Isn’t it the same thing, we wondered? In Russia, there is almost always a desire to justify the central state even among those who suffer from it. We were surprised to hear such words from one who militated against glorifying Stalin.
Our talk turned to other topics. After 1991, Levin told us, when the Republic began receiving revenues from its diamond mines, the leadership chose to spend them on transforming the city into a megalopolis, at least as the Sakha understood it, rather than on health care and education. Yet they did designate some funds for the cultural sphere. The resulting ethnic revival helped quell separatist aspirations, with the Sakha finding themselves free to be Sakha in their own land. A more practical question did arise: namely, just what purpose independence would serve. Yes, Sakha’s resources would make it the richest country, at least per capita, on earth, but most businesses, particularly those in the diamond sector, are run and owned by Russians. Ethnic divisions do remain: the Sakha tend to hire Sakha; Russians prefer to deal with Russians.
“A balance between ethnicities has not been found on the republic’s level,” Levin said.
He was right. Time and again, we heard from Yakutsk Russians, who had little positive to say about their city, “We’ll all leave, and those Yakuts can stay and do what they want.” On the flight from Blagoveshchensk, a young Russian woman sitting next to us kept repeating, “I can’t wait to move to Blagoveshchensk, from this godforsaken Yakutsk—hot, cold, dirty, with mosquitos and nothing to do.”
Yet these Russians vastly underrated their Sakha conationals. We saw evidence of this in Vecherny Yakutsk, where Russian and Sakha journalists worked side by side, and a young Sakha photographer whose name, Saidam (“talented, savvy” in translation), described him welclass="underline" he really impressed us with his knowledge of cities via 2GIS, a Russian search engine company (developed in Novosibirsk). He was also an expert on New York jazz clubs, though he had never traveled abroad. So removed from the world, the Sakha were as ambitious as anyone. Perhaps, in fact, their remoteness gave them special incentive to nurture their ambitions.
Levin told us that although couples were, in Yakutsk, having fewer children than ever, the drop in population was compensated for by an influx of out-of-work youths moving in, as reindeer farms in the outback are running into hard times. The republic’s cultural rejuvenation, has, moreover, had one negative consequence no one expected: imbued with Yakut nationalism, many schools now offer education only in Yakut, which means students are not learning proper Russian.
“These kids,” he said, “will have no college in their future, since nobody teaches classes in the local language. Education levels and expertise in various fields will be falling.”
That being the case, how could the Sakha, if independent, run the diamond and gold businesses, revenues from which sustain the local budget? To take advantage of the recently emerged hesitation in Sakha about independent statehood, and also following his own growing autocratic tendencies, Putin did away with the title of “president” and replaced it with “Leader of the Sakha Republic.” It is unconstitutional to have two presidents in one country, Sakha was informed. Given all the potential complications from splitting away, perhaps it was for the best that Sakha remained part of Russia.
The day was ending, and we walked outside with Levin, where his son awaited him in a spotless black SUV. The languid blue-gold light of evening was coming on, the mosquitos and midges were whirling in dark columns against the sky. He had given us a frank assessment of how things were in his republic, free of the ethnic chauvinism so many Russians evince toward Yakuts. We thanked him for his time and parted ways.
In the Oyunsky State Museum of Yakut Literature (dedicated, as the name indicates, to the native-born poet and writer Platon Oyunsky, who lived from 1893 to 1939) our poet-guide Nikolai Vinokurov told us, in accented Russian, the heroic story of how the Yakuts both resented and embraced Russian culture. This Sakha man, like many here going by his Russian name, spoke of the “civilization” the Slavic outsiders brought with them. One panoramic painting illustrated the gist of his message. It showed a landscape of tundra, low hills, and yurts with hearth fires that kept burning in summer to ward off mosquitos and midges; Sakha herding cattle and riding horses; and old men reciting the tales of the Olonkho, their traditional oral epic. (The United Nations has recognized the Olonkho as part of humanity’s “intangible cultural heritage.”)
The Yakuts, as the painting had it, dwelled in a sort of prelapsarian, boreal idyll before the Russians arrived.
However, the story isn’t so simple. Sakha owes at least its written literary traditions to Russian missionaries who arrived in the nineteenth century. Under the direction of Bishop Innokenty—later canonized as the Siberian missionary—Saint Petersburg’s scholars and writers adapted the Cyrillic alphabet for the Sakha language, and priests began translating the Bible into it, thereby laying the foundation for the emergence of Sakha literature. As had Ammosov, Oyunsky stood at the beginning of Sakha’s transformation into a Soviet socialist republic; he composed his poems to resemble the Olonkho but imbued them with Soviet themes. Like many in the 1930s, he was arrested for his “counterrevolutionary” ideas and died in prison.
“It was strange that he was arrested,” said our guide, Nikolai. “He was a good Soviet citizen.” As if being a good Soviet ever protected anyone from Stalin and his security apparatus.
The city’s Museum of Local Lore exhibits document more than a hundred labor camps for political exiles on the Republic’s territory and also show the plight of the Sakha during the Stalin decades. By and large, the Sakha themselves were not victims of the Gulag. Most of the prisoners came from elsewhere in the Soviet Union. Nevertheless, the state did prosecute untold numbers of Sakha for the alleged crime of ethnic nationalism.
After Khrushchev’s Thaw began, Soviet authorities maintained that no purges had taken place in Sakha. The Sakha saw things differently. Many farmers, accused of resisting collectivization (of reindeer herds, for the most part), were forcibly relocated to other areas but given little time to pack and prepare. Thousands died from cold on the road.
Yet contradictions abound. The 2003 monument to Oyunsky, a victim of such Soviet repression, stands on a square with Dzerzhinsky’s bust, on Dzerzhinsky Street, just behind him. Stalin’s own bust lurks a few blocks away—two monuments to murderers and one to a victim of Soviet repression.
As we walked out to look for a place to dine one evening, black clouds massed over the flat bogs and taiga sweeping away from the Old City at the edge of town. We came across the Dikaya Utka (Wild Duck) pub, one of Yakutsk’s restaurants offering “traditional” cuisine, and chose it for our meal.
We walked inside to confront a bizarre scene: diners, all Sakha, were playing Hollywood Bingo. Images of Mel Gibson, Bruce Willis, Julia Roberts, and other American actors flashed on a giant plasma screen as the players marked their cards accordingly. In this remote city on the shore of the Lena River, where the wilderness is vast enough that it has served as a realm of exile, and where woolly mammoths are the objects of local pride, American movies serve to connect the inhabitants to people in the outside world.
The juxtaposition of Mel Gibson’s image above Sakha gamesters, of bingo inside and bog outside, combined with the palpable sensation of being far from anywhere we knew induced a disorienting feeling of alienation. Yakutsk, even though ever more “Sakha” and less Russian, did not seem to belong to Asia, but, like Russia as a whole, to a middle area, a gray zone. Often presenting themselves as “prisoners of the empire”—their 64 percent vote for Putin’s fourth term was one of the lowest in the country—the Sakha still seem to embrace their in-between status more than ever before.[47] They now freely foster their ethnicity but can leave big decisions on statehood to the man in the Kremlin.
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“Yakutskyi Gubernator Ne Udivilsya Publikatsiyam O Svoei Otstavke” [The Yakutia Governor Was Not Surprised by Reports of His Ousting], RBC, May 24, 2018.