The history of Siberian shamanism in the 20th century is a history of rupture and continuity. In a few decades, traditions handed down for generations were declared enemies of progress, their specialists persecuted, their objects destroyed or locked away in museums. And yet, by the end of the century, many of these traditions had re-emerged. Understanding how this could happen helps us look more carefully at Siberian shamanism today.
The shaman as «class enemy»
After the 1917 revolution the new Soviet state embarked on a policy of radical transformation of the indigenous societies of the North. In the early years a relatively cautious approach prevailed, entrusted in part to ethnographers who knew the Siberian peoples. From the late 1920s, with collectivisation and the anti-religious campaigns, the attitude changed.
In the propaganda of the time the shaman was portrayed in three recurring ways:
- as a charlatan, deceiving the population with tricks;
- as an exploiter, growing rich on the fees received for rites;
- as an obstacle to modern medicine, schooling and collective labour.
Like members of the clergy of other religions, shamans were deprived of civil rights, excluded from cooperatives and subjected to punitive taxation. In the 1930s many were arrested, deported or killed.
Drums burned and drums in museums
Ritual objects were one of the main targets. Drums, costumes and spirit figures were confiscated, burned, thrown into rivers. Some, however, ended up in the collections of ethnographic museums, where they served exhibitions of «scientific propaganda» presenting shamanism as a relic of the past.
The result is paradoxical: many of the best-preserved Siberian shamanic objects today owe their survival to the very policy that sought to wipe out their use.
Resistance
Repression did not pass without reaction. One of the best-known episodes is the Kazym uprising, in the early 1930s, among the Khanty of western Siberia, together with the Nenets of the area. Its causes included collectivisation policies, the removal of children to boarding schools and the entry of Soviet officials into sacred places, such as Lake Num-To. The uprising was harshly suppressed.
More often resistance was silent. Shamans continued to work in secret, at night, in remote camps; families kept small ritual objects; knowledge was passed on in reduced form within families. In the tundra and the taiga, far from administrative centres, control was looser.
What was lost
It would be naive, however, to think that everything survived intact. What was lost:
| Element | Why it was lost |
|---|---|
| The great public rites | they were visible and easily banned |
| The long chains of transmission | many shamans died without pupils |
| The ritual languages | indigenous languages retreated before Russian |
| The context of life | sedentarisation and boarding schools changed communities |
When, at the end of the century, the traditions came back to light, they often had to be rebuilt from fragments: the memories of elders, museum objects, the texts of ethnographers.
The revival after 1991
With the end of the Soviet Union, shamanism returned openly to the public life of several Siberian republics, notably Tuva, Buryatia and Sakha. Associations of shamans, centres and festivals were founded; collective rites were celebrated again; shamanism also became a symbol of national identity for peoples reclaiming their culture.
This revival has new features:
- many contemporary shamans live in cities and receive people in organised centres;
- traditional knowledge mixes with ethnographic reading and with influences from Western neo-shamanism;
- a relationship with tourism develops, bringing resources but also tensions.
Reading shamanism today
Anthropologists urge us not to judge post-Soviet shamanism as «authentic» or «fake». It is a tradition that has passed through a deep fracture and rebuilt itself with the materials available, as often happens in the history of religions. Studio Esoterico Cornelio shares this view: respecting a tradition also means knowing its wounds.
In short
- From the 1930s the Soviet state persecuted shamans as charlatans and exploiters.
- Many ritual objects were destroyed, others ended up in museums.
- There were uprisings, such as the one at Kazym, but above all a silent resistance.
- Public rites, chains of transmission and part of the ritual languages were lost.
- After 1991 shamanism was reborn, in new forms, in Tuva, Buryatia and Sakha.
