When the North Was Red: Aboriginal Education in Soviet Siberia

This work is rather special, some would say controversial, for the fact that Bartels and Bartels took seriously the loyalty and optimism of the students they encountered for Soviet socialist ideals. In the first chapter of the book, they rightly dismiss any discussion of "assimilation" or "Russification" as being inappropriate frames of analysis to account for the complexity of Soviet nationality policy. Instead, throughout the book, they explore two "local" concepts of "national consolidation" and "Sovietization." The former concept refers to what may loosely be described as the Soviet state's affirmative action policy of encouraging representation and active participation from each of the officially recognized nations of this multinational state. The latter concept refers to this state's characteristic stress upon industrial and urban modes of life. Together the two policies combined in an attempt to provide "modern" housing, health care, education and occupations to all nations in a manner which did not threaten local languages or costume (but impacted strongly upon other aspects of day-to-day life). This privileging of hegemonic discourse during a period of time when the Soviet state was at the apogee of its power may strike some readers as being either naive or uncritical. However, their ethnographic sensitivity to the goals of this subset of the Soviet intelligentsia has stood the test of time better than other works written in the sardonic genre of Sovietology. As members of the Siberian intelligentsia today look around at their native villages ravaged by the indifferent policies of market liberalization, they fondly recall the "good times" (rashee bylo luchshee) of the early 1980s documented in this work.