Pages of history

  Russkoye Ustye should not be taken to mean just one village standing on the left bank of the Indigirka River, but the whole set of small settlements located in the delta. They are located at the 71st degree of northern latitude. The average annual air temperature here is minus 15 degrees Celsius and the snow cover lasts for eight months. The main occupation of the population is fishing and hunting the white fox.

  Russkoye Ustye was first mentioned in scientific literature in 1739 in the reports of Lieutenant Dmitry Laptev to the Admiralty Board. The leader of the Great Northern Expedition V. Bering commissioned him to describe the coast of the Arctic Ocean east of the Lena River.

...Since then, Russkoye Ustye has been marked on all geographical maps. Some maps do not show Lipetsk and Kaluga, for example, but Russkoye Ustye does. And, apparently, not only because there is a lot of free space in this part of the map. This village is not quite ordinary - it is an ethnographic uniqueness, ‘a piece of Iceland of Russian life’.

  Semyon Dezhnev's sea voyage, which ended with the opening of the strait by Asia and America, actually began from here. Russkoye Ustye was visited at different times by M. Stadukhin, Sh. Shalaurov, Y. Sannikov, G. Maidel, K. Vollosovich, whose names, as well as the name of D. Laptev, are immortalised on the map of Russia.

  As is known, the Russian advance to Siberia and the expansion of the north-eastern borders of Russia were the result of a number of objective circumstances. An important motivating force was the fact that Siberia was rich in fur animals (‘soft stuff’), and its north-east - mammoth and walrus bone (‘bone, fish tooth’). These goods were the currency needed by the Moscow state for the emerging All-Russian market and for trade with other countries. In addition, life demanded that the growing state define its new eastern borders.

  In 1628, for the first time Russian explorers appeared on the Lena and Vilyui rivers. In 1632, Cossack sotnik P. Beketov founded Yakutsk, which later played a huge role in the development of north-east Asia and Alaska.

  In 1633, a group of servants and hunters submitted a petition for permission to go to ‘a new place by sea to the Yanga River’. Ivan Rebrov, a Tobolsk Cossack, became the head of this expedition. The detachment started its journey from the Lena and managed to reach the Yana River.

  After some time Rebrov continued his way further eastwards, travelling about a thousand kilometres across the Arctic Ocean, reaching the Indigirka, which was then called the Sobachaya River (literally - the Dog River). Here Rebrov built two stockades. (One of them is undoubtedly Russkoye Ustye). On the Yana and Indigirka he stayed a total of seven years and only in 1641 with the collected yasak (tax) to Yakutsk. With good reason it can be considered that Rebrov opened the Yukagir land for the state. ‘And among me, - he wrote in his petition, - no one has ever been on those heavy services on the Yanga river and on the Sobachaya river, I have checked those distant services’ [Discoveries of the Russians..., 1951, p 130].

  Gradually, most of the Russian industrial people got families, married ‘beautiful Yukagir women’ and became a permanent harvesting population. At the end of the 17th century, small but permanent Russian settlements appeared on the Olenek, Lena, Yana, Indigirka, Kolyma and Anadyr rivers. Their inhabitants were called Indigirshchiks (Russko-Ustiintsy), Kolymchans (Pokhodchans), and Anadyrshchiks (Markovtsy) according to their place of residence.

So, the facts allow us to assert: a small group of Russian people has long inhabited the Indigirka. Living surrounded by local nationalities and partly mixing with them, they nevertheless, unlike the Vilyui, Amga, Ust-Yana and other Russian peasants of Yakutia, have preserved their native language, oral folk art and Russian self-consciousness almost intact. And even some of their neighbours - Yakuts, Yukagirs and Even - forgot their language and adopted Russian.

  The main factors responsible for the remarkable national resilience of the Indigirka Russians and the originality of their language are:

   firstly, the compactness of settlement as a consequence of the settlement of ‘industrial’ people in the Indigirka delta, rich in fish and white fox;

   secondly, the semi-natural character of the economy. The only marketable industry was fox fishing and mammoth bone harvesting. All this led to the isolation of everyday life and economy;

   thirdly, a certain territorial isolation and remoteness from the surrounding indigenous peoples of the North due to relatively rare intermarriages with Yakuts and Yukagirs;

  fourthly, the fact that the comparatively numerous bourgeois society was from time to time replenished by new settlers-Russians.

   Marriages were performed mainly within the community, often marrying (or being married) to Kolyma Russians, less often to Ust-Yanians. Local tradition divides all Russko-Ustiinian surnames into four types:

  (a) ‘root’ (indigenous, i.e. old-timer) Russian surnames - Chikhachevs, Kiselevs, Strukovs, Antonovs, Shchelkanovs, Golyzhinskis, Rozhins, Shkulevs, Shelokhovskis, Cheremkins, Suzdolovs;

  b) ‘unrooted’ (i.e., non-local), belonging to later settlers: Skopins, Guskovs, Karataevs, Zhuravlevs, Ponevs, Shakhovs, Kotevshchikovs, Shulgovatis;

  c) ‘unrooted’, belonging to settlers from the peasant class: Portnyagins;

  d) surnames of Russified Yukaghirs and Yakuts - Varakins, Shcherbachkovs, Novgorodovs, Klemovskis;

  e) Soldatovs. (The Cossaks)  

  These factors contributed to the fact that bringing with them a higher culture, the Russian settlers were not subjected to assimilating influence of their neighbours. Having taken from them everything necessary for living and farming in the conditions of the North and heroically resisting the polar elements, they did not lose their ethnic identity.

  Reference:

1. Alexei Chikachev. Russians on the Indigirka// Series ‘Pages of our Motherland’ - Novosibirsk: Nauka, 2016 - P. 20-31.