Reindeer Herders of Russia Hunt for a Future

Velvet-antlered reindeer are tethered outside the nomads’ tents, trampling whitish moss underfoot and barking softly as the full moon rises. There’s snow in the air. The autumn temperature is well below freezing in the austerely beautiful hills of the Russian Far North.

And when the old men of the Evenki people go to sleep in the reindeer-herding uplands of their forefathers, they say they listen to the earth beneath them snoring.

Ignore the signs of poverty--the much-patched canvas of the encampments, the cheap clothes of artificial fiber on the herdsmen’s backs--and this is an idyllic picture. After decades of Soviet attempts to settle them in permanent villages, the Evenki folk are still hearing the call of the wild.

“To a stranger, our life may seem savage and primitive,” reflected Innokenty Burtsev, 39, the head of a four-family traveling group whose camp is pitched near a foaming stream. “But to us, it’s just life. The life our fathers led before us, what’s in our blood. We actually like it.”

Soviet bosses never quite worked out how best to get the 17,000 Evenki to serve communism. For ideological reasons, they settled some in “civilized” permanent villages; for economic reasons, they kept others on the road herding reindeer. Now that the Evenkis have been cut loose from that past by the new Russian market economy, they are trying their own solution: living by their traditions and getting capitalism to serve them.

Innokenty’s herders hope to earn money by using their expertise and finding ways to package and market reindeer products in Russia and abroad. His people’s dream is to set up a small, profitable industry in reindeer production--not relying on the government of the Sakha Republic, a region on Russia’s northeast rim, or on inefficient Moscow seven time zones away.

Russian reindeer herders draw inspiration from the foreign indigenous peoples of the North whom they have met at conferences, or read about, or seen on television: the Canadians and Americans and Norwegians who lead a modified version of their traditional life, but with hot showers, phones, televisions and proper incomes.

“That’s how it should be done,” sighed Innokenty’s wife, Lyuda Burtseva, describing a 1995 Moscow conference of indigenous peoples. “Just imagine--hot showers every day would be paradise.”

The life that Evenki herders live is spartan. The Burtsevs migrate six times a year, moving with Herd No. 2 from winter woods up to their summer pastures above the valley settlement of Sebyan-Kyuzel. The “family brigade,” which includes the Burtsevs, Innokenty’s mother, her sister, and his father’s sister, are waiting for the reindeer mating season to end this month before packing their tents again and heading to the forests for winter.

Working the Herds From Dawn to Dusk

In the muggy warmth of her 10-foot-square tent, Lyuda stirs a caldron of reindeer innards bubbling on a square stove the size of a cookie tin. A crooked pipe of can-sized segments leads out through a hole in the canvas. There are two low beds on a layer of brushwood, where visiting neighbors sit.

Lyuda is a lively 33-year-old veterinarian from the region’s Yakut ethnic majority. She fell in love with Innokenty and married him during a year of fieldwork with the herd as she finished vet school. She has been on the move with the herd for 10 years; she has three children.

Officially, she works as a vet during the summer and as cook and camp-keeper for the bachelor herders during the winter. The reality is harder: a dawn-to-dusk year-round coexistence with the herd, milking, cooking, stitching wounds, watching out for wolves, packing tents, gathering berries, making cream and washing the children’s traditional clothes that she embroiders.

Innokenty is equally at home in the wild. In honor of his guests, he has killed a reindeer. Its throat has been slit, its pelt peeled, its organs removed and its blood drained into a pan. He has chopped the chilly meat into four-inch cubes on the logs outside his tent. Tonight there will be a feast.

Innokenty has the slanting cheekbones and slender build of his ancestors, but he is also the homogenized product of a thorough Soviet education. His name is Russian, he holds Russian political prizes and, as with other herders, there is nothing rustic about his eloquent, educated Moscow-speak.

His friend, Evenki ethnographer Anatoly Alexeyev, has been working for three years with the Yakutsk-based Sakha American Business Center on a $630,000 project to set up seven mobile meat-processing plants. Now the United Nations Development Program is helping to raise $1.5 million for a separate program, aiming to set up meat-processing mini-factories and show the Evenki how to market their products internationally.

Reindeer was popular in northern Russian regions during Soviet times, but transportation problems have made it hard to obtain. It is considered a luxury in the Nordic countries that also produce it; there it is priced higher than beef and eaten smoked or roasted.

Bill Dickens, special advisor in Moscow with the U.N. agency, said: “We believe it will be self-sustaining in three years. They’ll have a source of income and livelihood.”

Getting projects off the ground has proved difficult. “We’re already in the third year of the American Business Center project; the [Sakha] government took the decision to allocate the money . . . but it never came, for the simple reason that there was no money,” Alexeyev said. A donor conference for the U.N. project was held last month.

Still, if money materializes, there are plenty of other problems to overcome.

