The 1926/27 Soviet Polar Census Expeditions

By David G. Anderson

In 1926/27 the Soviet Central Statistical Administration initiated several yearlong expeditions to gather primary data on the whereabouts, economy and living conditions of all rural peoples living in the Arctic and sub-Arctic at the end of the Russian civil war. Due partly to the enthusiasm of local geographers and ethnographers, the Polar Census grew into a massive ethnological exercise, gathering not only basic demographic and economic data on every household but also a rich archive of photographs, maps, kinship charts, narrative transcripts and museum artifacts. To this day, it remains one of the most comprehensive surveys of a rural population anywhere. The contributors to this volume – all noted scholars in their region – have conducted long-term fieldwork with the descendants of the people surveyed in 1926/27. This volume is the culmination of eight years’ work with the primary record cards and was supported by a number of national scholarly funding agencies in the UK, Canada and Norway. It is a unique historical, ethnographical analysis and of immense value to scholars familiar with these communities’ contemporary cultural dynamics and legacy.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Berghahn Books
• Release date: May 1, 2011
• ISBN: 9780857450449

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THE 1926/27 SOVIET POLAR CENSUS EXPEDITIONS

The 1926/27 Soviet Polar Census Expeditions

Edited by

David G. Anderson

First published in 2011 by

Berghahn Books

www.berghahnbooks.com

©2011, 2014 David G. Anderson

First paperback edition published in 2014

All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without written permission of the publisher.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

The 1926/27 Soviet polar census expeditions / edited by David G. Anderson.

         p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-84545-766-2 (hardback) -- ISBN 978-0-85745-044-9 (institutional ebook) -- ISBN 978-1-78238-097-9 (paperback) -- ISBN 978-1-78238-098-6 (retail ebook)

1. Indigenous peoples—Russia, Northern—Census. 2. Indigenous peoples—Russia (Federation)—Siberia—Census. 3. Ethnological expeditions—Russia, Northern—History—20th century. 4. Ethnological expeditions—Russia (Federation)—Siberia—History—20th century. 5. Indigenous peoples—Russia, North—Social life and customs. 6. Indigenous peoples—Russia (Federation)—Siberia—Social life and customs. 7. Siberia (Russia)—Discovery and exploration. 8. Russia, Northern—Discovery and exploration. 9. Siberia (Russia)—Census. 10. Russia, Northern—Census. I. Anderson, David G. II. Title: Soviet polar census expeditions.

GN585.R9A18 2011

305.800947—dc22

2010051903

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN: 978-1-78238-097-9 paperback

ISBN: 978-1-78238-098-6 retail ebook

Contents

List of Figures

List of Tables

Acknowledgements

Note on Cyrillic Transliteration

CHAPTER 1

The Polar Census and the Architecture of Enumeration

David G. Anderson

CHAPTER 2

Seasonal Mobility and Sacred Landscape Geography among Northern Hunter-Gatherers

Peter Jordan

CHAPTER 3

The Interpretation of Nenets Demography in the First Third of the Twentieth Century

Elena A. Volzhanina

CHAPTER 4

Undaunted Courage: The Polar Census in the Obdor Region

Elena M. Glavatskaya

CHAPTER 5

Household Structure in the Multiethnic Barents Region: A Local Case Study

Gunnar Thorvaldsen

CHAPTER 6

Statistical Surveys of the Kanin Peninsula and the Samoed Question

Igor Semenov

CHAPTER 7

The Sustaining Landscape and the Arctic Fox Trade in the European North of Russia, 1926–1927

Konstantin B. Klokov

CHAPTER 8

The Origin of Reindeer Herding as a ‘Sector’ on the Kanin Peninsula

Stanislav Kiselev

CHAPTER 9

The Spatial Demography of the ‘Outer Taiga’ of the Zhuia River Valley, Eastern Siberia

David G. Anderson, Evgenii M. Ineshin and John P. Ziker

CHAPTER 10

Identity, Status, and Fish among Essei Iakuts

Tatiana Argounova-Low

CHAPTER 11

Subsistence and Residence in the Putoran Uplands and Taimyr Lowlands in 1926–27

John P. Ziker

APPENDIX 1

The Manuscript Archives of the Polar Census Expeditions

APPENDIX 2

Table of Measures

Archival References

Bibliography

Notes on the Contributors

Index

Figures

Figure 1.1. The Census Districts of the Polar Census of 1926/27

Figure 1.2. A census transport caravan at the head of the Moiro river, Evenkiia, 9 January 1927

