Koryak Cultural Loss

The Bay of Korf is a small, sheltered nub of ocean on the northwestern edge of the Bering Sea. Here, the tundra of Northern Kamchatka turns into a beach of grey sand lapped by the bay’s dark blue waters. Twenty thousand years ago, the reindeer that inhabit this tundra, and the salmon that flood into the bay and surge up its rivers each summer to spawn, became a foundation of a flourishing human community here. Today the Koryak people, descendants of those original inhabitants, continue to fish the bay and its rivers, but in a world that has drastically changed. Over the last 300 years, Koryak and Russian cultures have clashed under the tsar, then the Soviets, and now in a post-Soviet economic depression, all of which has left traditional Koryak culture on the verge of oblivion.

On a sunny July morning, I landed at Korf’s small airport – on a spit of land extending out into the middle of the bay. The airport was just a runway with a small wooden building of peeling, faded blue paint. From there, a short ferry ride brought me to Tilichiki, the region’s main settlement, which perches on the bay’s shore. I held on as the crowded ferry slammed into the beach and dove up onto the sand. A drawbridge lowered and commuters wearily filed into the warm and humid air.

In Tilichiki, I stayed with my friend Zhanna’s family, and her father was there to meet me as I disembarked. An older Koryak man, he was scrawny and feeble-looking, with dark skin and black, unkempt hair. He introduced himself as “Lyova” and awkwardly shook my hand. He was drunk. I followed him home and met the rest of the family – Lyova’s sister Natalia and her husband and daughter. Lyova explained that his son Maxim, Zhanna’s brother, was out at their salmon fishing camp on one of the bay’s rivers. Hesitant at first, he eventually explained that this fishing camp was illegal. “My pension is so small. It’s always less than it’s supposed to be. What else can I do, right?” He pleaded, eyeing me with a drunken suspicion as if to make sure I was on his side.

I would come to learn that, for all Russians, the pensions promised during the Soviet era vanished with the socialist state. People are forced to make a living however they can, and in Kamchatka that means illegally selling salmon caviar on the black market. Traditionally, Koryaks only fed caviar to their dogs, but now it has become the only way to making a living here.

Lyova’s family and I walked along the bayshore that first evening. The weather was very pleasant, with a gentle breeze coming in off the water. Lyova pointed across the water to a slight rise on the opposite shore and said, “That’s where I was born. Oleutork, my village. My sisters and I were raised there.” He gestured towards Natalia, his sister, who walked ahead skipping rocks on the bay with her daughter. He continued, “We lived there, but we came to Soviet boarding schools in Tilichiki. All Koryak children did.”

This turned out to be one of the pivotal stories of cultural loss for Koryaks. The children in Lyova’s generation were the first to leave their native villages on the bay to attend a Soviet boarding school here in Tilichiki. Formal education for children was one of the highest virtues of Soviet culture, and native children throughout Siberia were no exception. In these schools, called internats, Koryak children learned the Russian language, Russian literature, and, of course, the history of communism and the glory of the founders of the Bolshevik Revolution. And for the first time in 20,000 years, Koryak children lived in a Koryak world for only a few short summer months each year. Lyova remembers the first time he made that daunting walk around the bay, at the age of five, together with Natalia and his other sister. I pictured Lyova and his sisters dressed in furs, walking along this beach after the salmon run had trailed off in early autumn. I imagined the full weight of Koryak cultural heritage on their tiny shoulders as they walked across a cultural divide that would change Koryak culture forever.

The Koryak language was strongly discouraged in the internats, and Natalia recalled being punished for speaking it as she struggled to learn Russian. The same suppression of native languages occurred across the Bering Sea in Alaska; missionaries there demanded that native children learn English as a means of converting them to Christianity, while in Kamchatka the atheist Soviets demanded Koryak children learn Russian so that they could become liberated in a different way. With opposite ideologies, the two superpowers helped dilute and degrade the indigenous cultures in their respective hinterlands.

When Lyova and his sisters returned home to Oleutork in summer and changed out of their boarding school uniforms, their mother did not allow them to speak Russian in the house. Lyova’s generation of Koryak children were thus caught between the internats and parents embittered by foreign rule.

Back at the house, they showed me a photograph from the internat – a group of Koryak children dressed in school uniforms and standing in neat rows, and a Russian man at the center. Even though Lyova and Natalia recognized what the internats had done to Koryak culture, they spoke adoringly of their teacher, a figure universally loved by the children. I began to appreciate the rift within their culture and within themselves that this generation of Koryaks had navigated since they were small children.

