A People on the Brink

Over the past century, the ancient people known as the Votes has been exiled twice, has seen its language banned, and has faced the threat of having its villages razed. Today, although teetering on the verge of extinction, it holds fast to one of the last rights it enjoys – the right to bear and to say its own name.

Zinaida Savelyeva is of pure Vote descent on both sides. She is the last fluent speaker of her native language, and knows its songs and poems by heart.

Living alone since her husband’s death, Zinaida often spends her evenings in the dark. The electricity has been turned off and the candle on the windowsill lights up only a portion of the table. Without her, the village of Krakolye in Leningrad Oblast would be a ghost town in winter. There are few true locals left, the seasonal residents have fled the frigid weather, and Krakolye is a wilderness of shuttered houses. The village is slowly dying, and that process was only accelerated when the school was moved to nearby Ust-Luga.

And when Zinaida goes to bed, she might lie awake for hours. Heavy building equipment is operating close by, and the noise is bad. Something – a gas pipeline, a road, a port – is always under construction around here. The thumping and thudding make it hard to fall asleep.

The 1950s: Peski (Liivcyla)

The sixteen-year-old Zinaida and her mother came home to the village of Peski in 1954. They had walked the whole way from the Estonian city of Narva, driving a cow before them. But they were not the only ones; other family members had left Narva earlier.

The trip took several days. The two women spent one night bedded down on sheaves of hay by the roadside and then, when they were almost home, they had stopped in to see relatives in a neighboring village.

A lot had changed in ten years. The village’s wartime military base was gone. Peski’s tall wooden church where Zinaida was baptized had been dismantled and moved to the settlement that had sprung up around the fish processing plant. Once there, it had been retrofitted to house a club and a library.

Leningrad Oblast’s Ust-Luga District, which borders on Estonia, had come under occupation as soon as the war began. And in 1943, the German High Command decided to uproot the Finno-Ugric peoples living in the occupation zone and relocate them to Finland. The Votes were swept up in that mass resettlement.

That name – Vote, Vod, and in their own language Vađđalaizõd – is not easy to decode. In more ancient times, the Votes were called the Maavyachi (“the people of [this] land”), and they had lived here since at least the eleventh century, inhabiting territory to the northwest of Novgorod, near Ust-Luga Bay in the Gulf of Finland. The sources tell us that in those early days the Votes were mostly blacksmiths, fishermen, or farmers.

The late Olga Konkova, a historian who worked at St. Petersburg’s Center for the Indigenous Peoples of Leningrad Oblast, wrote that paganism and Christianity long coexisted here. As late as the sixteenth century, Orthodox priests were complaining that the Votes still prayed to idols on riverbanks and in the forests, bringing oxen, sheep, and birds to sacrifice, and that newborns were not taken to church for baptism until they had been seen by a sorcerer.

Census records make it easy to trace the changes in the Vote population. In 1848, 5,148 of them were counted in 36 villages. In 1919, the number had dropped to 1,000 and to 705 in 1926 (although those latter figures are generally considered to be underestimates). In 1943, only some 400 Votes were left. And that 400 included Zinaida, her male and female cousins, and her foster father and mother.

On December 3, 1943, everyone was rounded up and brought to the Ust-Luga railroad station. Zinaida, who was five at the time, vividly remembers that trip, which she made with her parents. Huge bonfires were burning at the station, and a military escort, with dogs, was waiting for them. People were loaded into freight cars and sent to the Klooga concentration camp in Estonia.

The family of Taisiya Mikhailova – mother, father, and three children from the nearby village of Luzhitsy – was better prepared than the Savelyevs for the journey. They had brought homemade lard bread, a tub of sauerkraut, and salted meat.

From Estonia the Votes were ferried to Finland, where Zinaida and Taisiya’s families were lodged with good people. The Vote men worked outside the home, the women helped with household chores, and the younger children soon felt comfortable in Finland and began speaking Finnish. But on September 19, 1944, the USSR and Finland signed an armistice. The Vote families in Finland started preparing for the return to their homeland, while the local Finns tried to disabuse them of the idea. “We’ve been told, we’ve heard on Russian radio, that they’re not taking you back home. You’ll be going to Siberia,” the Votes were warned. Taisiya, who now lives in Luzhitsy, recalls it as if it were yesterday.

