The Soviet regime's treatment of the various Siberian tribes and ethnic groups varied over time and alternated between fascination, Orientalist condescension, and callous indifference to this region's inhabitants. When formulating policies for these various peoples, the Soviet state often failed to differentiate between them and often reduced a very heterogeneous population into more simplistic and manageable categories.

The early Bolsheviks of the Revolutionary and Civil War Era tended to look at the Siberians with a mixture of romanticism and anti-tsarist politics. Reports of the nomadic and communal living of these peoples meant that the Siberians had built an ur-communist society. This proto-communism fascinated a number of Bolsheviks and built on tropes developed during the tsarist era of a people that were both out of time and seemingly primeval. Moreover, Lenin's approach to the nationality question was to differentiate between oppressor and oppressed national groups and sought to repudiate Great Russian chauvinism. In the case of the Siberian, Bolshevik discourse stressed that the under the tsars, Russian settlers had exploited and repressed the socioeconomic development of the Siberians and that the Bolsheviks would reverse this process. Lenin's envisioned that the Eurasian masses as part of a new global proletariat once Soviet power had transformed it. With regards to Siberia, this meant scrapping the tsarist classification of inordtsy (resident aliens) and considering them tuzemtsy (natives) of the region. After the Civil War, the Committee of the North, which was to sort out the region, briefly toyed with the idea of an American-style reservation system, but instead a system of demarcation of ethnic boundaries within Siberia and creating a liaison with these peoples and the central government. There were also programs to bring administrators to these peoples who would act as missionaries for communism while korenizatsiia (indiginization) programs would promote native CP cadres among the Siberians.

One of the problems with this system of national uplifting and demarcation was that it became increasingly indistinguishable from older methods of imperial regulation and control. The demarcation of ethnic boundaries often had to rely upon older ethnographic data that often had a clear orientalist bent that emphasized the exotic nature of the regions' inhabitants and their lifestyle. Marxist-Leninism added a further element of othering to this process because the apparent lack of economic development among the Siberians allowed Soviet officials to categorize whole communities as reflecting a primitive stage of human development. The Marxist focus on base over superstructure ensured that Soviet officials seldom focused on economic development at the expense of cultural norms and practices in their efforts to uplift the Siberians. What happened meant that the state could lump any resistance to Soviet power to these allegedly backwards elements within the Siberian population. The persistence of orientalism within Soviet ethnography also meant that there were a preexisting gallery of stock villains like shamans that were behind native resistance to Soviet efforts to bring these peoples into modernity. The tensions that resulted from the contradictory impulses of simultaneously trying to modernize Siberian peoples and protect them as members of the Soviet brotherhood of nations would remain one of the constants in Soviet Siberian policy.

The Stalin turn of the late 1920s brought these contradictions into sharp relief. The Stalinist drive to make all regions of the USSR economically productive and harnessed in the service of modernization meant that the Soviet administrators in Siberia began to demand the collectivization of Siberian reindeer, fishing and fur industries. The theory was that a scientific management of these resources would push the Siberian peoples out of their primitivism and be a boon to the Soviet state. Not surprisingly, the impact on the region's reindeer herds in particular was disastrous and many of the native Siberians saw the state as destructively intrusive. As with its campaigns against the Muslims of Central Asia, the Soviet officials interpreted this resistance to the continued presence of backwards social interlopers, with shamans taking the place of imams and the officialdom sought to break the alleged power of these "class enemies" of the native peoples. following the pattern of the hujum in Central Asia, Stalinist officials prioritized the emancipation of women as one of the solutions to the backwardness of these peoples. They also sought to instill youth cadres in which boarding schools would inculcate modern values and instruct the youth in the meaning of Soviet civilization. Instruction was in Russian and reflected part of a USSR-wide project to construct a New Soviet Man in which ethnic cultural markers would be largely irrelevant to individual identity. The Stalinist industrial drive also brought much greater state penetration into the region as the promise of exploiting Siberia's vast natural resources, something often talked about in tsarist circles, but never achieved, was now finally palpable. Working in an industrial concern became a real possibility for indigenous Siberians, but also the lax environmental record of Soviet industry had a long-term impact on the region's natural species.

The post-Stalin era saw the Soviet state take a somewhat softer approach to Siberian affairs. Postwar Soviet ethnography tended to eschew classifying these peoples as primitives and Soviet cultural entities sought to preserve the region's cultural practices rather than just treating it as an irrelevant superstructure. This cultural preservation had a Cold War element to it as the Soviets preferred to contrast their enlightened and scientifically managed treatment of their indigenous population to the US's policies on Native Americans. Yet some of the old tropes of a romanticized people outside of time remained common in Soviet culture. This trope had increased salience in the Thaw and Brezhnev eras as many Soviets lost faith in the grand transformative nature of the Soviet experiment. For example, the novel Dersu Uzala was reprinted and was adapted into a prestigious Soviet-Japanese film production with the Akira Kurosawa depicting the titular Goldi tribesman as honest and true, and therefore not able to stomach modern civilization's regulations and controls. The development of the Baikal–Amur Mainline (BAM) in the late 1960s and 70s brought further industrial development to the region, but also new settlers and yet more pollution. The Gorbachev era brought about a reversal of Soviet stance on the various Siberian peoples. Instead of working towards uplifting and modernizing them, the new course in Soviet Siberian policy was to preserve and protect them from the encroaches of modernity. This reversal was more of a change in tone than substance as it was still treating these groups as still being somewhat innately alien to the Soviet experience and a culture in perpetual stasis.

Sources

Hirsch, Francine. Empire of Nations: Ethnographic Knowledge & the Making of the Soviet Union. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005.

Slezkine, Yuri. Arctic Mirrors Russia and the Small Peoples of the North. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994.