The Passing of the Shors – What the Death of a People Looks Like in Russia Today

Paul Goble

            Staunton, December 10 – Many non-Russians fear that both social change and government policies are putting the existence of their nations at risk and even speak of the approaching “death” of their communities, while defenders of the Kremlin deny this and point to census figures showing that few nations, even the smallest, have disappeared.

            But a people may die or at least be approaching death even if its members by inertia continue to declare their identities to census takers.  And their passing, often the product of the absence of official structures and economic developments they have no defense again, deprives the members of the community and the world of their unique points of view.

            In an important and detailed new article, Inna Kim of the Sibreal portal provides some important glimpses into the complexities and tragedies of this process as she describes how one numerically small indigenous people in Siberia, the Shors, is “quietly dying off” (sibreal.org/a/30317951.html).

            There are now fewer than 10,000 people who identify as Shors in the Russian census, but they says that they do not have anything else other than that remaining: they do not have their own language, the natural environment they used to rely on, their own settlements of their customary way of life.”

            According to Lyubov Chudzhanova, a Shor writer and activist, the authorities are indifferent. “We are quietly dying off,” and conditions are so harsh that most of those who should be trying to save their nation are simply trying to survive physically. And ever more of the young are fleeing to the cities and assimilating.

            Veniamin Boriskin, a Shor writer who gave up after his village was destroyed by the Kuzbass coal mines, says that the worst thing the mines did was to poison the water, kill the taiga and make the people sick.  First, their traditional way of life became impossible, and then life itself.

            He says he wrote President Dmitry Medvedev who responded by sending a delegation to examine the situation. But while they expressed concern, it was too late to do anything much to help the Shors recover or even prevent this people from continuing to die off. As a result, a people who have lived in the Northern Altay for centuries will soon be no more.

            The tsarist regime prohibited Russians from moving into the territory of the Shors, and in early Soviet times, the authorities created an Altay Mountain District which protected them to some degree. But then Stalin created the GULAG which flooded the region with Russian political prisoners; and in 1939, Moscow disbanded the only state formation the Shors had.

            The GULAG camps were often better supplied with electricity and other accoutrements of modernity than the Shor villages, and the situation hasn’t gotten better since the camps were closed. In many cases, there is electric power only two hours a day, no schools, and no community facilities. And hunting and fishing is no longer possible.

            Often the Shors can’t continue their traditional way of life because the coal mines have destroyed the taiga; but sometimes they can’t because the state has created a park in which the Shors are treated as unwelcome interlopers and can engage in fishing and hunting only illegally as poachers.

            After the fall of Soviet power, the Shors hoped to recover. A group of activists emerged but many were forced into emigration (windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2018/04/russia-not-moscow-and-provinces-but.html), and the ones who remain are discouraged. Mikhail Todyshev, one of their number, says they have been able to get Moscow to adopt better laws but not get them enforced.

            One has the sense, Todyshev continues, that “federal laws do not operate” on the land on which the remaining Shors live.

            Another activist, Gennady Kostochakov, says that for decades, “the Shor language was in fact prohibited.” Nothing was published in it and no schools conducted lessons in Shor, even though the first Shor grammar appeared in 1869.  In 1941, the Soviets published a Shor grammar but then for 50 years acted as if Shor was a non-literary language.

            In the early 1990s, some Shors began to talk about trying to revive their language which by that time was not being used widely even at home.  A department to train teachers in the language was established but its moving spirit, Andrey Chudoyakov, died in 1994, and the faculty was closed down in 2010 as part of the optimization movement.

           

            There remains a Shor section in the local pedagogical institute, but its few graduates can’t find jobs because there are no schools using Shor.” Beginning in the 1970s, Shor children were sent to boarding schools where instruction was in Russian and those few schools with Shor began to disappear.

            “Our language is dying,” the activists say. “Today, not only young people but even 30 and 40-year-olds do not speak it,” Chulzhanova says. “And if young people don’t, then the people will finally disappear and in the immediate future.”  Her own hope, she says, is that “God will work a miracle and save my people.”