The Peoples of the North and Their Road to Socialism

Most books about the small peoples of the Soviet North were written about them. This one was written by one of them.

Vasily Nikolayevich Uvachan was an Evenk, born in 1917 in a hunter's tent on the Nizhnyaya Tunguska, the son of a poor and illiterate reindeer-hunter. He was taken as a boy to Leningrad and schooled at the Institute of the Peoples of the North, fought at Stalingrad and across the Dnieper, and returned to become first secretary of the Evenk Area Committee of the Party, a candidate of historical sciences in 1961 and a doctor in 1970, a deputy to the Supreme Soviet, and a delegate to three Party congresses.

His subject is how his own people and the other small peoples of the North - Nenets, Chukchi, Khanty, Nganasan, Dolgan, Selkup, Ket - passed within a single lifetime from a clan-and-tribal hunting society to Soviet socialism. The organising idea is the non-capitalist road: the claim that a society still at the clan order could be carried directly to socialism without passing through capitalism, provided a vanguard state undertook to carry it. He devotes his opening chapter to the pedigree of that idea, from Marx and Engels on the Russian commune through Lenin.

Whatever one concludes about the frame, the material is first-hand and the biography behind it is real. It is also a domestic history doubling as an export advertisement, written at the high noon of detente for readers in the newly independent states.

New critical introduction by Dmitry Chasovennikov.