Figure 1.3. Konstantin M. Nagaev of the Siberian Statistical Administration posing with three unidentified enumerators

Figure 1.4. A family of Sym River Tunguses near their skin-lodge

Figure 1.5. A community of Samoed iurty near Khe

Figure 2.1. Middle Ob´ region (Western Siberia)

Figure 2.2. Polar Census community diaries: Iugan River basin

Figure 2.3. Kaiukovy seasonal mobility (middle Bol´shoi Iugan)

Figure 2.4. Summary model: upper Iugan River settlement and seasonal round

Figure 2.5. Variability in seasonal mobility: upper Bol´shoi Iugan River

Figure 2.6. Variability in seasonal mobility: upper Malyi Iugan River

Figure 2.7. Boat travel along the Malyi Iugan River

Figure 3.1. Map of the Polar Census Enumeration Distiricts in Tobol´sk Okrug

Figure 3.2. The population of Nenetses in the area of the contemporary Iamal-Nenets Okrug in the first third of the twentieth century

Figure 3.3. Map of Obdor district (1929) showing regional groups of Nenetses

Figure 3.4. The total population of ‘Iamal Nenetses’

Figure 3.5. Various population figures for Forest Nenetses from 1924 to 1935

Figure 3.6. Age rounding of Iamal Nenetses more than 40 years old

Figure 3.7. Comparative age-sex pyramids for Samoeds of the Obdor raion and for the Mordy River valley

Figure 4.1. A family of Samoeds in the far northern area of Ural oblast´

Figure 5.1. Household structure by ethnicity (natsional´nost´) in Aleksandrovsk district

Figure 5.2. Population pyramid for Aleksandrovsk district in five-year age cohorts, gender and marital status

Figure 6.1. Members of the Northern Expedition of St. Petersburg University interviewing Vasilii Ivanovich Kaniukov, Brigadier, Brigade 10

Figure 6.2. Map of the Timan, Kanin and Bol´shezemel´ tundras circa 1840

Figure 6.3. Fragment of a card from the Survey of the Reindeer Herding Families of the ‘Dead-Zone’

Figure 6.4. Map of the Kanin Peninsula 1926–27

Figure 6.5. The Oral History Archive in the village of Nes´

Figure 7.1. Arctic fox hunting in Komi Autonomous oblast´

Figure 7.2. Roman Sen´ko of the Ethnographic Museum of the Peoples of Russia standing over an old kulema dead-fall trap at the mouth of the Burgenitsa River

Figure 8.1. Brigade 8, Kanin Commune, with the author

Figure 8.2. Comparative rates of income from reindeer herding in two types of brigades per year

Figure 9.1. Map of the Outer Taiga along the Upper Zhuia River, Bodaibo region

Figure 9.2. An Evenki-Tungus transport reindeer camp in the region of the Lena Goldfields at the turn of the twentieth century

Figure 9.3. Age-sex distribution of the aboriginal population of the Zhuia valley from 1926/27 census results

Figure 9.4. The Shilkovs separating cows from their calves at their summer camp on the Lower Bukharikhta in 2007 to prepare them for milking

Figure 10.1. A horsehair net from Lake Essei collected by Lekarenko during the Polar Census Expedition

Figure 10.2. Fedos´ia Egorovna Miroshko prepares iukola, July 2002

Figure 11.1. The Kamen´ region showing the major watersheds, the uplands and lowlands

Figure 11.2. A model of subsistence and settlement with explicit consideration of the social, political and physical environment

Figure 11.3. Boris Osipovich Dolgikh preparing for his Taimyr enumeration

Figure 11.4. A balagan at the mouth of the Kochechum River in 1926–27 in contemporary Evenkiia at the southern border of the Putoran uplands

Figure 11.5. A golomo at Ekondakon at the far eastern borderlands of the Putoran region

Figure 11.6. The seasonal movements of four sets of households in the Kamen´ region in 1926–27

Figure 11.7. A schematic representation of the seasonal movements of four sets of Kamen´ households

Figure A1.1. Polar Census documentation organised by information types

Figure A1.2. Information types within the household card

Figure A1.3. Map of Russia showing the quantities of household cards digitised by region

Figure A1.4. Map of Russia showing the quantities of community diaries digitised by region

Tables

Table 2.1. Overview of Iugan Khant settlement, household mobility and economy

Table 3.1. Demographic data on Nenetses derived from household cards and family-household sheets of territorial formation expeditions

Table 3.2. Family composition of Iamal and forest Nenetses according to data from territorial formation expeditions

Table 3.3. Distribution of Nenets households according to number of people derived from household cards and family-household sheets of territorial formation expeditions

