Siberian Survival


Book Description

The Yamal Peninsula in northwestern Siberia is one of the few remaining places on earth where a nomadic people retain a traditional culture. Here in the tundra, the Nenets—one of the few indigenous minorities of the Russian North—follow a lifestyle shaped by the seasonal migrations of the reindeer they herd. For decades under Soviet rule, they weathered harsh policies designed to subjugate them. How the Nenets successfully resisted indoctrination from a powerful totalitarian state and how today they face new challenges to the survival of their culture—these are the subjects of this compelling and lavishly illustrated book.The authors—one the head of a team of Russian ethnographers who have spent many seasons on the peninsula, the other an American attorney specializing in issues affecting the Arctic—introduce the rich culture of the Nenets. They recount how Soviet authorities attempted to restructure the native economy, by organizing herders into collectives and redistributing reindeer and pasture lands, as well as to eradicate the native belief system, by killing shamans and destroying sacred sites. Over the past century, the Nenets have also witnessed the piecemeal destruction of their fragile environment and the forced settlement of part of their population. To understand how this society has survived against all odds, the authors consider the unique strengths of the culture and the characteristics of the outside forces confronting it.Today, the Yamal is known for a new reason: it is the site of one of the world's largest natural gas deposits. The authors discuss the dangers Russian and Western developers present to the Nenets people and recommend policies for land use which will help to preserve this remarkable culture.For information on the documentaries about life—both human and animal—above the Arctic Circle that Andrei V. Golovnev and Gail Osherenko have made, visit www.filmsfromthenorth.com.




Tent Life in Siberia


Book Description

George Kennan tells the story of his expedition through the Siberian wilderness with a small team of explorers.




Yuri Vella’s Fight for Survival in Western Siberia


Book Description

The book is centred on a fascinating personality, a Western Siberian indigenous poet, reindeer herder and ecological activist, who, in his 40s, made the choice to live in the forest with reindeer. There, he struggled with oil giant LUKoil to ensure his reindeer the possibility to live. A series of essays reflect on his awareness and construction of self and culture, his complex relations with the oil industry, and his native spirituality. It presents insights into what it means to be an indigenous intellectual in post-Soviet Russia at the beginning of the 21st century. Yuri Vella (1948-2013) is not an ordinary representative of his people, but he shows one of the possible forms indigenous leadership could take in Russia, if it aims at giving indigenous peoples the possibility in the near and far future to shape a sustainable relation to nature and their neighbours.




Lost in the Taiga


Book Description

The sole surviving family member, the daughter Agafia, lives by herself in the Lykov family cabin to this day.




Sentence, Siberia


Book Description

Ann Lehtmets is one of the few people alive in the western world to have lived through Stalin's holocaust. This is her tale of survival in a world where existence was difficult for all and deadly for most.




Tent Life in Siberia


Book Description




Escape Via Siberia


Book Description

Through the dramatic true story of one boy-Eliott ""Lonek"" Jaroslawicz-Dorit Bader Whiteman coveys the stories of the dramatic escape of thousands of Polish Jews from the encroaching Nazi menace. Whiteman draws on hours of interviews with Jaroslawicz, as well as extensive archival and other research, to narrate this saga of the only Kindertransport to leave from Russia.




The Lost Pianos of Siberia


Book Description

This “melodious” mix of music, history, and travelogue “reveals a story inextricably linked to the drama of Russia itself . . . These pages sing like a symphony.” —The Wall Street Journal Siberia’s story is traditionally one of exiles, penal colonies, and unmarked graves. Yet there is another tale to tell. Dotted throughout this remote land are pianos—grand instruments created during the boom years of the nineteenth century, as well as humble Soviet-made uprights that found their way into equally modest homes. They tell the story of how, ever since entering Russian culture under the westernizing influence of Catherine the Great, piano music has run through the country like blood. How these pianos traveled into this snowbound wilderness in the first place is testament to noble acts of fortitude by governors, adventurers, and exiles. Siberian pianos have accomplished extraordinary feats, from the instrument that Maria Volkonsky, wife of an exiled Decembrist revolutionary, used to spread music east of the Urals, to those that brought reprieve to the Soviet Gulag. That these instruments might still exist in such a hostile landscape is remarkable. That they are still capable of making music in far-flung villages is nothing less than a miracle. The Lost Pianos of Siberia follows Roberts on a three-year adventure as she tracks a number of instruments to find one whose history is definitively Siberian. Her journey reveals a desolate land inhabited by wild tigers and deeply shaped by its dark history, yet one that is also profoundly beautiful—and peppered with pianos. “An elegant and nuanced journey through literature, through history, through music, murder and incarceration and revolution, through snow and ice and remoteness, to discover the human face of Siberia. I loved this book.” —Paul Theroux




Survival!


Book Description

Survival! is a Capstone Press publication.




Siberian Exile


Book Description

2018 Book Prize from the Association for the Advancement of Baltic Studies 2018 Vine Award for Canadian Jewish Literature in Nonfiction from the Koffler Centre of the Arts in Toronto When Julija Šukys was a child, her paternal grandfather, Anthony, rarely smiled, and her grandmother, Ona, spoke only in her native Lithuanian. But they still taught Šukys her family’s story: that of a proud people forced from their homeland when the soldiers came. In mid-June 1941 three Red Army soldiers arrested Ona and sent her east to Siberia, where she spent seventeen years working on a collective farm. It was all a mistake, the family maintained. Some seventy years after these events, Šukys sat down to write about her grandparents and their survival of a twenty-five-year forced separation and subsequent reunion. Piecing the story together from letters, oral histories, audio recordings, and KGB documents, her research soon revealed a Holocaust-era secret—a family connection to the killing of seven hundred Jews in a small Lithuanian border town. According to KGB documents, the man in charge when those massacres took place was Anthony, Ona’s husband. In Siberian Exile Šukys weaves together the two narratives: the story of Ona, noble exile and innocent victim, and that of Anthony, accused war criminal. She examines the stories that communities tell themselves and considers what happens when the stories we’ve been told all our lives suddenly and irrevocably change, and how forgiveness operates across generations and the barriers of life and death.