Most of the volumes in this series were written about the peoples they describe. This one was written by one of them. The Peoples of the North and Their Road to Socialism is the work of an Evenk — a man born in 1917 in a hunter's tent on the Nizhnyaya Tunguska, the son of a poor and illiterate reindeer-hunter, who was taken as a boy to Leningrad, 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 CPSU, a candidate of historical sciences in 1961, a doctor in 1970, a deputy to the Supreme Soviet, a delegate to the Party's twenty-second, twenty-third and twenty-fourth Congresses, and a member of the Central Auditing Committee of the CPSU. The book is his account of 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, and it is offered by its own foreword as living proof of the policy it describes: "This son of an illiterate Evenk hunter became a college instructor!" That is a real story, and a moving one, and no honest reading of the book can begin by denying it. What the book cannot do — what it is built not to do — is tell the reader at what price the road was travelled, or turn upon its own state the category of national oppression it wields so freely against every other.
(A note on the name. The 1975 printing's own title page gives the author as Vladimir Uvachan, and that is the form our catalogue carried until it was corrected; the book's own foreword and running heads name him Vasily Nikolayevich Uvachan — V. N. Uvachan — and it is under those initials that his earlier bibliographies of the Yenisei North are cited within the text. The biographical facts above are drawn entirely from the book's foreword and are given as it gives them.)
Date the argument, not the spine. The English edition carries "© Progress Publishers 1975," but the book is a document of the early 1970s. Its latest political marker is the twenty-fourth Congress of the CPSU of 1971, which it quotes repeatedly; its running statistics are given "as of January 1, 1970"; its climactic biographical fact is Uvachan's own doctorate of May 1970. It belongs to the high noon of détente, when the Soviet Union presented itself to the newly independent states of Asia and Africa as the one great power that had abolished national inequality on its own soil — and this book is one of the exhibits in that case. It is a domestic history doubling as an export advertisement: look what we did for our own most backward peoples; we can do the same for yours.
The organising idea is announced early and attributed, correctly, to Lenin: the peoples of the North "took the non-capitalist road of development which was indicated by Lenin." The claim is that a society still at "the clan order" could be carried directly to socialism "without passing through the stage of capitalism," provided a vanguard state undertook to carry it. Uvachan devotes his opening theoretical chapter to the pedigree of this idea — Marx and Engels on the Russian commune, Lenin on the "non-capitalist countries," the thesis endorsed as "a new historical law of social development."
A reader who has followed this series into its Third-World volumes will recognise the doctrine at once, because those books are its descendants. The "non-capitalist path of development," or "socialist orientation," is the theory on which Kaysone Phomvihane's Revolution in Laos (Progress, 1981) sets a peasant nation of three million on "the direct transition to socialism bypassing the capitalist stage of development"; on which the anniversary volume Ten Years of the Ethiopian Revolution (Progress, 1986) presents a junta of army officers "Bypassing capitalism and creating prerequisites for a socialist revolution"; and which Rostislav Ulyanovsky, Moscow's foremost theorist of the thing, states whole in Present-Day Problems in Asia and Africa (Progress, 1978). Uvachan's book is where that export theory comes home — or rather, where it started. The peoples of the North were the doctrine's first and most complete test case: societies with, in some instances, no writing, no state and no market, lifted in a generation into collective farms and area soviets. If the leap over capitalism could be shown to have succeeded anywhere, it had to be shown here first. That is what gives this modest regional history its outsized place in the series: it is the internal proof on which the external promises were floated.
The tsarist record the book documents is not invented, and it was atrocious. Under the empire the northern peoples were inorodtsy — "aliens," a legal caste of subject peoples — and were treated as a fur-yielding resource. Uvachan sets out the yasak, the fur-tribute, collected under official instructions to take it "by kindness and not by coercion" — which, as he notes, meant only that "the natives were not to be beaten with sticks." He quotes Fridtjof Nansen, who travelled the Yenisei North in 1913 and found whole encampments dead of smallpox, "reindeer which had failed to break free, perished from starvation and lay around the chooms." He records that at the 1926–27 census "not more than 2.1 per cent of the population in the North was literate," and that among women the figure was under half of one per cent. These peoples were dying: a real demographic collapse, from disease, alcohol sold by traders, and dispossession, was under way when the revolution reached them.