Table 3.4. Indicators of birth and death rates and natural increase of the Obdor raion population according to the Polar Census data of 1926/27

Table 4.1. Inventory of documents filed and discovered from the four Obdor Polar Census parties of the Ural Polar Census expedition

Table 4.2. The number of sel´sovety, settlement, households and people by their nomadic or settled status

Table 4.3. Population of the Obdor Region according to nationality and language

Table 4.4. Prices of the goods most in demand at the trading post Syr´e in Nyda from before World War I and in 1926

Table 5.1. Self-reporting of identity in Aleksandrovsk district according to the 1926/27 Polar Census

Table 5.2. The household of Ivar Skere in Bol´shaia Ura surveyed 10 December 1926

Table 5.3. Household types in Aleksandrovsk district 1926

Table 5.4. The ethnicity (natsional’nost’) of married partners, Aleksandrovsk district, 1926

Table 6.1. A summary of the available statistics for Kanin Samoed and Izhemets populations by year showing households and populations (1856–2006)

Table 6.2. Zyrian households registered at Kuloi in 1926

Table 6.3. The structure of nomadic households on the Kanin tundra by ethnicity in 1975

Table 6.4. The nomadic population of the Kanin tundra by ethnicity in 1975

Table 6.5. The nomadic households of the Kanin tundra by ethnicity in 2007

Table 6.6. The nomadic population of the Kanin tundra by ethnicity in 2007

Table 7.1. The number of households hunting Arctic fox in the north of Arkhangel´sk guberniia

Table 7.2. A comparison of Arctic fox hunting practices between nomadic Samoeds and Komi-Izhemetses in the European North

Table 7.3. A comparison of Arctic fox hunting households in the North of Komi Autonomous oblast´

Table 7.4. The number of Arctic fox traps in the north of Arkhangel´sk guberniia (GAAO 760-1-28: 1–48)

Table 8.1. A comparison of the income structure for families living in two types of brigades, 2007

Table 9.1. Contemporary Aboriginal Population of selected settlements in Bodaibo region (2002–2008) by nationality

Table 9.2. A summary of Imperial-era populations for the Zhuia Administrative Clan, Olekma Region

Table 10.1. Reindeer ownership by households around Lake Essei

Table 10.2. The percentage of households at Lake Essei catching specific species of fish in 1926–27

Table 11.1. Table of subsistence resources of three Essei Iakut encampments at Kamen´ in 1926–27

Table A1.1. Index of sections within the household card

Table A1.2. Index of sections within the household diary

Acknowledgements

This book is the result of the collective work of a large team of people. The work on locating, classifying and digitising the primary manuscript records of the Polar Census began in 2000 and continues as this book goes to press. I am especially grateful to Ol´ga Robertovna Sordiia, director of the State Archive of Krasnoiarsk Territory, and her team, for helping us design a protocol for organizing and digitising the large collection of material in Krasnoiarsk. I hope that much that we learned then will be used to preserve and to analyse other collections in that archive for future generations. I am also grateful to the team at the Krasnoiarsk Regional Museum for finding and then also designing a new set of techniques for digitising the photographs and glass plate negatives associated with the Turukhansk Polar Census expedition. From our first work in Krasnoiarsk, this project spread to work in archives in North, Eastward and Westward. I would like to thank the archivists Aitalina Afanas’evna Zakharova (Iakutsk), Sergei Gennad´evich Ovchinnikov (Irktusk), Anatolii Alekseevich Okuneev and Oleg Sarafanov (Ekaterinburg), Tat´iana Ivanovna Lakhtionova (Sykyvkar), Ol´ga Ivanovna Korneeva (Arkhangel´sk), and Natal´ia Ivanovna Galaktionova (Murmansk) for helping us work with their collections. I am also thankful to the archivists in the Russian Far East who helped us for many weeks to locate material, even if there were no specific results.

This project would not have been possible without the help of several Russian scholars who devoted several years of their time to finding and interpreting the Polar Census results. All of them are published here as authors in this book, but their work in signing agreements and in digitising materials for a common catalogue went far beyond the range of their own scientific interests, published here.

A large number of computer programmers and web designers have devoted months of their time to making the archive of the Polar Census expeditions accessible both as digisitised photographs and as an online database. The three databases used for collecting the texts and statistics were designed by Nikolai Zhukov and Edoardo Pignotii (both of the University of Aberdeen) and Yngvar Natland (of the University of Tromsø). The web-interfaces were designed by Nikolai Vasil´evich Martynovich (KKKM), Darren Shaw (University of Alberta) and Gordon Neish (University of Aberdeen).

