From Savages to Citizens: The Cultural Revolution in the Soviet Far North, 1928-1938

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Abstract
In the mid-1920s the Soviet government singled out about 150,000 ; citizens for an administrative category designated the "small peoples of the north." These were the indigenous inhabitants of the Arctic and sub-Arctic zones of the Soviet Union who subsisted on hunting, fishing and reindeer herding and who were seen by bolshevik officials as the most backward peoples of the new republic, languishing in a pitiful and unacceptable state of "semi-savagery and outright savagery." As such, they needed to be understood as a peculiar phenomenon and governed differently from their more "cultured" countrymen.

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