Against that, the early Soviet achievement was real and deserves to be stated plainly. The Committee for the North, under P. G. Smidovich, was an instrument of genuine emancipatory intent, and Uvachan is right to honour it; its declared task was "assisting the small nationalities in the North to build socialism," not charity or administration. Written languages were created where none had existed — "Written languages with a Latin alphabet were created for Evenks, Khanty, Chukchi, Mansi, Nentsi, and other northern peoples in 1932" — and "The creation of written languages for the peoples of the North was an outstanding cultural accomplishment." So it was. Primers, textbooks and the first national literatures followed; smallpox and anthrax were fought with veterinary and medical services that had never before existed; the caste of inorodtsy was abolished at law. A people that had been 2 per cent literate became, within two decades, a people with schools, a written culture and an intelligentsia of its own — including the author of this book. A reader told that all of this is worthless, or a mere propaganda fiction, would be badly misled. It happened, and for the people to whom it happened it was liberation.
The credibility of everything that follows depends on granting that first. The quarrel with this book is not that it credits the Soviet North with achievements it did not have. It is that it presents the achievements as the whole of the story, and buries the coercion that was inseparable from them under a vocabulary designed to make it disappear.
Consider first how the book handles collectivisation — the forced reorganisation of hunting, fishing and above all reindeer-herding into cooperatives and artels at the turn of the 1930s. To its considerable credit, the book does not pretend the process was smooth. It concedes, in so many words, that "collectivisation was imposed by bureaucratic methods; the principle of voluntariness in the collectivisation of cows, reindeer and hunting gear (rifles, traps), dogs and even dwellings (chooms) was violated." That is a remarkable admission to find in a Progress volume, and it should be acknowledged as one. Herders were stripped of their animals, their tools and even their tents; the "voluntary" transition was, at the point of contact, not voluntary at all.
But watch what the book does with the admission. The coercion is instantly reassigned. It becomes a matter of "errors as well as distortions of Party policy" committed by over-zealous local officials — men who launched "cavalry charges" against a backwardness the wise centre had explicitly warned them to approach with "caution, tact and foresight." The Party "always warned local officials against 'cavalry charges' in the formerly backward districts"; the distortions are the officials', never the policy's. And the deeper causes of resistance are displaced onto a class enemy: the kulak — the wealthier reindeer-owner — and the shaman, who between them are made to account for every act of opposition to the new order. When a Nganasan man kills himself, the book reports that the kulaks "led a Nganasan to suicide only because he had been the first to join a collective farm" — the death laid at the enemy's door, never at the door of the campaign that broke his world. When a school is destroyed, we read that a former priest and "the rich and shamans set fire to a school in Baikit in 1936; 26 Evenk children perished in the flames." Twenty-six children burned: the book offers this as proof of the savagery of the resistance, and it may well be. But it does not, and cannot, register the depth of terror and refusal in a people among whom schools were being burned — it can only see enemies of the people, never a people at the end of its tether.
There is a second, quieter mechanism, and it turns on the reindeer. The reindeer is the axis of the whole northern economy, and the book knows it: it gives careful figures for how the animals were distributed by class, and how their ownership shifted into the "socialist sector" — from 36.6 per cent in 1932 to 69 per cent by the mid-1940s. What it never once says is that reindeer were lost to collectivisation. Every collapse in reindeer numbers the book records is assigned to a pre-Soviet or natural cause: the ruin of the herds under Kolchak and the imperialist war; the anthrax epidemics of 1921–23, in which the Chapogir, Kurkogir and Pankagir clans "lost half of their reindeer." After collectivisation begins, the herds only grow, and grow into the socialist sector. Yet the mass slaughter of livestock by peasants who preferred to kill their animals rather than surrender them to the collective is one of the best-attested facts of Soviet collectivisation everywhere it was imposed — and the sibling volume on Laos, in this very series, records exactly this response to a collectivisation drive of the same northern type: livestock slaughtered rather than surrendered, and flight across the border. That the northern herders, facing the compulsory socialisation of the reindeer the book admits was carried out "by bureaucratic methods," made no such answer is not credible; that the book contains no trace of it is the more telling for the candour it shows elsewhere. The admission of coerced collectivisation and the silence on its cost sit on the same page, and the second is the price of the first.
