Power to Tax is Power to Destroy, and Moscow is Now Deploying It Against Aboriginal Peoples

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Feb. 5 – Until last year, non-Russian peoples in the far north and far east were not charged taxes on the land where they practiced their traditional ways of life, such as pastures for reindeer herding and the like. But in 2024, Moscow changed the tax code; and at the end of 2025, these communities were faced with tax bills they couldn’t pay.

            The full impact of the new arrangement is yet to be felt, because the authorities aren’t charging taxes on land if it is in a traditional place as defined by the powers but are if these land plots are beyond the borders of those areas, according to Tatyana Britskaya, an investigative journalist for Novaya Gazeta (novayagazeta.ru/articles/2026/02/06/chernye-vezhniki).

            In Sakha, she says, officials have defined as “traditional” only places where people actually live and not where they herd animals. That means that only four of 37 land plots the indigenous peoples view as their own are “exempt from tax.” The other 34 “have to pay several million rubles a year for reindeer pastures,” a completely “impossible sum.”

            What this is intended to do, Britskaya says, is to allow the officials to restrict the amount of land that the indigenous peoples can actually call their own without declaring any change in internal borders and thereby open the way to the exploitation of land they in fact have used from times immemorial to development by Russian mining interests.

            What these means is that many indigenous peoples will find that the state has confiscated the lands they need to continue to practice their traditional way of life; and when they give that up, the state will then hand the land over to Russian corporations, which will complete the destruction of these nations.

            The Russian authorities can and undoubtedly will present the new tax arrangements as a matter of simple justice. After all, if other groups use land, they have to pay taxes on it. But in this case, the power to tax is the power to destroy – and with this new tax arrangement, Moscow has accelerated the demise of the numerically smallest peoples of the north and far east.