclusively referred to by their Russian names), of about 15,000 people.11 From 1993 to 2008, the okrugs were federal subjects—direct subjects of the Russian
Federation, autonomous from the surrounding administrative units of Irkutsk Oblast and Chita Oblast, respectively. As described in the following section, administrative
restructuring that began under Putin and continued under Medvedev has de-privileged ethnic territories like Ust’-Orda and Aga. Ust’-Orda was officially merged with Irkutsk Oblast on January 1, 2008, according to a referendum held on April 16, 2006. Aga—a harder sell—was merged with Chita Oblast to form the new Zabaikal’skii Krai on March 1, 2008, according to a referendum held on March 11, 2007. Aga Buryat Okrug still technically exists, in a transitional state with “special status” [osobyi status], and Buryats in both regions retain this “special status” as well, with provisions for ongoing support for the preservation of Buryat language and culture. Culturally and in the geographic imaginations of the people described in this dissertation, Ust’-Orda and Aga remain Buryat territories. But their dissolution provoked heated discussion and no small amount of anxiety over the political future of the Republic of Buryatia (Graber and Long 2009).
11 In the 2002 census, Ust’-Ordynskii had 14,335 registered residents and Aginskoe had 11,717.
Due to a number of housing projects expanding Aginskoe, however, the settlement has grown so rapidly over the last several years that preliminary results of the 2010 census place its population now at 14,808. Ust’-Ordynskii has grown more slightly, to 14,900. (Rosstat 2011)
Ethnonational autonomy
The Republic of Buryatia’s political standing is based on a model of ethnonational autonomy inherited from early Soviet nationalities policy. Three aspects of this model are particularly important to understanding the current structural position of Buryats in Russia.
First, although words like ėtnicheskii (‘ethnic’) and korennyi (‘indigenous’) are used, the salient category of identity, affiliation, or allegiance based on cultural and linguistic criteria is nationality, or natsional’nost’.12 Outside of the former Soviet Union, scholars often speak of native Siberian peoples in these terms—of Native Siberians implicitly analogous to Native Americans or First Nations peoples, or of indigenous peoples and speakers of indigenous languages. Within the Russian Federation, however, and for most of my interlocutors, the category at issue is 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 the early 1990s, but it remains so ubiquitous that when I conducted research in Buryatia in 2008–09, it was a piece of information that people would immediately offer about themselves, unsolicited. It is also
12 Another important term in the past has been inorodets. During the Tsarist era, until roughly
1917, inorodets was the official title for Siberian peoples that we would now call indigenous. There are several difficulties with this term that prevented it from being taken up by Soviet planners in the 20th century and by native Siberians in the post-Soviet era. It literally means ‘a person [–ets] of another [ino–] birth-line or genealogy [rod].’(For comparison, inostranets means ‘a person from another country,’ ‘foreigner.’) The implication of ‘other’ here is ‘non-Russian,’ but more specifically, because the term was applied most consistently to Mongolic, Turkic, and Asian peoples inhabiting eastern Siberia and the Russian Far East, inorodets ended up meaning something like ‘radically racially non-Russian’ or ‘Oriental.’ It became racialized, in other words, and emphasized exclusion from the Russian ethnos.
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’.
Second, the main purpose of identifying indigenous Siberian peoples in the Soviet period was to whisk them away on the 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. 13 In the fledgling Soviet Union, native groups were elicited in terms of Lenin’s principle of national self- determination. 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 an explicit attempt to incorporate outlying native populations into the Soviet telos (Grant 1993, 1995; Martin 2001; Slezkine 1996; Suny 1993, 1998). 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.’14
13 This emphasis may inadvertently undermine efforts to claim indigenous status based on natural
‘firstness’ or organic group identity. I have argued elsewhere that the existence of ‘a’ single, unified Buryat language and people is less a product of organic emergence than of the vicissitudes of border politics between China, Russia, and Mongolia (Graber in press; Graber and Murray n.d.). I stand by that claim, but I do want to remain cognizant of the fact that by emphasizing the discursive
construction of ethnic and linguistic boundaries, we preclude certain claims that my interlocutors might like to make.
14 The criteria of stages developed in Marxist-Leninism are indebted to Engels, and ultimately
Lewis Henry Morgan. For more on these categories and their formulation, see Francine Hirsch’s (2005) excellent account of ethnography in the late Tsarist and early Soviet periods.
Third, 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, most of which became ethnic republics 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. Only four remain because, since the mid-2000s, federal policies in the Russian Federation have increasingly favored administrative centralization at the expense of territories previously based on the principle of ethnonational self-