Then there is sedentarisation. The nomadic life was not a defect to be corrected but the very form of these peoples' existence, adapted over millennia to the taiga and the tundra. The book treats its ending as an unambiguous triumph: "The transition of the majority of the peoples of the North from a nomadic to a settled way of life was the most important result of the victory of the collective-farm system." Settlement is described as gradual, natural, chosen — the fruit of new relations of production, never of a policy of fixing a mobile people to permanent points. That much of it was policy, and that the fixing of nomads is a coercion in its own right, the book does not entertain.
And then there are the boarding schools — the internaty — which are the reflexive heart of the matter. Because the northern peoples were dispersed and mobile, their children were educated in residential schools, boarded at state expense, often hundreds of kilometres from their families. The book presents this as pure benefaction: "A new type of an educational institution — the boarding school — was opened to correspond with national customs, particularly the nomadic way of life." By 1970, it reports with pride, some 24,000 indigenous children were living in such schools, "all the expenses of which are covered by the state." The reader is shown the founding, benevolent face of the internat: at first, lessons were given in the native tongues, the term of study calibrated to local conditions. What that system became — the routine removal of children from parents and from the land for most of the year, the attrition of the native languages it was supposed to protect, the generational rupture that indigenous northerners themselves would later describe as the great wound of the Soviet century — is nowhere in view, because in the early 1970s the state that ran the internaty was not about to publish its cost, least of all through a native author.
The language question shows the same arc inside the book's own pages. The Latin alphabets of 1932 were, within a few years, abandoned for Cyrillic; the "artificial isolation" of the northern languages from Russian is pronounced "the greatest mistake"; the primacy of Russian — "the language of Lenin" — is settled, and the settlement is dressed in the language of free choice: "In such a delicate matter as learning a language, voluntariness and the absence of coercion are essential." The word coercion appears here precisely to be denied. A book that has just conceded coercion in the collectivisation of tents insists there was none in the substitution of one alphabet, and then one language, for another.
Every one of these evasions is an instance of a single, structural refusal, and it is worth naming as such, because it is the test this series applies to every volume it introduces. Ask not how often a book uses the vocabulary of oppression, nor even whom it deigns to quote, but this: can the category it wields against others ever, by its own logic, be turned on the speaker's own state? The Peoples of the North wields the category of national oppression with real force — against tsarism, against the inorodtsy regime, against the merchants and the empire. It never turns it homeward. And the home to which it declines to turn it had, within the living memory of every adult reader in 1975, done to other small peoples something for which "national oppression" is far too mild a word.
Between 1941 and 1944 the Soviet state deported whole nations. The Volga Germans, the Karachai, the Kalmyks, the Chechens, the Ingush, the Balkars, the Crimean Tatars, the Meskhetian Turks — loaded nation by nation into cattle-trucks and dumped in Central Asia and Siberia, their autonomous republics abolished and wiped from the map, a large fraction dead of cold and hunger and typhus in the first years. Some of them were small peoples of exactly the order this book celebrates rescuing; some were sent to the very Siberia the book paints as a land of deliverance. In 1975 the Crimean Tatars were still forbidden to return home. This is not a marginal fact about the Soviet nationalities policy; for a great many of its subjects it was the policy. And a book whose entire subject is the fate of small peoples under that policy contains, on the deportations, a flat and total silence. The sibling volume Races and Peoples (Progress, 1974) performs the identical erasure with the identical peoples, and there the mechanism is caught in the act: the Ingush appear in that book only once, on a roll of grateful nations who "had no written languages at all" until "these were only devised in Soviet times" — listed as a trophy of Soviet enlightenment thirty years after the Soviet state packed them into trains. Uvachan's book runs the same move to its logical end. His climactic proof-text, a 1957 Central Committee decree, recites the northern peoples who once "led a nomadic way of life and they were doomed to extinction" and were saved; his book's own summary borrows the Party's phrase that such peoples were "saved from physical extinction." The rhetoric of rescue is real, and it is deployed to fill exactly the space where the rhetoric of the deportations would otherwise stand.