The next day, Lyova and I set out to walk the eleven miles around the lip of the bay to a place he called Kultushnoye. As we walked, Lyova explained how “Kultushnoye used to be a real village, but it was closed down, just like my village. That’s why we moved to Tilichiki. It’s the same story for all Koryak villages on the bay. You’ll talk to people there and learn about it. Now people just fish there in summer.” Lyova planned to leave me in Kultushnoye and continue on to meet Maxim at their fishing camp.

After two hours walking along the glistening grey beach we moved inland and came to Tilichiki’s potato gardens. The sun shone brightly as we passed rickety wooden fences surrounding lush, green fields. A Koryak woman stood up and called to Lyova. They were very endearing, almost flirty, with each other. Each of them pulled out a small bottle of vodka, and we were stuck.

They drank together for over an hour, debating who was to blame for Russia’s socio-economic collapse. He blamed Gorbachev, she blamed Yeltsin. A Russian man hoed his potatoes in the next patch, smirking at the drunken conversation. He stoked a small fire that had burned down to coals and set a blackened kettle of water on a spit. While waiting for it to boil for tea, he sat back, sharpening his hoe. I asked why people here drink so much and he answered, “You see how we live here. There’s no work, no money. Somehow, a man finally gets a few rubles, and he thinks, ‘What will I do with this money?’ So he drinks vodka, eats a little something, and goes on living.”

By the time we set off again, Lyova was quite drunk. He stumbled along, a bony shoulder protruding from his shirt’s stretched collar, his glazed eyes glaring at the dirt road in front of us.

We walked through a landscape of beautiful tundra stretching away to the nearby hills of dark green Siberian pine. We stopped to eat lunch, and as we lay down on the tundra, our weight released the aroma of rosemary from the grass. When I commented on the beauty of the scenery, Lyova answered, “Yes. I live in the tundra.” I would later come to understand that, in Kamchatka vernacular, “tundra” is synonymous with natural beauty, with the primeval state of native life. Koryaks frequently say “coming out of the tundra” to mean attending the internat or moving to Tilichiki.

After another several hours we came to a thin string of nine shacks stretched along the beach. This was Kultushnoye, the former village. Each shack had beside it a rack of drying salmon, bright red glistening filets swaying in the breeze off the bay. Each also had a stout rope stretching out into the bay that traced a row of white floats with a gill net dangling below, invisible to the salmon. Other than a rundown concrete building nearby, there was no trace of the former village.

The handful of people fishing in Kultushnoye included Koryaks and people of mixed Russian-Koryak ethnicity, and they all told the same story of loss. Many were born in Kultushnoye and, like Lyova and his sisters, attended Tilichiki’s internat as kids. Then, in the 1960s, the Soviet government closed Kultushnoye and forced its inhabitants to move permanently to Tilichiki. Most believed that the reason for this relocation was efficiency, whereby consolidation of the bay’s population would allow state services to reach everyone more easily. But no one seemed to know the reason with certainty. Ana, a middle-aged Koryak woman, sarcastically quoted Brezhnev, leader of USSR at the time, “The economy must be economical.”

One day Ana and I ventured out onto the tundra to gather cloudberries (moroshki), each of us dangling empty buckets from our elbows. We slowly strolled over the tundra’s bumpy surface, the moss giving a bit with each step, our footprints filling in with water as we moved on. Ana moved surely, exuding an obvious familiarity with the land.

Ana was born in Kultushnoye, and the forced relocation was still fresh in her mind.

“Immediately after we got to Tilichiki, 100 of our elders died,” she said. “Every month, more and more of them died. It was horrible. People just started drinking, they lost hope, and the generation of elders disappeared. They never wanted to leave Kultushnoye, but the police came and destroyed our brick ovens and broke windows. We had no choice.”

She continued, all the while bending down to pick the bright orange berries, “My mother’s generation was the last to tan and sew reindeer hides. I’ve never done it because I grew up in the internat. My mother once asked me, ‘Do you see all of this stinging nettle around?’ I said, ‘Yeah, so?’ She said, ‘Ana, people used to gather it and make it into rope.’ I’ve never even seen this done,” she said.

While frequently condemning the Soviet government, Ana also cursed her own people for their drunkenness and for passively forfeiting their culture. “Koryak culture is already dead here,” she said. “It died with us. A war wasn’t even necessary to kill us off – we just lay down and died.”

Ana and the others spoke of the former Kultushnoye as a real “Koryak” village, saying things like “We were connected to nature here.” But it became clear that Kultushnoye was actually very Russian, not some ideal of pre-contact indigenous life as one might have imagined. People worked in a communist sovkhoz (state-managed collective farm), tending potato and beet patches and raising pigs. The name “Kultushnoye” is itself a Russian word.

