Paul Goble
Staunton, June 9 – Between 1991 when the Soviet Union disintegrated and 2022 when Putin launched his expanded war in Ukraine, the Soyots, a numerically small Turkic people in Buryatia, acquired a written language, resumed the reindeer herding that they had practiced for centuries, and looked to the future with confidence.
But from the very first day of Putin’s expanded war, those hopes were crushed as ever more young Soyot men were dragooned or attracted into service in Russian forces fighting in Ukraine only to die there (sibreal.org/a/nas-vsego-gorstka-kak-voyna-v-ukraine-unichtozhaet-soyotov-iskonnyh-zhiteley-sayan/32975796.html).
The 2021 Russian census counted just over 4,000 Soyots and so the deaths in Ukraine have hit the community hard because as they say, one Soyot is not six degrees of separation from another but one and so every loss affects the entire community, especially given that those who have died were expected to be the fathers of the next generation.
Other nationalities in the Russian Federation have suffered more deaths and perhaps even a higher percentage of those than the Soyots, but the facts that this nation consists of such tightly interrelated people and that it was staging a remarkable recovery from past oppression means that the Soyots have lost something especially precious: their hopes for a national rebirth.
For that reason if for no other, the Soyots and the reasons they have lost hope deserve to be remembered.
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