The 20-odd state helicopters that serviced the remote North in Soviet days, transporting people and products to town from the wilds at no cost to the herders, have been sold off or privatized. Hiring a private helicopter costs an unthinkable $1,000-an-hour. “If our meat has to go out by helicopter now, it will cost as much as gold!” Alexeyev said, laughing.

Without choppers, the herders and the farm in Sebyan-Kyuzel have much less chance of getting their reindeer meat and horn to Yakutsk, the local capital, an hour and a half away by air. There is no tarmac road out of Sebyan-Kyuzel, and there are no spare parts for vehicles. Most cars are in such bad shape they cannot get the certificate of road worthiness they need to leave the village and travel down a rough dirt track.

If the herders manage to get meat to market in Yakutsk, where reindeer is still prized, it is hard to find buyers. Yakutsk has started importing reindeer meat from abroad--weighed, labeled and packaged in bright plastic packets--and the foreign product is cheaper than the roughly wrapped reindeer meat that costs so much to get to town.

Murky accounting across the vast distances of a region seven times the size of California muddles the picture further.

Herders say they sell reindeer horn to middlemen, who give them just 5% of profits and sell the horn to factories in Yakutsk and in a more distant Russian city, Khabarovsk. The horn is used by the Evenki as a cure-all, drunk in tea; in several Asian countries, it is prized as an aphrodisiac.

But officials in one factory near Yakutsk said they paid the reindeer herders 70% of the money they made from selling horn.

“If things don’t improve soon, we’ll be forced to go back to the totally tribal way our forefathers lived,” Alexeyev said. He has been living with the Burtsevs’ Herd No. 2 in recent months while he researches a book on customs of the Evenki, one of three big nomadic groups in this area of northern Russia who speak a Tungus-Manchu language, practice shamanism and have occupied their land since well before the majority Yakuts, a Turkic people, conquered the area. “Just us, our tents, our knives and guns, and the reindeer.”

Deals Take Priority Over the Evenki

The government of a region with vast riches in diamonds and gold is uninterested in the problems facing the Evenki. Officials are more worried about cutting deals with international businesses than looking after what regional Foreign Minister Vitaly Artamonov dismisses as “the smallest of our minorities.”

There are only 21,000 indigenous people in the Republic of Sakha; 10 times as many people, mostly ethnic Yakuts and Russians, live in Yakutsk. The Republic of Sakha, formerly Yakutia, has a total population of more than 1 million.

Artamonov wants foreign aid to go to the majority. Indigenous people were living a “Stone Age” life, he said. The laws of progress and profit dictated that they give it up and move into modern times. “I am sometimes surprised that you former hunters and reindeer breeders from places like Paris and Oslo want us to stay hunters forever,” he said with heavy irony. “This arouses no special enthusiasm among us.”

Leftover social problems from the Soviet era face the Evenki closer to home. A Soviet conviction that nomadism was “uncivilized” pushed most reindeer herders into villages by the 1950s, where their native language was all but replaced by Yakut, the regional language, or Russian. Mostly male herders worked after that for collective farms, in small groups in the tundra, separated from their families living in the villages. Alcoholism, heart disease, alienation and a widening generation gap led to the emptying of the villages, as young people headed to the city to look for a new way of life.

But there are reasons for hope. Sebyan-Kyuzel is a rundown, cramped place--where fuel is a problem, the school is freezing all winter and the hotel has been boarded up for lack of state money. Still, locals talk of the beginning of a revival of Evenki culture.

About 700 people live here, most of them related, more women and children than men. Prices are at least twice as high as in Yakutsk. Many teenagers want to leave and study in Yakutsk. Some giggle and admit that their secret aim is to get rich quick as part of a hunger for wealth that has gripped Russia.

Over the past few years, however, the local language that the Evenki speak has been taught in schools, first for half the 11-year curriculum and later right through. Students can now study their language at the university level in Yakutsk.

Kids Miss Life in the Wild Uplands

Although kids on the village streets usually speak Russian or Yakut and scheme to get alcohol without their parents finding out, they are also eager to spend summers in the camps, relearning the ways of their ancestors. Up there, parents say proudly, they speak only Evenki and they never drink.

“I’m sorry I’m back,” said Anna, 13, who spent the summer with the herd and returned to the village for the start of the school semester. “It’s boring here, but up there everything is so interesting.”

Lyuda Burtseva has left the uplands and come to the village aboard a U.N. helicopter. She is staying at her home here--a two-room apartment in a wooden house, with a television, until her son Dima has started the fourth grade and settled down with the cousins she is boarding him with for the school year. Lyuda, who has looked forward to this trip all summer, will then return to the herd.

In her warm kitchen, however, she looks pensive. “There’s no money in town,” she said. “And I’m sorry to be leaving Dima. . . . Whenever I get here, it feels claustrophobic; I remember how beautiful it is up with the herd. And I want to go back.”