Of the total number of 40 thousand Nenets, over 25 thousand live in the Yamalo-Nenets Autonomous Okrug. And it was here that the Nenets rebelled most against the Soviet regime. The uprising of 1934 became known as "Mandalada", which in Nenets means "congress of armed people".

The Nenets belong to the Samoyedic branch of the Uralic language family, and are therefore distantly related to the Finns and Hungarians. Nomadism, where families and reindeer move from place to place depending on where the best grazing grounds are, is a fundamental feature of their traditional way of life. It is still practiced by over 50 percent of the indigenous people of Yamal, who still build “chums” in the tundra – tents similar to Indian teepees, covered with tarpaulin or bark in the summer and warm reindeer fur in the winter. “For centuries, people and animals have been moving along the same routes and living in perfect symbiosis. It is actually difficult to say whether the reindeer follow people or people the reindeer,” Zoya Saparbekova, an employee of a small museum in the settlement of Yar-Sale on the Yamal Peninsula, told us in 2011.

Remove the Russians, give back the voice to the kulaks and shamans!

The beginnings of Soviet rule on the Yamal Peninsula were quite brutal. The Bolsheviks tried to forcefully convert the indigenous population to the Soviet way of life, and their shamans were arrested en masse under Stalin in the 1930s. The Nenets refused to hand over their reindeer to the state farms, but in the tundra they felt like free people. In April 1933, six Nenets were arrested and imprisoned in the regional capital of Salekhard for refusing to hand over their reindeer and for beating members of the national soviet. Four of them were taken to Tobolsk and sentenced to ten years in labor camps.

In March 1934, the Nenets living on the Yamal Peninsula began to revolt en masse against the increasingly ruthless behavior of the Soviet government and against the arrests of their shamans. The resistance consisted mainly of blockades and sabotage of the factories (places where nomads gathered and exchanged furs and other products of pastoralism). The rebels demanded, in essence, the complete withdrawal of Soviet authorities from the tundra: "Remove the Russians, we do not need any factories, give back the voice to the kulaks and shamans, we will not send children to school, we do not recognize Soviet laws and will not observe them."

In December 1934, the uprising culminated when the Nenets declared the dissolution of three national soviets and blocked the recently established Northern Sea Route factories. The rebels also killed two militiamen and one factor manager. At the end of December 1934, a detachment of OGPU troops (the predecessor of the NKVD and KGB) numbering one hundred soldiers was sent to Yamal, and eventually managed to suppress the mandalad, allegedly without loss of life. The rebels scattered across the vast, vast plains of the Yamal Peninsula, the depths of which the Soviet authorities never properly monitored. Thus ended the first organized resistance of the Nenets against the Soviet government.

A still-living rebellion

In 1943, two more large mandalads, or uprisings, took place, during which armed Nenets actively fought against the NKVD troops. The Nenets, whom the Soviet government did not hesitate to accuse of collaborating with Nazi Germany, dissolved several state farms in the remote tundra and took away their reindeer. However, the soldiers caught up with them, overpowered them, and arrested 51 Nenets. During the investigation, 41 of them died, and families without reindeer were left destitute. This uprising is still vivid in the memory of the Nenets today. The result was the departure of many families to the most remote areas of the tundra and the complete minimization of contact with the outside world for the entire existence of the Soviet Union.

After World War II, the situation calmed down relatively. “There were state farms, but the reindeer state farm is not standing still,” explains Zoya Saparbekova. In certain settlements, there were state farm offices, where herders came in the fall to evaluate results or buy food, but otherwise everything essentially went on as it had for centuries before. "Even the Soviet government did not disrupt the routes and movements of reindeer herds; it could not afford to do that, because the reindeer would not obey it anyway."

Perhaps a greater threat to the Nenets than the Soviet government is natural gas extraction today. 90 percent of Russia's gas is extracted on the Yamal Peninsula, and before the war against Ukraine, it also flowed to the Czech Republic. Hundreds of kilometers of new railway lines intersect traditional reindeer migration routes, pastures are polluted, and tens of thousands of people from all over Russia come to the area to work. Although the Nenets still maintain their traditions, they are practically powerless against Gazprom and the Russian state, and their future is in much greater danger than in Soviet times.

Author: Štěpán Černoušek, December 30, 2024

Photo: Petra Černoušková and Štěpán Černoušek (Nenets on the Yamal Peninsula in the settlements of Aksarka and Yar-Sale in April 2011)

Sources:
- Larkov Sergey, Romanenko Fyodor: "Vragi naroda" za poljarnym krugom, Paulsen, 2010
- Mandalada: Kak nency voevali protiv sovetskoj vlasti i chto s nimi stalo? Dzen.ru, 12. 8. 2022
- Vosstanija na Jamale 1934, 1943. Russkaja nacionalnaja filosofija https://www.hrono.ru/sobyt/1934sssr.html
- Funds and materials of the Yar-Sale Museum