Paul Goble
Staunton,
March 4 – Russians are so used to being the dominant nationality regardless of
where they live in the Russian Federation that they are “not prepared” for a
different experience, Yulia Bobkova says. But that is how she felt when she
visited the Mountainous Altai. There she “suddenly found herself in the role of
a representative of an exotic minority.”
The
Nazaccent journalist recently visited
the village of Ulagan in the mountainous portion of the Altai Republic. While
ethnic Russians form a majority in that federal subject as a whole, they are almost
absent among the 3,000 residents of the district center and do not set the
cultural or political weather there (nazaccent.ru/content/29344-strana-kajchi-i-kabargi.html).
Instead,
Bobkova says, it is the Altay, the indigenous Turkic-language people of the
republic, who do so. They consist of several sub-ethnoses, including the Telengits
who Moscow agreed to count as a separate people in 2002 but rescinded that recognition
in 2010. However, for the people in Ulagan, they view themselves as Telengits
or other groups like the Chelkans.
The
Chelkans, she continues, have succeeded in getting the courts to recognize
their nationality as separate and distinct. There were about 100 such cases in
the last year alone. But the Telengits
haven’t done so, apparently content to be Telengit for themselves and Altais
when officials require it or when they want to emphasize their regional
identity.
The
Telegits view themselves as a separate and distinct and in Ulagan at least
dominant culture, Bobkova says. They all
study Russian in school and speak it well, but they don’t use it at all. “There
are no ethnic Russians in these areas, except for tourists in the summer, and
few of them are there often or for long,” she relates.
“And
without practice, any language is forgotten.”
“On
the other hand,” she continues, “all of them have a perfect knowledge of their
native language. In the middle school in Yazul, there is a sign in the office
of the Altai instructor: ‘My native language is my wealth’ (translated from
Altai).” And a glance at the class record book shows that all the students are
doing well.
Bobkova
does report one interesting aspect of the language situation. Because teachers
can’t easily find recordings of music the local children can sing in their own
language, they use Russian for songs until they are old enough to sing a capella. Then they go over entirely to
Telengit songs.
Equally
mixed with a Russian cover over a non-Russian reality, the journalist says, is
the religious life of the population. Earlier everyone in the Altai followed
shamans. Then came Orthodox Christianity under the tsars. And then in Soviet
times, officials declared “all religious” illegal.
But
that official position had little impact on distant regions in the Altai,
Bobkova continues. “The further from the capital, the stronger the faith, and
both pagan and Christian ideas about the world to one degree or another were
present here even in the most anti-religious times.”
She
says that she and her fellow journalists weren’t able to meet with
representatives of the ancient faith of the Altai peoples. The shaman said he
was “too busy” to meet with journalists and suggested they come again in the
summer when he conducts rites in public for tourists and other visitors.
They
were able to meet the local Orthodox priest, Father Makarii, himself a former
follower of shamanism who converted in the 1990s. Until recently, he acknowledged, even he kept
up many of the pagan practices but has tried to give them up, although he said
he understands and is sympathetic to those who won’t.
“Services
in church are conducted in Russian or Old Church Slavonic,” Bobkova reports, “but
Father Makarii delivers his homilies in Altai: that is more convenient for his
parishioners.” And she says no one condemns those who combine elements of both
faiths given the strength of the old one relative to the new.
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