Sibirica

This article questions the conceptualization of the 1930s Soviet rural mass collectivization as an opposition of 'private versus collective'. Instead a 'private-in-the-collective' (sovkhoist) approach is suggested, stemming from the essentially compromised nature of mass collectivization and offering a better key for understanding of current post-Soviet processes. Archival evidence is used to demonstrate how altruistic versus acquisitive polarities formed a major ideological debate in the 1920s and were gradually resolved as a 'private-in-the-collective' compromise in the collectivization decade. It is suggested that northern reindeer husbandry in the Russian Subarctic presents the private-in-the-collective compromise through the long-standing practice of grazing personal (private) deer mixed with the public herd. The empirical data presented in this article has been collected during fieldwork with reindeer-herding teams in the Kola Peninsula, Northwest Russia since 1995.

This article illustrates ways in which a Canadian international development team attempted to legitimate the transfer of natural resource management and economic development models from the Canadian to the Russian North by positing the notion of fundamental similarities between Canadian and Russian northern indigenous peoples. Drawing upon interviews and my participation in the development project, I demonstrate ways in which Russian northern leaders responded to these supposed shared features and describe how the definition of indigenous was debated by Canadian and Russian project participants. Namely, indigenous project participants disagreed over whether indigenousness was rooted in descent or activity and what kind of economic future (mainstream market-oriented or rooted in subsistence practices) could sustain indigenous peoples. I conclude that indigenousness as a unity discourse may facilitate good international politics, but does not serve as an unproblematic mechanism for knowledge transfer and crosscultural communication on a level closer to home.

Organized crime is not a new phenomenon in Russia; however, it differs in contemporary Russia significantly, in quality as well as in quantity, from its predecessors. Using the Russian Far East, especially the city of Vladivostok, as a case study, this article sketches the evolution of organized crime in the region during the last 20 years. Tracing interconnections between various criminal groups through time, the article shows that quick reactions to new market opportunities were essential for successful illegal entrepreneurship. Powerful local elites have emerged and monopolized particular sectors of the industry (especially the fishing and shipping business). The case studies illustrate the interlinkages between organized crime structures, big business, and the political aspirations of powerful individuals. This article is a proposition to move beyond the economic paradigm in organized crime research and to focus more intensively on the multiple functions organized crime groups carry out in contemporary Russia.

This article examines the ideals of G. N. Potanin and N. M. Iadrintsev, who were the architects of the federalist Siberian oblastnichestvo movement of the second half of the 19th nineteenth century and beginning of the 20th twentieth century. In their day, the work of the oblastniki on the cultural specificity of native Siberian peoples had a great influence on popular opinion, on the popularization of ethnological theory, and on the general social and political credo to reform policy towards these people. The oblastniki rejected both ethnocentrism and Eurocentrism in the comparison of various peoples. Their eventual acceptance of cultural relativism, the idea of equality of cultural values between peoples, and need for a civil understanding of human history were all closely linked to their political program of promoting regionalism. Their regionalist idea put forth the idea that every social and cultural unit had the right to an independent existence and to have control over their own development.

The 11th British Universities Siberian Studies Seminar (BUSSS) took place from the 11th to the 15th of September 2006 in Vladivostok and was hosted by the Pacific Institute of Geography of the Far Eastern Section of the Russian Academy of Science. Entitled “Siberia and the Russian Far East: Past, Present and Future,” the meeting marked the 25th anniversary of BUSSS and was attended by around 40 participants from all over the world

Dr. Lydia T. Black, Professor Emerita of Anthropology at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, died on 12 March 2007, at age 81, in Kodiak, Alaska.

Maya Mikhailovna Shcherbakova, ed., Knigi, bez kotorykh ne mogu rabotat’: katalog lichnoi biblioteki V. K. Arsen’eva

Stefan Bauer, Stefan Donecker, Aline Ehrenfried, and Markus Hirnsperger, eds., Bruchlinien im Eis: Ethnologie des zirkumpolaren Nordens

Leonid P. Khlobystin, Taymyr: The Archaeology of Northernmost Eurasia

Steven Sabol, Russian Colonization of Central Asia and the Genesis of Kazak National Consciousness Carol Kerven, ed., Prospects for Pastoralism in Kazakstan and Turkmenistan: From State Farms to Private Flocks

David Anderson, managing ed., with Mikhail Batashev, Nikolai Makarov, and Olga Sordia, eds., Turukhanskaia ekspeditsiia Pripoliarnoi perepisi: Etnografiia i demografiia malochislennykh narodov Severa

Francine Hirsch, Empire of Nations: Ethnographic Knowledge and the Making of the Soviet Union

E. M. Glavatskaia, Religioznye traditsii khantov XVII–XX vv

Marc Garcelon, Revolutionary Passage: From Soviet to Post-Soviet Russia, 1985–2000

Edward J. Vajda, ed., Languages and Prehistory of Central Siberia

V. D. Golubchikova and Z. I. Khvtisiashvili, eds., Practical Dictionary of Siberia and the North

List of Books Received for Review