Changing Lifestyles : Siberia’s Khant People Strive to Revive Culture : Soviet-era repression, assimilation and the oil industry take their toll. But advocacy groups are springing up.

After five hours of chanting, Pyotr Yukhlymov’s voice is a reedy rasp as he jumps and shuffles before the stuffed head of a bear, its eyes covered by coins. Amid wood-fire smoke and swarming mosquitoes, a dozen almond-eyed women in bright head scarves look on as he asks the bear, his blood brother, to forgive him for killing it.

This is the famous Bear Game, a favorite ritual of the Eskimo-like Khant people who have lived for as long as anyone can remember in these deep, cold reaches of Siberia.

Not long ago, when the Khants were forced to worship the gods of Marx and Lenin instead of their traditional natural spirits, a Bear Game would have been broken up and its participants probably sent to jail.

Now, they are free to revive their centuries-old culture and relearn how to speak their old tongue, sew their costumes, worship their gods and sing their stories.

But it may be too late.

During the 70 years of Soviet rule, “we saw that our unique culture was disappearing before our eyes,” said Svetlana Gyndysheva, chairwoman of the regional Assn. for the Salvation of the Ugritic peoples.

“Seventy percent of the people were forgetting how to speak their own language,” she said. “The repression took away our deepest roots . . . and under the pretext of putting down the shamans, the male part of the population was largely destroyed.”

In a little-known episode of Stalinist history, many of the Khants and the similar Mansi people rebelled against Soviet rule in the 1930s, leading to bloody reprisals and forced cultural absorption.

The Soviet-era repression conspired with geography and economics to make the Khant culture appear doomed today. Although their populations have risen slightly over the last three decades--to about 22,000 Khants and 8,000 Mansi today--their old ways are threatened both by their very isolation and by the encroachment of civilization in the form of land-hungry oil companies.

Their plight is shared by an estimated 180,000 people belonging to about 30 ethnic groups, lumped together in Soviet parlance as the “Little Peoples of the North.” They are little not in stature but in their tiny numbers, with some dwindling ethnic groups numbering only several hundred.

The Khants and Mansi “will not physically die, but they could die as a people,” said Natalya Novikova, head of the Department of Peoples of the North at the Russian Academy of Sciences. “Their language will die and so their culture will die.”

Like many of the native tribes of Canada and America, the Khants were rapidly assimilated into the colonizing culture--in this case, that of Russians conquering Siberia--and appear to be prone to developing alcoholism.

“The Russians brought the first vodka here, and it brought degradation of the whole population,” said Vladimir Telegin, who heads the Beryozovo regional government in northern Siberia. “And Soviet power brought new degradation.”

He said the Russian government’s committee on the region, trying misguidedly to help the Khants and Mansi, had tried to throw money at the problem, only to find that this had no effect except to raise the price of vodka as the Khants “drank through” the aid.

The Khants’ tendency to live in tiny, remote settlements led to the Soviet practice of forcing school-age Khant children to leave home and live in internats , boarding schools where they were often persecuted for speaking their own language instead of Russian.

“Imagine that kids are growing up in your family and then, when the time comes, they take all your kids away,” Gyndysheva said. “You have a terrible psychological trauma. And then when a parent visits and sees a kid get a different upbringing from that at home, it’s very difficult.”

Beginning in the 1950s and continuing to this day, the native peoples of Siberia faced a powerful new threat to their culture: oil.

After some of the world’s largest oil fields were found in western Siberia, the native deer herders and hunters began to find themselves edged slowly, inexorably northward if they wanted to continue their hunter-gatherer way of life, or left to adjust to Soviet reality in the oil towns that sprang up.

“They’re just big children,” said Natalia Krasikova, an environmental inspector in the city of Surgut. “They can’t accept our style of life, and we’re taking away their style of life. I think this people will disappear. Oil for them is a tragedy.”

It may not look like a tragedy these days. Under new Russian laws, oil companies must obtain the permission of the natives living on a stretch of land to be able to drill there. But in practice, many say, the Khants and others are being moved off their lands just as they always were, only now they may get a snowmobile or an all-terrain vehicle as a buy-off.

“What good is an all-terrain vehicle if the deer are gone?” asked Rima Yefremova, a Khant from north of Beryozovo. “It breaks down and you can’t get parts and that’s it, and it costs 700,000 rubles (about $700.)”

Actually, the native peoples do have some prospects for money-making. As state-owned oil companies are being turned into semi-private companies, the Khants and others are entitled to a certain percentage of the stock, meant to provide them with the income they lost as their lands were ruined.

But the promised prosperity may send the Khants even faster toward extinction, Novikova said, because once again, easy money combined with the loss of their lands makes many of them turn to drink.

“They lose their land, they can’t hunt because there’s no forest left, and the money they get leads to no good,” she said.

Ironically, the very Russians whose rule has contributed so much to the Khants’ decline are openly admiring of the culture now facing looming extinction.

“People have awakened and said, ‘We can’t lose such a rich culture. We have to keep it,’ ” Telegin said.

But Russians also acknowledge their helplessness. Most agree that only the Khants can revive their own culture.

In fact, advocacy groups societies such as the Assn. for the Salvation of the Ugritic peoples, though small, are springing up around Siberia and pushing for more power for native peoples. Folklore ensembles have multiplied, and a glossy new magazine, called Sterkh, is put out for the Khants and Mansi, in part with money from oil sponsors.

“Khants and Mansi, if we were given a chance to live our own way. . . ,” author Yuvan Shestalov wrote in the first issue. “If only we were taught. Not directed. Not called to the bright future, but were given instead the opportunity to live, fish, hunt, collect berries, sing our songs, publish books, embroider the magic ornament of life, live in harmony with Torum--the Water, Earth, Heaven.”

Gyndysheva, normally somewhat dour, lights up when she tells of the old Bear Games before her birth, when her entire clan would gather after a bear had been killed and hold the equivalent of a seven-day wake.

“People would talk and dance, sing and marry,” she said. “My grandmother bore seven children, and when she died she still had no wrinkles, no white hair and all her teeth. It all depends on your way of life.”

The traditional Khant way of life includes many such holidays, as well as costumes that resemble some American Indian garb in their beading and embroidered geometric patterns. Folklore includes memorized songs that CAN go on for hours, and religion involves hundreds of local gods.

The Khant language varies widely among the far-flung districts where Khants live.

“There are no words in Russian to tell you what a good language it is,” Gyndysheva said.

Key to the Khant revival are elderly people with superb memories who can serve as what Gyndysheva called “walking encyclopedias” and help the people relearn their traditions, she said.

At the Bear Game in Khanty Mansiysk, Yukhlymov and his two dancing companions looked to be in their mid-60s or 70s, and no middle-aged people joined in the dancing. Some children, however, stepped in to imitate their elders’ mimed re-enactment of the stalking of the bear as approving parents looked on.

But despite those heartening signs, in the midst of the revival there is a foreboding that all this might not be enough.

“Khants, Mansi, who are we?” wrote author Yuvan Shestalov. “Vanishing people from the book of endangered species? . . . The word survival is no accident. It gives rise to sad meditations.”