The answer to this book was written, from within the revolutionary-Marxist tradition, four decades before it. In The Revolution Betrayed (1936), in the section "Nationality and Culture," Trotsky drew the precise negative of Uvachan's picture. The much-advertised flowering of the national cultures under the bureaucracy is a hollow show: "The Ukrainian, White Russian, Georgian, or Turk newspapers and books are only translations of the bureaucratic imperative into the language of the corresponding nationality." There can be, he wrote, "no talk of uniqueness of national culture when one and the same conductor's baton, or rather one and the same police club, undertakes to regulate all the intellectual activities of all the peoples of the Soviet Union." And the drawing-together of peoples that this series' volumes celebrate as free convergence wears, in reality, a specific face: "bureaucratism inevitably takes the color of an autocratic Russification, leaving to the other nationalities the sole indubitable cultural right of celebrating the arbiter in their own language." Uvachan's book, in which the northern peoples are forever bound to "the destiny of the Russian people" as elder brother and pedagogue, in which the honour of translating Stalin's and Kalinin's constitutional reports into Evenk is offered as a summit of cultural achievement, is the confirming instance of Trotsky's charge, written by one of the arbiter's own subjects.
Two honesties are owed. The first is that Trotsky wrote in 1936, before the deportations, and The Revolution Betrayed therefore cannot be cited as a witness to those; for the deportations the historical record itself, and the contemporary reply below, must carry the weight. The second cuts the other way and is more interesting: on the underlying science, Trotsky and this book largely agree. In the same section he mocked "the theory of unchanging racial types" and "the mysticism of the 'Slavic soul'"; he did not deny that Soviet nations could and would draw together. His quarrel — and this series' quarrel with Uvachan — is over the one question the book is built to suppress: whether the drawing-together was the free movement of emancipated peoples, or something done to them, at times at gunpoint, by a state that then recorded the vanished nations as evidence of fraternity. Trotsky's own formulation is the sharpest available: what the USSR practised was "not... the oppression of one nationality over another in the proper sense of the word, but of oppression by the centralized police apparatus over the cultural development of all the nations, starting with the Great Russian."
Nor did the reply depend on hindsight. The Fourth International's weekly, Intercontinental Press, covered the twenty-fourth Congress of the CPSU — the very Congress whose resolutions Uvachan quotes as proof of fraternal harmony — as it happened, and read it exactly against the grain of this book. The Congress, it reported, moved "in the direction of reestablishing the autocratic norms of party life of the Stalin era," among its marks "the conscious encouragement of Great Russian chauvinism." "The continued forced exile of the Crimean Tatars," the same report noted, "has been the cause of a series of protests. The reaction of the 5,000 congress delegates was to proclaim approval of a paternalistic Great Russian chauvinism obligatory for all party members" (Intercontinental Press, vol. 9, no. 16, 26 April 1971). While Uvachan was quoting Brezhnev at that Congress on the respect the Russian people had earned as elder brother of all the others, the press of the opposing tradition was reporting, from the same event, the elder-brother doctrine and the exiled nation this book will not name. The information was not unavailable in 1975. It was declined.
The verdict this book foretold, the export theory built on it would eventually meet in the field. The "non-capitalist path" that the northern peoples were said to have proven ended, in Laos, in a collectivisation drive abandoned within two years and a return to the market; in Ethiopia, in famine, resettlement and collapse. What was announced as a law of history turned out to be, again and again, a bureaucratic party standing in for an absent working class and calling the result socialism.
The Peoples of the North and Their Road to Socialism should be read, then, for both of the things it is. It is a real record of a real emancipation: the end of the yasak and the smallpox and the illiteracy, the creation of writing and medicine and schools among peoples the empire had left to die. And it is a monument of the silence that the same state required — a whole book on the liberation of small peoples that cannot mention the small peoples that same state deported, that renders forced collectivisation as local over-zeal, coerced settlement as free choice, and the boarding schools that would hollow out the native languages as pure gift. The most poignant fact about it is that both halves are true at once, and that the author embodies both. Vasily Uvachan really was carried from an illiterate hunter's tent to a doctorate and the Supreme Soviet; his life is the achievement the book celebrates. That the native voice, once found, was permitted to tell only the flattering half of its own people's story — that is the achievement's shadow, and the measure of what the road to socialism, as this state built it, could not afford to say.