Russkoye Ustye - History and Culture

History and Culture

Russkoye Ustye was settled by ethnic Russians several centuries ago. As no agriculture is possible at this Arctic location, they developed an economy based on hunting, fishing, and trapping. Since the place is north of the Arctic tree line, driftwood brought by the Indigirka was used for construction and for firewood.

Due to the remarkable geographic isolation of the settlement, its residents preserved much of their ancestors' beliefs, customs, and folklore into the 19th and 20th century, which made the village a favorite destination for Russian ethnographers and cultural anthropologists. Linguists visited the place to study the local dialect of Russian, strongly influenced by the Even language.

It is speculated that the original settlers, possibly of Pomor origin, arrived to the delta of the Indigirka as early as the first half of the 17th century. More skeptical researchers believe that the second half of the 17th century would be a more likely time for the initial settlement. According to a legend recorded in the village, the villagers' ancestors originally left the European Russia during Ivan IV's persecution campaigns in the late 16th century, although, as Rasputin suggests, reaching the Indigirka may have taken them a long time.

The first known record of the community of Russkoye Ustye is in the reports of the explorer Dmitry Laptev, who had to spend a winter there in 1739 when his boat was stuck in the ice. A Socialist Revolutionary Vladimir Zenzinov gave an account of the village visited by him in the early 1900s, during his Siberian exile.

It was only between 1928 (when a schoolhouse was built, and a schoolteacher arrived from the outside world) and the 1960s (the arrival of helicopters) that the village became reconnected, to an extent, with the "mainland" culture and integrated into the national economy. The pelts of arctic fox became the principal product sold by the villagers to the outside world.

Historically, the peoples of Russkoye Ustye were spread out over several tens of kilometers, living in solitary houses or tiny hamlets of 3-4 houses (there were six houses in the hamlet where Zenzinov stayed). Around 1940–1942, the authorities arranged for them to move into a single village, which was given the name Polyarny. It was only in the late 20th century that the old name, Russkoye Ustye, was officially returned to the settlement. although it had always been used colloquially by its residents.

A Siberian writer, Valentin Rasputin, dedicated a chapter of his non-fiction book, "Siberia, Siberia" (originally published in 1991) to the people of this isolated traditional community. Even though the villagers "seemed to be fashioned entirely out of prejudice", he favorably compares their ability to pass moral judgments with the moral relativism of the modern people.