Altai natives are usually divided into two main groups - Northern and Southern Altaians.
The Northern Altaians include the following tribal groups:
1) Tubalars (Tuba-Kizhi), who occupied the valleys of the rivers Bolshaya and Malaya Isha (tributaries of the Katun), Kara-Koksha, Pyzhi, Uimen (tributaries of the Biya);
2) Chelkans who settled in the basin of the Lebedi River and especially its tributary Baigol. They generalized themselves as Kuu-kizhi, i.e. people of the Lebedi River, and therefore in ethnographic literature they are sometimes found under the name of Lebedins.
3) Kumandins living along the banks of the Biya River from the Lebedi River down almost to the town of Biysk, as well as in the lower reaches of the Katun River, where they merged with the local Russian population.
The famous researcher of Siberia of the 19th century V.V. Radlov singled out the Kumandins as a special independent group of northern Altaians. Radlov singled out the Kumandins as a special independent group of northern Altaians. According to the classification of V. Verbitsky, they were part of the nomadic “Chernevye Tatars” of the Biysk district. Historically, the Kumandins joined the Russian state together with a number of other tribal groups of northern Altaians soon after the Kuznetsk stockade was built in 1618 on the Tom River against the confluence of the Kondoma River.
The first mentions of the Kumandins in Russian historical sources date back to 1628. It refers to the petition of the Tobolsk military governors, which states that on February 28, 1628 they sent from the Kuznetsk stockaded township servants - “Oleshka Bakaya and his companion for your sovereign service in the Chebanskaya volost”. On the way back four of them were killed by people of the Teleut prince Abak, among whom were Kumandins. (The Teleut princedom existed in the Mountain Altai until the middle of the 18th century.) The Teleut princes considered the Kumandins as their kyshtyms, or tributaries, who were obliged, among other things, to participate in the military campaigns of the Teleut artels. Probably, earlier in the same way the Kumandins had to take part in distant military expeditions of the Tatar-Mongols. So the Russians, unknowingly, could have met the Kumandins much earlier than 1628.
The ethnonym “Kumandy” was not a self-name of the Kumandins in the pre-revolutionary period. It was given to them by neighboring tribes (Tubalars, Shors, Telengits, Chelkans) by the name of their main and most numerous clan (Ore) and the Altyn Kumandy, while the Kumandins themselves were called simply “Tatar-Kizhi” (note: “kizhi” in Altaic means “man”). Some researchers believe that the ethnonym “Kumandy” means “swan man” (apparently swans could be their totem animal). According to L.P. Potapov and O. Pritsak, the term “Kuman” in the name of the Kumandins is adequate to the name Cumans and Kipchaks. If this is true, the Russians were well acquainted with the ancestors of the Kumandins even before the Tatar-Mongol invasion of the 13th century. Anthropologically, the Kumandins, as well as the ancient Polovtsians, have many Caucasoid features. Even the first Russian explorers noted a significant number of fair-haired and blue-eyed children in Kumandin ailas. It is quite possible that the Altai Kumandins are the descendants of the Altai population, which is older than the Turks and has its roots in the Athanasian and Andronovo cultures of the Bronze Age.
Such researchers and local historians as A.M. Maloletko and B.H. Kadikov connect the origin of the Kumandins with one of the most ancient peoples of Siberia - the Kets. Thus, according to the monograph by V.I. Verbitsky (1893), “the names of the duck in the languages of the northern and southern Altaians sound respectively - ur'tek and su-gush. The first syllables of these words mean “water”, but the northern Altaians use the Ket word “ur'tek”, and the southern Altaians use the Turkic word “su”. The same is the case with the word “aina” - “devil”. Nowadays this word is used in the same meaning by Shors, Northern Altaians and Khakasses. Southern Altaians are unfamiliar with it.
The genetic connection of the Kumandins with some ancient Siberian population of Caucasoid type, possibly Dinlins, was pointed out by the famous researcher of Central Asia Grum-Grshimailo in the early twentieth century: “the Tatar-Mongolian type prevailing in the Southern Altai,” he wrote, “turns in the north, in the forests of Biysk and Kuznetsk ostrogovs, into almost European”. The ancestors of the Kumandin ancestors evolved over several centuries. They were part of the first and second Türkic Kaganates, experienced the power of Kyrgyz and Uigur rulers (6-9 centuries AD). And then their lands were traversed by the cavalry of Genghis Khan - for several centuries the lands of the Kumandins were part of the Yuan Empire, and then the “White Horde”.
In the process of feudal fragmentation in the late 13th-early 14th centuries, the Golden Horde split into two parts, of which the eastern part, including a strip of steppes from the Volga to Western Siberia, was called the White Horde. Feudal strife and strife led gradually to the disintegration of the White Horde, as a result of which in the first half of the 15th century on its territory separate large feudal uluses: the Nogai Horde, the Sheibanid ulus and the Siberian Khanate.
Territorially, the Kumandins were part of the White Horde and then the Siberian Khanate. And even after the defeat of the latter as a result of Ermak's campaign, the Kumandins did not cease to be tributaries - now they were obliged to pay tribute (yasak) to the Teleuts, and then to the Dzungars (Dzungars - aka Oirats, Western Mongols).
Since 1756, after the defeat of Dzungaria in the war with the Qing Empire, all Altai tribes, including the Kumandins, voluntarily joined the Russian Empire. And according to the “Statute on foreigners”, developed in 1822 by M.M. Speransky, they were categorized as “nomadic” and included in the Biysk uyezd.
The materials of the site “Kumandins in Altai” (http://www.bigpi.biysk.ru/altay/), the site was created within the framework of the project “Revival and Development of Kumandinsky Culture in Altai Krai” under the grant of the Governor of Altai Krai Alexey Bogdanovich Karlin.
Website authors:
Bespalov Alexander Mikhailovich - Candidate of Philosophy, Associate Professor, Head of the Department of Philosophy of the State Educational Institution of Higher Professional Education “V.M. Shukshin Biysk Pedagogical State University”;
Valentina Makarovna Kastarakova, Chairwoman of Association of Kumandins of Altai.