Finally we are all grateful to our sponsors who have supported this work involving a team of forty-seven people in ten cities. The Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada supported the initial cataloguing of the manuscript archive in Canada through a module of its Major Collaborative Research Initiative (SSHRCC MCRI 412-2000-1000). The main work of photographing and entering the records from Turukhansk, Iakutsk and Irkutsk was done through a small grant from the Economic and Social Research Council of the UK (ESRC 22-0217). The digitization of the photographic archive of the Turukhansk Polar Census expedition was supported through a small grant from the British Academy (SG 35555). The Research Council of Norway (NFR 167040) supported the bulk of our work in finding and digitizing collections in the Russian North, Western Siberia, Iakutiia and the Far East. The NFR also sponsored our field research inspired by the Polar Census collection in the Kanin peninsula and in Bodaibo district, Irkutsk oblast´ (NFR 179316). A small grant from the European Science Foundation EUROCORES BOREAS programme supported one two-day seminar with the authors to discuss the manuscript.

A group of graduate students from the University of Aberdeen and the University of Alberta were employed in preparing this manuscript – and they did an excellent job. Aline Ehrenfried catalogued the initial manuscript collections from Krasnoiarsk. Maria Nakhshina prepared preliminary translations of four chapters. Olga Pak translated one chapter. I am grateful for the help of Joseph Long for helping to alter the syntax and style of two of the chapters. I am especially grateful to Maria Nakhshina who helped to assemble the manuscript and verify the citations, and to chase down missing references.

The editor gratefully acknowledges a publication subsidy from the Research Council of Norway (NFR 202348) to support the publication of such a large number of tables and illustrations.

Note on Cyrillic Transliteration

Words spelled in languages using the Cyrillic alphabet (Russian, and the indigenous languages of Siberia) are in italics and transliterated using a simplified version of the Library of Congress transliteration system. All iotised vowels, excepting ‘e’, are transliterated with a Latin ‘i’ without the ligatures that bind the two vowels together. Therefore Якутия is rendered as Iakutiia and not kutī .

The spelling of names for the aboriginal peoples of Siberia is based upon the root for a singular person (or a singular male person if there is not generic root). A Latin ‘s’ is added for plurals and ‘es’ if the transliteration system places an ‘s’ at the end of the root, i.e. Nenetses. In the book we use both Imperial and Soviet-era identity markers since these identities were not standardized at the time of the Polar Census.

The Polar Census manuscripts recorded weights and measures predominately in Russian Imperial units. For accuracy, most chapters and tables present the raw data in the original but at the instance of the first citation the editor has added a co-efficient to translate the measure into the metric system. The table of weights and measures in the appendix presents a full set of co-efficients.

Similarly, administrative units were in a radical state of flux in the 1920s, and it was not uncommon for regional boundaries to shift even during the year that the census was conducted. As a result, we have used the names of the units, italised, in Russian with a shorthand translation in square brackets upon first usage, i.e. uezd [district]; raion [district]. Quotation marks are placed around the names of Soviet-era collective institutions, as is standard practice in Russian texts: ‘Red Khomolkho’.

Data from Russian archives is represented in-text with a simplified, abbreviated system of the archive abbreviation and the classmark system. A full explanation of this system, and the abbreviations, precedes the central bibliography at the end of the book.

In 1925, following several years of civil war, the leaders of the new Soviet state began to look northwards. Up until this time Arctic Siberia and the Russian North were considered marginal spaces. Populated with tribes labelled as ‘alien-outsiders’ (inorodtsy), it was a landscape often defined by what it lacked. Lying beyond the reach of roads and the recent railway, it was a difficult and costly region over which to plan resettlement. Further, its climate made the land unsuitable for traditional Russian styles of cereal agriculture. As it became increasingly apparent that the world revolution was not forthcoming, planners realised that Northerners would also have to become active parts of the Soviet project. As a prelude to the first Five-Year Plan, the Central Statistical Agency of the Soviet Union designed a series of surveys setting the groundwork for a social experiment aimed at transforming relationships among people and between people and their lands. Part of these preparations involved a well-known general population census which, for the first time, would provide a universal standardised picture of the population built-up from the enumeration of individuals and rejecting Imperial-era estate categories such as ‘peasant’ or ‘alien’. A less-known project of this era was the no less ambitious attempt to conduct a total economic and demographic survey of the polar and taiga regions then known as the Northern Frontiers (severnye okrainy). Unlike its cousin, the 1926/27 Polar Census was designed to take place over eight months and to fold together a demographic survey with an inventory of household architecture, equipment, livestock and budgets and a general inscription of what for the lack of a better word were called ‘settlements’ (poselennye). Over the course of the year, the enumerators of the Polar Census would survey no less than 33,000 settled, nomadic and semi-nomadic northern households and return hundreds of thousands of pages of tabular data, narratives, diaries and photographs covering a vast region stretching from the Kola to the Chukot Peninsulas. Epic in its scopes and aims, the Polar Census had a deep effect on the Soviet North, training an entire cohort of statistician-ethnographers and coining the lexica by which the Soviet North was addressed, mapped, collectivised and appropriated.