While Koryak culture began to change long before they were born, these people spoke as if the major cultural shift had happened only recently, within their lifetimes. But they looked with romanticism to something much more recent, and to something clearly much more “Russian.” One older Koryak woman pointed out that Kultushnoye itself was the product of an earlier forced resettlement that others did not seem to remember. “Old Kultushnoye,” she said with a toothless grin, “used to be over there.” She pointed a short ways up the Kultushnoye River, one of the bay’s main waterways. In the first decades of Soviet rule, Old Kultushnoye, which probably once had a Koryak name now long forgotten, was moved out onto the coast in order to facilitate easier shipping from the sovkhoz.

Despite these older, forgotten stories of cultural loss and upheaval, the most recent changes held the strongest symbolism. These people were somber, and they had lost something valuable, even if it was not that for which I had expected them to yearn. These Koryaks looked at their own childhoods, to their personal “tundra,” and lamented all that had changed.

While in Kultushnoye I stayed with Babushka Nadia – a mixed Koryak-Russian woman who was short and heavy-set, with light skin and messy brown hair. Like the others, she lived in a wooden shack in Kultushnoye during the summer and made her yearly income by selling illegal caviar. She told endless stories as she went about her strenuous daily work tending the gill nets, salting caviar, and gathering berries for jam or mushrooms for canning. Her stories were full of passion and enthusiasm, even when she spoke of how hard it is to work under a cloud of relentless mosquitoes. She would just smile and laugh and go back to work.

Nadia was strong and obviously loved the natural world, as well as her place and her work on the bay. She talked excitedly about the winters and how much she loved walking all the way here from Tilichiki just to arrive tired and cold, then savoring the wonderful first cup of tea one gets after coming indoors after a trudge across the North’s winter landscape.

She talked about her father a lot – a pure Russian. “My father loved the tundra. He would take us out onto the tundra just for lunch or tea. He loved it, and wanted to spend time out there with us. He wanted us to love it too, and we did. We would gather up our tea pot, some food, and a tent, and we just took little vacations on the tundra... He used to scold me when I used mosquito repellent, or when I tried to pick a dead mosquito out of my tea. He would say, ‘What are you doing? That’s not dirt. There is no dirt on the tundra. Out on the tundra everything is clean.’ He just adored this place so much.”

While Nadia’s father was Russian, her stories mirrored those told by Koryaks. Clearly it is not only native Koryaks who equate the tundra with purity.

Nadia loved demonstrating how her father would remove the mosquitoes from his face with a single grand swipe of his hand, then go back to work. She did this often, imitating her father’s motion as if wishing for the same strength in herself. “My younger sister was born after my father died. She never grew to love the tundra like I do. She just stays in Tilichiki now, and never comes out here to fish.”

Nadia’s father taught her self-sufficiency, saying, “You have to know how to do everything yourself – chop wood, fish, make caviar – because today you live fine, but who knows about tomorrow?” He could not have known how right he was; today Nadia does everything for herself.

She had planned to retire and live on her pension in this shack year-round, surrounded by the nature she loves. But when her pension vanished, she took up caviar – the survival profession of Koryaks and Russians alike – transferring buckets of glistening orange eggs to men in motor boats who cruise the bay, stopping at each fishing camp.

Perhaps as important to Nadia’s story is her grandson, Vanya, who lived in the shack with us. Every day I woke to Nadia shaking and scolding Vanya, demanding that he get up and check the gill net. “Wake up! Work is waiting for you!” She would break into a song about spring, then give up. She needled him constantly for his laziness and his lack of interest in the work she so loved. “My grandson just isn’t a fisherman,” she would say. “I hoped he would love it, like I do, but he just doesn’t have it. He only wants motorcycles and TV.”

The cultural rift here suddenly seemed inter-cultural. Babushka Nadia shares in the tragedy of Lyova, Ana and the rest of the older generation of Koryaks living on the shores of this bay. When this generation passes, something will die here – a cultural trait they all share and that has nothing to do with ethnicity. It is a rugged love of this place, a heartfelt attachment to this land and a recognition of the honor and value of the hard work that life here demands.

While I believed that I saw the largest cultural rift as that separating Nadia, Lyova, and Ana from today’s youth, they did not agree. Nadia and Ana both saw their parents’ as the last great generation. “My father had something,” Nadia insisted. “He knew something that I just don’t know.”

Perhaps Nadia’s father would disagree and insist that his father was the true hero of this bay. In the same way, the vanished generation of Koryak elders from Kultushnoye and Oleutork might have also looked further back for real native Koryak culture, longing for Old Kultushnoye or some antecedent village long since swallowed up by the mossy tundra. They might have longed for their own childhoods and called that the real “tundra.”