The Votes brushed it all off. Late in 1944, they began their return journey. The trains took them as far as Vyborg, on Russia’s border with Finland, but they were allowed no closer to their homes. Taisiya’s final destination was in Tver Oblast and Zinaida’s in Novgorod Oblast.

Exile, wrote historian Olga Konkova, was a routine feature of Bolshevik repression: “The Votes were deported by design to the ravaged oblasts of northwest Russia. Many ran away in an effort to return home, but they were caught and sent back. And for those who did ultimately return, life would never be the same. Their houses had new owners (pursuant to a 1949 order mandating the sale of residential properties to newcomers); they were forbidden to speak Votic; and they were labeled enemies of the people.”

Zinaida’s family also tried to go home – in 1944 she actually attended school in her native village for six months – but then came an “invitation” to leave again, and the family moved to Narva. They put down roots there, as the older children married, bringing Estonian in-laws into their families. After Stalin’s death, though, the Votes still resolved to go back. At that point they had been away from home for a decade.

“It was best not to speak Votic at that time,” Zinaida Savelyeva recalls. “It wasn’t openly forbidden, though. You just drew your own conclusions. If Votes in line at the store were chatting among themselves, the clerk might yell at them, wanting to know what all that foreign jibber-jabber was about. And at school you’d be reprimanded.”

Where there is a dominant language that is exclusively used in education and publishing, it is highly likely that the language spoken in the home will be considered inferior and economically disadvantageous, says linguist Denis Zubalov, a specialist in language policy. “If parents have a negative take on their own language and consequently avoid using it in routine interaction, the children will start feeling the same way.”

And, if the conclusions drawn by linguist Heinike Heinsoo (then an associate professor at the University of Tartu) are anything to go by, that is exactly what happened with Votic.
“The generation born in the 1920s preferred not to speak Votic to their children. At that time, if the use of an ethnic minority’s language… implied anything, it was that the person had a poor command of the state language (of Russian, that is). The general belief was that if a child spoke good Russian, rather than being fluent in Votic, he or she would have an easier life.”

Vera Safronova, who was in school during the 1950s and 1960s, remembers teachers coming to her home and asking her parents not to speak Votic when their daughter was around. And, it must be said, their reasoning was strictly practical: Vera was not doing well in school. “I was falling behind in Russian class, because I’d tend to use a Votic word instead of the Russian one. They were threatening to make me repeat the year. And because of that, I can’t speak a word of Votic. I can only understand it.”

By 1991, there were only sixty-one native speakers of Votic.

The 1990s: Luzhitsy (Luutsa)

Nina Vittong goes out into her yard to greet the morning. The winters are quiet here. The only sound – one barely audible at that – is the snow creaking underfoot if someone is walking nearby. A faint smell of stove smoke hangs in the air, and the drifts all around are almost waist-high, their tops oddly dusted with black snow. This started happening more often during the previous winter, and now the snow is sometimes made up of alternating layers of black and white…

On Nina’s property are two small houses that were built to replace a single residence. The house where she was born, where her parents lived, where she and her husband came to stay, burned down in 2001. Arson was suspected. Apparently someone did not appreciate that the residents were taking a stand for their village.

Tatyana Yefimova, Nina Vittong’s sister-in-law, first came to Luzhitsy in the 1990s.

Tatyana, an ethnic Russian, was married to Nina’s brother Sergei. The couple had worked in a Kingisepp chemical plant, put the finishing touches to the family home in Luzhitsy, where Sergei had been born, and eventually retired there. And Tatyana, who to that point had not even suspected that such a people as the Votes existed, began studying her husband’s ancestry and realized that he and all his kin were members of a vanishing people.