The purpose of this volume is to introduce English-speaking readers to the published and unpublished documents generated by the Polar Census expeditions. The volume is the product of eight years of collaborative research involving a large team of archivists and scholars working in twelve cities of the Russian Federation. The heart of our work was to discover and re-assemble the primary record cards of several of the Polar Census expeditions, which as this book goes to press, consist of an archive of over 6,000 household cards (representing over 30,000 individuals), 800 community diaries and a large archive of photographs, correspondence, diaries and memos.¹ Reading collections of the primary manuscript records, we were able to flip the telescope of statistical interpretation to look back upon the families, and in some cases the individuals, whose lives were represented in the published aggregate figures. We also found it interesting to turn the census instrumentation inside-out to query the central and local administrators who were asking the questions. Many of the authors in this volume are also field ethnographers who were able to contextualise the surviving archival records through the memories of those living in the same Northern communities today. This ethnohistorical approach, we argue, not only breathes life into the documents but also helps us to settle some theoretical questions about how statistical enumerations structure people’s lives. The Polar Census occupies an interesting place in this regard. While many scholars have shown an interest in how enumeration supports the structure of power in state socialist societies, this particular collection also speaks to how local understandings of residence and identity percolated through the documentation, somewhat blurring the crisp categories on the forms. The authors in this volume come from a variety of scientific traditions including anthropology, history, demography, geography and archaeology and use these records to address debates in their disciplines. We hope to demonstrate that this comprehensive description of northern peoples and their lands served not just as a prelude to the dislocations and expropriations that were to follow in the 1930s, but that it offers several alternative genealogies that are still evocative as Northern societies revitalise themselves today.

This introductory chapter has three goals. First, I wish to give an overview of the arguments and themes running through the ten substantive chapters in this collection. Second, I wish to contextualise the design of the Polar Census within a history of Imperial-era enumerations of Siberia and the Russian North. Finally, I will address some of the theoretical debates that the Polar Census archive evokes, making special reference to the analysis of colonial enumerations worldwide. The appendix to the volume provides a guide to the finding-aids we constructed to collections in regional archives with the hope of encouraging further comparative work with this valuable resource.

A major theme running through this volume is the entangled nature of the Polar Census inscriptions, which provided not only a record of people, but their relationships to wild and domestic animals, evocative landscapes and the economic and ecological relationships binding them together. The complex nature of this enterprise is hinted at in its official title. While most modern censuses enumerate individuals living within an administrative region, these expeditions surveyed an ecological frontier. The pripoliarnaia perepis´ speaks to a survey of households clustered ‘around’ the Arctic Circle – a cartographic metaphor describing places that were just beyond the infrastructure of roads and railways of the Russian steppes (fig. 1.1). At its heart this exercise was an exploratory one – the exercise of a state taking a close look at a poorly understood region. For the sake of convenience, we have translated this inscription (perepis´) as a ‘census’ – although in a strict sense the inventory of humans occupied only a small part of this exercise. Reflecting this quality, the chapters in this volume analyse the primary records according to two themes.