Importantly, Nadia and Ana’s generation grew up when Kamchatka was wealthy. In the last Soviet era, people moved here to make two or three times the standard salary received in larger western cities like St. Petersburg and Moscow. With reliable employment and pensions, life was good, despite the summer mosquito swarms and the winter cold. Since the end of socialism, however, looting has become the norm here, as demonstrated by the concrete shell of a building in Kultushnoye.

Today’s youth have only ever experienced this economically depressed hinterland, with its rampant alcoholism and a dwindling population. It is a profoundly different tundra for today’s youth than it was when Nadia and Ana grew to love it under their parents’ tutelage. “For people living here,” Nadia often said, “killing, stealing and drugs were only in movies about America or England. We felt bad for those people. There was none of that here. People here never even used to lock their doors. They would just lean a stick up against the door to tell visitors that no one was home. Now all of those things are here.”

No wonder the youth want to escape this place through TV.

Back in Tilichiki, Lyova and his son Maxim had returned from their fishing camp with buckets full of shining, orange salmon roe. Maxim was thirty years old. He had a huge smile and surprisingly dark skin, given that his mother was Russian. Like most people his age, Maxim did not know more than a few words of Koryak, so if his grandparents, Lyova’s parents, were still alive, they would not have been able to converse with one another. This reminded me of my own family, in which the Yiddish of my immigrant grandparents had completely vanished over two generations. Yet Maxim’s grandparents did not immigrate – the foreign country came to them.

The following day I met Larisa, a mixed Russian-Koryak born in Kultushnoye, and her husband Sergei, a descendant of Cossacks who came to Kamchatka in the 1850’s. They arranged a conversation for me with Abram Uley, one of the oldest Koryak elders in the area. That afternoon, Lyova and his family and Larisa and Sergei and I strolled through town toward the far end of Tilichiki, where Abram lived. The mood among us was somber, as if we were making a pilgrimage to a holy place.

Abram’s daughter, clearly of mixed race and an old woman herself, graciously invited us in. We entered a back room in the small house, and there Abram lay on a couch. He appeared old and feeble. He was nearly blind, and, as I later learned, suffering from cancer. He never quite learned Russian, so Larisa served as translator. Before I could get my first question out, Abram handed me his passport. I opened it to find his birthdate: 1914.

With spare words and a quiet, sickly voice, Abram told me of a time on the shores of the Bay of Korf when there were few Russians, and when Tilichiki did not exist. “This was Koryak country,” he said through Larisa, who struggled with her birth language. “I lived as I wanted. I did what I wanted. I never had to ask permission. Now these people rule us.” He used the old Koryak name for Russians, nuchi nuchi. “But I remember when we were free. I was very young, much younger than now.” His words marking decades of fantastic change cast a heavy pall over the room. I understood why my hosts had approached his house like pilgrims.

“I was born in Oleutork, my village. Then they turned it into a sovkhoz.” I asked when that was and, after some debating in Koryak, Abram and Larisa said it was 1934. The old man continued, “We had 900 reindeer in our village. They belonged to everyone. Then the sovkhoz took the deer and gave them to another village, and we had only three deer left.” In this collectivization, all Koryak property suddenly became owned and controlled by a federal government, over 5,000 miles away. “Later, it became worse. They started making our children go to Russian schools. Then they moved us, first to Kultushnoye, then to Tilichiki. So many people died.”

After a short while, Larisa suggested that we allow Abram to rest. As we left his room, he said “goodbye” in heavily accented Russian, as he lay back down on the couch.

The evening air on the street was cooler and pleasant, with few mosquitoes. We walked along quietly, saying little. When I marveled at Abram’s age, Sergei replied, “It’s not just amazing. It’s impossible. Koryaks here simply don’t live that long.”

Later that day we sat in Larisa and Sergei’s apartment, drinking tea and eating lunch, discussing culture and history. “I feel a lot of pain for Koryaks,” Larisa said. “I see the death of Koryak culture. You, an American researcher, will go home and write a book about us or some articles just like others who have visited. But we’ll still be sitting here beside the last of the dying Koryak elders, and there’s nothing you or anyone else can do about it. We are finished.”

Natalia later mentioned that Abram’s cancer was advanced and he did not have much longer to live. Larisa turned to me, saying, “You see? How will anyone stop that? Nobody can, not you, not me. If only Kamchatka had been sold to America along with Alaska, maybe we’d be living a little bit better, even though with a dying culture.”

“In ten years the Koryak language will be dead,” Sergei added, “along with the last of those who grew up in Kultushnoye. I see all the people around me, and they are all dying so early. Half of my friends are already dead and I’m only 41. We are all dying here.” RL