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Sedentarisation and urbanisation, displacement and relocation among Arctic Indigenous populations have been common traits of all modern Arctic nation states in the past century, with heavily traumatic consequences everywhere. This chapter focuses on the Kola Peninsula, Northwest Russia, as an extreme and yet exemplary case of such social engineering in its Soviet variety. I look into Indigenous people’s displacement and its consequences through the theoretical framework of social engineering and using oral history and archival data. The chapter shows the reasons and motivations of the state behind its efforts to remake the social assembly of its Indigenous backyards, as well as the circumstances that were faced by the people concerned. Considerable space is given for quoting oral testimonies, in order to lay bare the heavily traumatic events.

This inquiry into the history of boarding schools for indigenous and quasi-indigenous, tundra-connected children in the Soviet part of Lapland tries to answer why children were sent to a boarding school despite their parents living in the same village, and also why an additional school for mentally disabled children, a school half as big as the boarding school for “regular” children, was opened. Data from oral history interviews among former pupils and teachers, both indigenous and incomers, are combined with archival materials. Using the concepts of cynical knowledge as well as the Bourdieuan notions of social exclusion and reproduction, concealed functions of the boarding school system are identified, among which are the attenuation of housing shortage and the operation of the school out of economic interests, alongside with ethnocentric and paternalist patterns. The stigmatization of mostly Sami children from relocated families as mentally disabled is set in a frame of individualization of the ...

This chapter examines the history of the Soviet boarding school system between the 1960s and the 1980s in Eastern Sapmi, based on materials created in a co-productive approach to oral history and a long-term fieldwork commitment. The testimonies show that schooling experiences were very heterogeneous in nature. Structural racism and the perpetuation of social hierarchies were dominant patterns in Lovozero, the ‘capital’ of the Russian Sami. In Gremikha, another settlement with a boarding school, there was less segregation, which generally led to more positive school experiences. Boarding schools should not be seen as solely responsible for the widespread social despondency among both the parents and children of relocated families, but rather as connected to the preceding mass relocations and as an exacerbating factor. While negative experiences about the school system co-exist with positive ones, the stories show that pupils, parents and teachers could be both victims and agents at the same time.

With this study of the Sami population in the Russian part of Lapland, Lukas Allemann closes a research gap. The author focuses on the little explored period between the end of the war in 1945 and beginning of perestroika. Applying an oral history approach with biographical interviews the author opens up the inner world and structural relationships of this minority ethnic group. For all the differences, contradictions and diverging assessments of the Soviet era, what emerges from this study is that - contrary to the widespread view expressed in the secondary literature - it was not collectivization and terror, but the forced relocations between the 1930s and 70s that represented the deepest rupture in the life of the Sami. The opinion that it was Soviet rule that initiated the destruction of Sami culture is also relativized. Russification and changes in reindeer herding patterns had set in already before the October Revolution.Translated from German language by Michael Lomax.Originally published (in German) by:Verlag Peter Lang, 'Menschen und Strukturen' series. Historisch-sozialwissenschaftliche Studien, Ed. Heiko Haumann, Vol. 18, Frankfurt am Main, Berlin, Bern, Brussels, New York, Oxford, Vienna, 2010.