Vladimir Bogoraz

Bogoraz was born in 1865 in Volhynia, joined the revolutionary movement as a student, and was arrested and sent to north-eastern Siberia in 1889. Political exiles on the Kolyma had time and no work, and several of them turned to the peoples around them. Bogoraz turned to the Chukchi and the Even, learned the language, and began collecting texts.

When Franz Boas organised the Jesup North Pacific Expedition to test whether the peoples of Siberia and of north-western America were historically connected, he needed Russian fieldworkers, and Bogoraz and Waldemar Jochelson, another exile, were the obvious choices. Bogoraz worked the Chukchi peninsula in 1900 and 1901. The Chukchee, published in the expedition's memoirs between 1904 and 1909, runs to three parts covering material culture, religion and social organisation.

It is a strange and valuable book. It records the Chukchi spirit world, the drum, the assistant beings, sacrifice, and the practice sometimes translated as the soft man, in which a specialist changes gender at the instruction of the spirits. It also records, with some humour at his own expense, that the Chukchi found the ethnographer's questions eccentric. Bogoraz wrote fiction about the same region under the name Tan, and the two bodies of work read very differently.

After 1917 Bogoraz became an official as well as a scholar. He was among the founders of the Committee of the North, established in 1924 to administer the small peoples of the Soviet Arctic, and of the Institute of the Peoples of the North at Leningrad, which trained indigenous students and developed written forms for their languages. He also founded the Museum of the History of Religion in Leningrad, housed in the Kazan cathedral, whose brief was the comparative study of religion in a state committed to abolishing it.

The result is a career at cross-purposes with itself, and it is better stated plainly than smoothed over. The same decades in which the Institute produced the first Chukchi and Nenets literacy also produced the collectivisation of reindeer herds, the closing of ritual grounds and the prosecution of shamans. The same museum that preserved ritual objects displayed them as evidence for the backwardness of the people who had made them. Bogoraz argued for gradualism and against the harsher measures, and the harsher measures were taken anyway.

He died in 1936, before the worst of it. The Chukchee is still the reference work, and the position it occupies, an indispensable record made from inside an apparatus that was dismantling what it recorded, is the ordinary condition of the Siberian ethnographic archive rather than an exception within it.