'The Shaman's Coat': The Fate of Siberia's Native People

Toward the end of the 16th century, Siberia fell to the Russians as an unexpected prize. When this conquest and occupation began, European Russia stood deep in its own ashes after a half-century of war, famine, plague and despotic rule under Ivan the Terrible. Ivan's imperial ambitions had been thwarted to the west by Poland and Sweden and to the south by the Crimean Tatars backed by the Ottoman Turks. Russia then turned to the east, and within the space of a few generations acquired a territory larger than the Roman Empire.

In statistical terms, that territory covers 8.5 million square kilometers (about 1/12 of the total land surface of the globe) and stretches from the Arctic to Central Asia, the Urals to the Sea of Japan. Its mineral wealth makes it potentially the richest resource area on earth. But "not everything that counts can be counted,'' as Albert Einstein once remarked, and after the geologist and the geographer have exhausted their estimation of its dimensions in numerical wonder, there remains its human heart. When the Russians first arrived, Siberia (like aboriginal America) already had a diverse life and culture of its own, and it is the idea of Anna Reid's captivating new book, "The Shaman's Coat: A Native History of Siberia,'' to explore the impact of the Russian conquest on that aboriginal culture's fate.

A former Kiev correspondent for the Economist and the Daily Telegraph, Reid is no ordinary journalist. As in her previous book, "Borderland: A Journey Through the History of the Ukraine,'' she sets out on her travels determined to bring the land of her reckoning alive. In this she is aided by her acute curiosity, fine descriptive gifts and delight in detail. The result is almost always to give us, in her own wry way, an indelible sense of place.

Consider, for example, her description of flying from Moscow to Tobolsk: "The in-flight movie ... was 'Some Like It Hot,' accompanied by rye bread, cucumber and soapy mineral water, served on battered aluminum trays. The Tupolev's engines kept up a homely rumble, and the sun sparkled on the scratches on the windowpanes. As we came in to land, no bossy loudspeaker said to belt up or stow bags in overhead lockers, the unoccupied seats flopped forward in unison and a canteen of cutlery jingled down the center aisle. On the runway our baggage tumbled onto potholed tarmac awash with meltwater and the cawing of rooks.''

Or, later, her impressions of a voyage in western Siberia: "The River Ob, wide, brown, meandering mightily among leafy islets, has cast a spell on our hydrofoil. On deck men in paint-spattered trousers ... smoke in silence, shifting only to point out the rise of a fish or the current's churn past a tethered buoy. ... When the engine cuts, sky and water tilt gently upward, silence washing over us like the floodwater drowning the willows on either bank. The trees part and a village drifts alongside, strung along a low scarp of soft brown earth. Then the cabins and fences spin away, and we are skimming again between mazy walls of green. It would be no surprise if parrots flashed out of them, or a hail of arrows.''

Some part of Siberia's vanishing present will always be preserved by words that attend it with such care. But it is the plight of the indigenous peoples that is Reid's chief concern. Like other conquering powers, the Russians insisted on their colonial right to civilize the "savage'' and make the wilderness their own. Ultimately, their way was cleared by slaughter, alcoholism and disease. Reid's account of her own journey -- part history, part travelogue, part excursion through the outback of Siberian lore -- more or less follows the progress of Russian domination eastward as the Khant, Buryat, Sakha, Ainu, Chukchi and other peoples are subdued.

It was not long before some of them were struggling simply to survive. In 1876, for example, there were said to be only about 1,600 Yukaghirs left, the pitiable remnant of a once-powerful tribe. Here and there, their ancient burial mounds could still be seen, containing skeletons with bows and arrows, spears and shamanistic drums, but the descendants of these mighty warriors had fallen into such indolence and addiction that their chief delight was a coarse Ukrainian tobacco stretched with dung.

Under the Soviets, the Yukaghirs and other small nomadic groups essentially disappeared. Josef Stalin, in fact, distrusted all native peoples because they lacked an "industrial proletariat,'' the only class to which he could pretend to relate. But in the parsing of native life, the new categories did not apply. "The Small-Numbered Peoples,'' Reid explains, "possessed no exploiters and exploited in the Marxist sense. ... Owning a hundred deer did not make a man a kulak; prospective sons-in-law working out their bride-prices were not hired laborers; a shaman was not the same thing as a priest.'' No matter: It was not the people but the categories that counted, and collectivization programs proved as devastating to Siberian natives as to peasants in Ukraine.

The history of their obliteration has since been obliterated -- the erasure of an erasure, so to speak. In St. Petersburg's State Russian Museum, we learn, "the sole evidence of the native Siberians' existence is an 18th-century ivory," while the vast collection housed by the Hermitage contains but a single "china figurine of an Itelmen girl, one of a series of 'national types' produced by the Imperial Porcelain Factory in the 1780s.''

Forty years ago, it was still possible to find whole communities of the Khant, a west Siberian people, where their language was spoken. Today, only the elderly keep it alive. Though a somewhat primitive tongue (in that it lacks a capacity for abstraction), it is evocative and vivid, with a poetic particularity all its own. A photograph, for example, becomes by analogy "a pool of still water;" a hat, "a wide-crowned tree that keeps off the rain.''

Losses of all kinds abound. At Goose Lake, once home to a thriving monastery, the author goes in search of the head lama and finds him "in a cabin in the temple grounds, hiding from his mother, girlfriend and infant sons behind a newspaper. The wall above his bed was decorated with 3-D posters, one of kittens in a basket, another of a table laid with Ben Nevis whiskey and tomatoes sliced to look like flowers.'' The shaman's true power and knowledge, in exaltation, belong to another book. Here we find it in its fall.

Benson Bobrick is the author, among other books, of "East of the Sun: The Epic Conquest and Tragic History of Siberia.''

"The Shaman's Coat." By Anna Reid. Walker & Co. 224 pages. $25.