Tatyana began gathering everything with any connection to the Votes. She visited archives, going as far afield as Finland, spoke with locals, assembled a collection of artifacts. Virtually single-handedly she collected more than seventy items, including the outfit worn by an unmarried girl in the nineteenth century, other articles of clothing, and examples of footwear. She opened a museum in the house where Nina and Sergei had grown up and where Sergei and Tatyana now lived on one side, and Nina and her husband Nikolai lived on the other.

“Vote culture was on an upward trajectory during the latter half of the 1990s,” Olga Konkova said. “Museums opened, language courses were launched, and people became more outspoken about their origins.”

The cultural renaissance had many faces. In 2000, Yekaterina Kuznetsova founded a Vote musical group called Bestiary, and St. Petersburg linguist Mekhmet Muslimov began teaching Votic in a local school. An elementary-grade teacher named Marina Petrova, her eyes now opened to the very existence of the Votes, founded a children’s folk group called Linnud (“Birds”), which recorded an album in Votic called “Vaddya” in 2008. Its members wear the traditional Vote outfits for unmarried girls, a white sarafan and a pyayasiye, a hemispherical cap decorated with bead pendants, tin studs, and seashells.

Also in 2008, the Votes were included in the Common List of Minor Indigenous Peoples of Russia. These and other changes affected many, including Nina Vittong, whose memory of those times is simple and poignant. “We finally understood who we are,” she says. “We started feeling a greater freedom, because we could now take an interest in our culture at last, and learn about it.”

The culture, the traditional trades, the language were all being reborn. The tribulations of the Votes seemed to be receding into the past. But very soon it became clear that some dark clouds still loomed overhead.

First, the museum burned down. Nina thinks that had something to do with what her sister-in-law had been up to. “In the late 1990s,” she reports, “illegal loggers started clear-cutting the forests around here. A couple of miles outside the village, it’s just stumps everywhere. Tatyana proceeded to raise the alarm, writing letters, knocking on doors. And a letter came, telling her that if she didn’t stop, it would be the worse for her. On September 11, 2001, at night, our neighbors woke us to tell us that our house was on fire.” An investigation made a finding of arson, but the culprits were never caught. After the museum was put back together, there was another fire, that one accidental.

Tatyana left Luzhitsy several years ago. “That second fire knocked her flat,” Nina told us. Tatyana turned down our request for an interview in no uncertain terms. “I can’t,” she said, “and I don’t want to communicate with anyone at all about the Votes.” Her departure left Nina and Sergei alone in the family home. Nina is certain that the two of them will be the last people living in Luzhitsy.

Around that same time, it also became clear that a full-scale linguistic rebirth would be impossible due to the generation gap. To quote Professor Heinsoo again: “The communicative function has been lost. Families don’t speak Votic anymore, which leaves the language with no more than a sociocultural function. Songs might be sung in Votic, sometimes texts might be read, but that’s the extent of it.” Indeed, the last member of a family that used Votic at home died six years ago.

The 2000s: Luga Bay (Meree-suu)

Alexei Yermolayev, who is half Vote and half Ingrian, goes to sea almost every day in summer. He starts out by sailing down the Luzhitsa River, which flows into Luga Bay, where the wind and the air suddenly change. Then he heads out into open waters, to check the nets he set earlier. This has been his livelihood for more than twenty years.

Alexei’s grandfather, like many in his village, was a fisherman. Alexei went off to do his military service and did not come home as soon as he was discharged. But before long he recognized that fishing was his true calling. (In fact, it had been part of his life since the age of five, when he would scamper down to the village river with rod and line in hand.) So in 1990 he came back.

It was good timing: the Soviet Union was breaking up and private fishing was again being allowed, ending the decades-long monopolization of the fisheries by state-run operations. The Votes were now able to reclaim their time-honored trade. Alexei remembers about a thousand people working Luga Bay: “There were fights over the best spots. But the fish populations held steady, so there was enough for everyone.”

Even with so many people wanting a piece of the action, fishing is by no means a game that just anyone can play. “It’s dangerous,” Alexei warns us. “I’ve dumped snowmobiles into the drink, and I can’t even count how many times I’ve had to leap across a crack in the ice when the sea is frozen over. It’s winter, you’re far from shore, and the ice starts coming apart. Then it’s jump or die. Sometimes even guys with years of experience lose their lives. There are a million wrinkles involved in being a fisherman.”