The analysis of cultural landscapes predominates in every chapter. As this introduction will demonstrate, the detailed instrumentation for the Polar Census provided a frame within which households were inscribed into named places. As this exercise crossed several cultural boundaries across the Russian North, the manner in which place articulated with identity was not always the same. In many of the chapters we find that identity and ‘nationality’ often gloss with the landscape. We learn from Elena Volzhanina (chapter 3) that the names by which Nenetses in Western Siberia were known parallels the geographic description of their homelands. Further, we understand from Peter Jordan (chapter 2) that it is impossible to reconstruct any ‘community of iurty’ in Western Siberia without understanding the specific hydrology of the rivers and the resources they offer. True to this particular culture region, landscapes are seen not only as reservoirs of proteins and calories, but as ‘sacred’ places (Jordan) which ‘sustain’ life (Klokov, chapter 7). The historical ethnography of sacred or sustaining landscapes blurs the traditional definition of landscape by enlivening it with moral qualities. Anomalies in the way that communities were classified in the manuscript data often show the intersection of geography and cultural practice. This is evident in subtle designations, such as those in use in the Russian North, where an open treeless landscape could be sub-divided into one or more ‘tundras’ (Semenov, chapter 6; Kiselev, chapter 8; Klokov). As Anderson, Ineshin and Ziker illustrate through their fieldwork in Irkutsk oblast´, forest glades which still survive today, are markers of special places or nodes where people kept animals over several hundreds of years (chapter 9). Several of the contributors to this volume have dealt with this complex portrait of cultural landscapes graphically by using their present day knowledge of the tundra and taiga to draft maps of the relation of families to one another, and of the extent of their movements. The maps by Peter Jordan (chapter 2), Igor Semenov (chapter 6) and John Ziker (chapter 11) illustrate how historical data can be represented visually to accentuate ecological relationships.

Figure 1.1. The Census Districts of the Polar Census of 1926/27 (TsSU 1929)

Building on this theme, several chapters tease out aspects of cultural identity based on the lifestyles of groups of people (Klokov; Kiselev; Semenov; Ziker; Argounova-Low, chapter 10). These contributors use the primary source material to document the well-remarked fact that cultural identities (or ‘ethnicity’) are not existential convictions but are linked to what people do. For Argounova-Low the types of fish consumed give an important clue to the identity and the misinterpretation of status among Essei Iakuts. Konstantin Klokov, in a creative reading of the primary documentation, demonstrates how human groups can be differentiated not through their declared identity but through their tools and the efficiency with which they applied themselves to the hunt of the Arctic fox. Kiselev notes that raw numbers of reindeer and hunting equipment similarly give clues to different strategies that people employ to survive chaotic times, be they the Russian civil war or the dislocations of perestroika. John Ziker notes certain long-term continuities of hunting practice that can be described through the strategy of designing task-based ‘encampments’. The chapters by Igor Semenov and Tatiana Argounova-Low also remind us that at the start of the Soviet period, subsistence practice was closely linked to politics, and the wrong type of practice could be dangerous activity. The question of how these census results were used as a form of state surveillance is an alltoo-common one in the history of colonial censuses and is one that this introduction will treat in more detail.

The case studies presented here cover the entire range of the surviving manuscript material from the Russian North to Central and Eastern Siberia (the manuscript material of the Polar Census in the Russian Far East has not yet surfaced). In the first part of the book, chapters from Western Siberia (Jordan; Volzhanina; Glavatskaya, chapter 4) discuss the spatial and demographic anomalies that can be read from the primary manuscript data. The Russian North is featured in the central section of the book. Gunnar Thorvaldsen (chapter 5) compares the demography of a range of well-known and less-known identity groups from the manuscript records from the Kola Peninsula. This is followed by three chapters on the history and contemporary subsistence dynamics of Nenets and Komi on the Bolshezemel´ tundra (Semenov; Klokov; Kiseleev). The book concludes with three chapters from Eastern Siberia focusing on subtle arguments about identity and the use of landscape in what is today Taimyr, Evenkiia and Irkutsk oblast´ (Anderson, Ineshin and Ziker; Argounova-Low; Ziker).

An important contribution of this collection is its historiographic technique. The results of the Polar Census were arguably best known by their weakest quality: that of their published aggregate results.² Here, in this volume, almost all contributors mix together summaries from the published aggregate data, with results published in regional publications, as well as anomalies scribbled in the margins of the primary record cards. Contrasting the ‘census-makers’ to the existential puzzlement their questions often elicited has become a bit of hallmark in the critical analysis of colonial censuses in India (Cohn 1987, Peabody 2001) or even the 1897 Imperial Russian census (Cadiot 2004, Darrow 2002). An unexpected finding of our group was an intermediary level of negotiation and interpretation. Scholars working for provincial statistical agencies often elaborated on the centrally-designed questions to the extent that they published their own forms and, most importantly, published alternate and often competing conclusions to those in the central publications. While population data was culled from the record cards to help fill several of the 56 published volumes of the 1926 All-Union census, a series of locally organised research agendas filled an alternative cannon of regional publications and manuscripts, many of which can only be found in provincial archives.³ In the chapters by Elena Volzhanina and Igor Semenov we have particularly good illustrations of how a careful comparison of the analyses done by individuals sitting at different levels of authority allow researchers to expose the aspects of social and political life that were most open to interpretation. The varied pictures that can be gleaned from central versus regional tabulations does not speak so much to the accuracy of the Polar Census as it does to the competing interpretations of how people were related to space.

