Khanty and Mansi, the Small Peoples of Siberia
There are now only a few thousand people. The definition of territories and the integration of peoples continues to Russias' priority. Moscow would like to reduce all its ethnic groups - Ukrainians included - to the tame folklore of the Khanty and Mansi.
Moscow (AsiaNews) - Specialist Arkadij Baulo, deputy director of the Institute of Archaeology and Ethnography of the Russian Academy of Sciences, has illustrated the current conditions of two minor peoples of the Russian Federation: the Khanty and the Mansi on Sibir.Realii. There are now just a few thousand of these people living in the Khanty-Mansijskaja Autonomous Province, half a million square kilometres in the centre of Siberia where one and a half million people live, 80% of them Russians and Tatars.
These are two distinct ethnic groups, but with a common destiny, whose names are even linked in the title of the main city of Khanty-Mansijsk. Until 1940, the city was called Ostjako-Vogulsk, because the first Russian colonisers called the Khanty 'ostjaki', and the Mansi 'voguly'. In reality, the life of these peoples was linked more to the rivers and the taiga than to the city: each family stock of the Khanty received a river as usufruct from which they drew their wealth without affecting the natural resources, protected by the gods of the forests and rivers. The wooden images of these deities were kept in the family in a sacred place in the granary called the 'ambar'.
One had to enter the ambar 'without evil thoughts', which would otherwise cause black streaks to appear on the trunks of the trees. Even today, travellers marvel at the extraordinary whiteness of the birch trees in the Khanty Valley on the Ob River, which at 3,560 kilometres competes with the Volga and the Enisej for the palm of the longest in Russia.
Earlier this year, an exhibition of khanty and mansi cult objects was inaugurated in Akademgorodok, the university citadel of the Siberian capital of Novosibirsk, which aroused great interest and is one of the flagships of the state's policy of recovering local cultures. As Baulo explains, 'the khanty are divided into two parts: in the Jamal area live the northerners, in the Tomsk region the southerners. The Mansi, on the other hand, live in the Berezovsk (birch) province, where Peter the Great's favourite, Aleksandr Menšikov, died in confinement; a small part of them live in the Sverdlovsk region in the Urals.
The origin of the two groups is rather complex: the Khanty are a people originating from the Arctic zone, while the Mansi are Finno-Ugric, related to the Hungarians, Estonians and Finns, coming from the southern steppes, as evidenced by one of their main gods, the knight Mir-Susne-Kum. In the taiga, no one before the Mansi used horses. The town of Khanty-Mansijsk is remembered as the site of the clash between the armies of Prince Samara and the Cossack Ermak in 1582, one of the decisive episodes in the Russian conquest of Siberia.
The issue of borders has always dogged the Russians and is starkly evidenced by the conflict in Ukraine. Invading Siberia in the 16th century, they deported all the Mansi who were west of the Urals, concentrating them on the Asian side. There they integrated, not without difficulty, with the Khanty, who in turn had to get rid of the cannibalistic Nenezi, who were driven out to the more northern spaces. Some argue that the Mansi are rather of Iranian origin, and came largely from south-central Asia.
Today, Khanty and Mansi are in fact one people, although within them linguistic differences and certain genetic characteristics that distinguish the Turanians from Europeans are preserved. They are groups of hard-working people, who have always lived by hunting and fishing, but are also skilled in construction and caring for the environment. The Khanty have preserved the hunting art of reindeer hunting, which attracts people from all over the world, as it is practically the only area where it is allowed.
The colonisation of Siberia took place gradually, first with military expansion, then with Christian Orthodox evangelisation and finally with the establishment of a vast administrative network, which was based on the lager system, called in Soviet times the 'Gulag archipelago' recounted by Aleksandr Solženitsyn. The definition of territories and the integration of peoples continues to be the priority of the Russians, who would like to reduce all ethnic groups, including Ukrainians, to the tame folklore of the khanty and mansi.
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20/04/2023 11:14
28/10/2021 09:23