But he has no plans to give up fishing and move away. “When I was in the hospital and couldn’t go out on my boat for what seemed like forever, I really missed it. But as soon as I was well, everything went back to normal. Again I had the air and the wind, and water, nothing but water, as far as the eye could see. Somebody up there must have decided that I’m a fisherman. It’s the core of my being.”

In 2007, the fishermen and other villagers came up against a new threat: the authorities had decided to build a port in Ust-Luga. The locals quickly realized that this would mean a lot of new development in Krakolye and that the port boundary would come within a hair’s breadth of Luzhitsy. But the villagers and the construction project management were able to reach an understanding that the villages would be left untouched. “They had us sign to show our agreement to an access road to the terminal,” Nina Vittong recalls. “First it was such-and-such a distance, and we agreed. But then, without asking us, they kept moving the terminals and moving them some more, and the upshot is that now they’re only about 200 yards away from the village.”

The port has had a powerful impact on village life. Several years ago, the wells began to fail, and those that survived were producing almost undrinkable water. Tests run two years ago confirmed this. Time and again, the residents of Luzhitsy went to the Ust-Luga rural settlement administration office, but no one there could do anything to help. Pyotr Limin, the man in charge, refused to take our calls.

And then there is the black snow that has been falling in Luzhitsy. Villagers who can get into the port describe seeing sprawling heaps of coal there, meaning that the wind is blowing coal dust from the terminals into the village. This all began after South-2 (the terminal closest to Luzhitsy and the one that, according to eyewitnesses, contained most of the coal) came under new ownership. The two companies involved – New Communal Technologies and the Commercial Sea Port of Ust-Luga – did not respond to inquiries.

The port has left its mark on Alexei Yermolayev’s life too. Every fisherman is assigned a strictly demarcated area to work. Since the port was built, he says, the fish are traveling along different routes, and their numbers have dropped. The rules under which he must work have tightened too. The leeway that used to be made for inadvertently catching prohibited species has been removed from the books, so that now if even one such fish is found, he’s handed a steep fine. Many fishermen have been driven out of the business, but Alexei cannot imagine making a living any other way. “Looks like the authorities have decided to stop the war on terror and start a war on fishermen,” he says, with a wry smile.

Nina Vittong expects that in a few years, when the native-born population is all gone, there will be nothing to stop the development. “They’ll drive the seasonal residents away and knock the whole village down. Our Luzhitsy sticks in the industrialists’ craw. They need this land.”

The 2010s: Krakolye (Jõgõperä)

In 2013, Vera Safronova, a Vote, came to spend the summer with her mother, in Krakolye. Happening to go outside one day, she noticed some children she had never seen before turning onto the path that led to her home. And she wondered what they could possibly want. But all they wanted was to come up to the house and stroke the old stones that made up its walls.

As Vera tells it, that is when the lightbulb went on. “It dawned on me that something had to be done with the legacy my family would leave,” she says. “It had to be preserved.”

She began with her home, a typical Vote house that had winter quarters and summer quarters connected by a T-shaped corridor and an attached, covered yard. It had been built in 1907. In the unoccupied half she found fishing nets, a lamprey trap, a wooden paddle for taking pies out of the oven bearing the Votic family crest of her maternal line, rakes for gathering berries in the forest, and other antique artifacts used in everyday Vote life. She arranged her discoveries in a vestibule that has since become a home museum. A pile of suitcases might look out of place there, until you realize that this is the luggage that her family carried all the way to Finland and, later, to Yaroslavl Oblast.

“I want to preserve the history of my family, so it won’t be lost forever,” Vera says. Her main regret is that she cannot determine what all the items were used for, because there is no one left to ask. That generation is long gone.

Experts are now talking in terms of total assimilation of the Votes. The indigenous community is disappearing before our eyes and will be altogether extinct in only a few generations. That time is not here yet, but it is coming.