Before turning to analyse these records in light of the historiography of post-colonial surveys in general, I would like to describe first some of the terms of reference of the survey itself and how it fits into the history of surveys in the region.

A Survey of Inaccessible Places

The unique quality of this survey lay not so much in its comprehensiveness as in the fact that the organisers sought to personally interview every single household head across a difficult terrain. Spurning the term ‘polar’, Kirill Shavrov (1929) of the Far-Eastern census expedition described this project as a survey of places that were ‘difficult to reach’ (trudnodostupnye) placing the accent upon the logistical problems of reaching these places, but also the difficulties of describing them (fig. 1.2). In this sense, accessibility provides an interesting interpretive frame within which to analyse this material.

In 1926 (and to some extent today) most of the regions subject to this survey were located far from central transportation corridors. However, distance and terrain at this time often served as a metaphor for resistance (Scott 2009). What was less commented upon in the official publications, but well-known, was the fact that large parts of Siberia and the Far East, as well as in European Russia, had been inaccessible due to the civil war. The Bolshevik administration had previously attempted and failed to survey many of these regions in 1917, 1920 and 1923.⁴ With these recent failures in mind, the Central Statistical Administration agreed to extend the ‘critical day’ of enumeration from one day (17 December 1926) to nine months (roughly June 1926 to March 1928) allowing census teams the time they needed to reach all outlying households by boat or reindeer sledge, or on foot. These romantically-stylised logistical difficulties served as a convenient pretext for local civic and government agencies to plan their own independent surveys of nomadic peoples – a goal that some archival evidence suggests they had coveted for many years. To some degree, the Polar Census enterprise was a goal in itself – a proof that every regional authority had the capacity to make contracts with local translators and guides and held the necessary geographic knowledge to reach every corner of their domains. ‘Accessibility’, then, served as a convenient slogan to release resources both for a central administration with its eye on the first Five-Year Plan, and for local scholars interested in detailed descriptions.

Figure 1.2. A census transport caravan at the head of the Moiro river, Evenkiia, 9 January 1927 (AKKKM 7930-1/02-16) Photograph by N. P. Naumov.

The archived discussions leading up to the survey itself carry an unmistakable impression that this census was a unique event – a spirit which flowed over into a wide-ranging debate on instrumentation. The cornerstone document of the general All-Union census was a small ‘personal form’ (lichnyi listok), eliciting basic demographic information on individuals including ‘new’ data on nationality and more traditional data on mother tongue, occupation and military service.⁵ Given the efforts invested into reaching Northern places there was a call to augment the personal form with more comprehensive tools. Provincial statistical bureaux began their campaign with a special request to combine together the general population survey of December 1926 with a survey of rural economy (sel´skoe khoziaistvo) originally planned for the previous summer. Rather than sending enumerators twice around remote tundra and taiga locations, many of which were only accessible in the winter, the regional statisticians successfully lobbied for a single survey that gathered the details of the personal form along with very specific information on various economic ‘sectors’ (such as ‘fisheries’, ‘hunting and fur-trapping’, ‘reindeer husbandry’), the tools and dwellings held by households, and their main consumption items. In April of 1925 regional statistical administrations were asked to plan and budget for a combined survey ‘in one excursion’ (za odin ob˝ezd) initiating a wide discussion on the types of data that were representative of these difficult-to-access places (GAAO 187-1-848: 17). As the appendix to this volume documents, the results of this discussion varied from region to region. However, all agencies administered a double-sided A3-sized form to every household head (on which the questions of the personal form were a small, compressed part) and each community was documented on a sizable 32-page ‘community diary’. Some regional agencies also collected additional information on sanitation, kinship relationships and ethnography. By comparison, the general 1926 census project fell into the background. In 1928, the central agency even had to remind each regional agency that they were to extract the 16 data-points on each individual from their complex instruments onto a personal form in order to complete the aggregate picture of the Soviet Union.

Aspects of this ‘survey of inaccessible, northern places’ were also linked to alterity. Before the Council of People’s Commissars stamped a neutral geographical label on this special survey, the preparatory documentation described it as an enumeration of indigenous peoples; literally a ‘census of people-in-their-places’ (tuzemnaia perepis´).⁶ This conceptual distinction also influenced the design of the instrumentation, which incorporated extremely detailed questions on reindeer husbandry, elicited descriptions of ‘tribal’ and ‘clan’ affiliation and place names (often in native languages), recorded the main encampments in a presumed seasonal round, and left spaces open for enumerators to record artefacts or practices that to them seemed important in classifying everyday life. What is striking when one first glances at the cards is the sheer quantity of questions documenting domestic animals, subsistence practices, collective identities and relationships between people. Leaving aside the bulk of the questions of the household card, 75 per cent of which comprise a check-list inventory of tools used and species hunted, an important subset of questions submerge the discrete identity of a household head under a number of overlapping categories describing language fidelity, territorial use, and a mixed matrix of both Tsarist and Soviet administrative categories. In order for the documentation to be submitted, each household in turn had to be nested in a fixed, named community (poselennyi). That place was further documented in the community diary with an exhaustive description of its seasonal phrenology, access to transportation corridors, customs and rituals, and incorporation into the regional markets judged by lists of prices. The questions on the community diary pushed the enumerator to go well beyond human demography to explore unfamiliar social and natural environments.

The question arises of whether or not this exercise is best described as a census at all in the modern sense. Most historians of science make a distinction between numeric inventories designed to facilitate a particular task (such as tax collection) and a survey designed to sketch the contours of a biopolitical entity such as a ‘population’ (Hacking 1990; Curtis 2001; Peabody 2001). Task-specific registers, like lists of baptisms submitted by Orthodox missionaries, have an ever-expanding quality wherein another pagan family or another newborn can always be added to the ecumene. Population enumerations, by contrast, have a hermetic quality circumscribing the universe that they represent. The task-based lists often serve to define relationships. For example, an individual could conceivably ask a clerk to consult the list to confirm his children’s baptism, or to prove that he had already extinguished his fur-tax obligations. By contrast, population enumerations are ideally anonymous such that an individual is defined only by relationship to a broader category such as being one of the 24.6 per cent of the population that is male and between the ages of 18 and 59, or one of the 15,083 enumerated nomadic Tunguses.

It perhaps will come as no surprise to learn that the Polar Census does not fit easily into one of these two types. The logistical challenges of surveying these remote regions made the census often look more like an open-ended population registry. Due to the fact that this survey took place over the better part of a year, enumerators used the nominal data to construct a population list in order to guard against repeat registrations. The census was not finished even when the forms were returned since regional statistical offices would exchange forms with each other in order to help each other achieve a complete picture of citizens crossing the boundaries of their newly designed districts. The fact that almost all of the primary nominal forms survived only in provincial archives speaks to the fact that regional administrations coveted them as registers and not just as draft sketches towards some greater, super-organic picture.

On the other hand, the terms of reference for the Polar Census make it clear that the goal was to create a picture of a northern population (naselenie). In the words of Konstantin M. Nagaev, the head of the Siberian Statistical Agency, as he was lobbying for funds for a multi-volume set of publications based on the census manuscripts:

One should not forget that although we have controlled the Polar North of Siberia for over three centuries we hardly have a complete and coherent description of either this gigantic territory or its mysterious inhabitants – and this despite sending out all sorts of different expeditions almost every year. We still even don’t know with any accuracy the population and a list of populated places. A large group of people, including local and central administrations, many northern [trading] organisations, and just those who are interested in the North have high hopes that the Polar Census will fill this lacuna (probel). (GARF 3977-1-355: 32–32v)

The same spirit is echoed in an important speech by Mitrofan P. Krasil´nikov (1926: 2, 9), one of the organisers of the All-Union Census, who spoke of the importance of surmounting the ‘colossal distances’ and ‘unusual difficulties of travel’ in the North in order to create a seamless ‘public inventory’ (narodnyi balans).

This same ‘need to know’ is echoed in the introduction to almost every central and regional publication of the census results. The extraordinary efforts invested into interviewing every single household head in these hard-to-reach regions signalled a new era of relationships. Imperial-era surveyors, be they missionaries or tax-collecting Cossacks, were content to know the ‘aliens’ at the level of large legal collectivities such as the tribe or administrative clan. The fact that it was thought possible to subdivide these alien groups into households, and to identify household heads who could be interviewed, were important innovations that would change the relationship between Northerners and the state. In Moscow, administrators might look upon northern minorities vaguely as representatives of ‘nationalities’ which might be ‘disappearing’ or in need of development or liberation from ruthless speculators. However, for regional administrators, this exercise gave each household a name, and that name was now linked to inventories of animals, equipment and geographic knowledge which could be marshalled to build a civic infrastructure.

Mediating the political importance of this survey is what can only be described as a type of enthusiasm which comes through from archived correspondence and field diaries, and occasionally in turns of phrase on the cards themselves. In his overview