Indigenous peoples of Russia as political actors

There are over 65 indigenous ethnic groups in the Russian Federation, and some 40 live in the North and the Arctic portion of the country, representing about 200,000 people. Indigenous peoples in Russia are understood to mean primarily not only indigenous, but also small populations. This is because larger populations, made out of nomadic tribes which migrated to Russia in more recent times, have also laid a claim to being indigenous and are actually recognized as such by the United Nations. However, the main umbrella organization in Russia, the Russian Association of Indigenous Peoples of the North, Siberia and the Far East (RAIPON) is quite adamant in keeping only smaller indigenous groups on its list. The Russian empire started expanding east in the 16th century, soon after the Mongol yoke had been rejected. However, the Russians had been in contact with Finno-Ugrian populations for hundreds of years, and some regions had a mixed half-breed population. As the Russians marched east, they encountered peoples they had not heard of before, and behaved with them in the same manner the Americans did as they moved west. The indigenous communities were broken up, driven into forced labor, accultured, but sometimes managed to escape and hid in the forest and the tundra. After three hundred years of expansion all the way into Alaska, Russia had a firm grip on the Southern fringe of Siberia and some of the Russian Far East. But further north as well as in more remote areas of the Russian Far East, people continued to live a traditional lifestyle, when the Russian Revolution of 1917 changed the game. The Soviets put more effort into penetrating the whole continent, driven by new technologies enabling them to tap in Siberia's vast natural resources. The Soviet local representatives targeted wealthy reindeer herd owners, traders, shamans as enemies of the people, as they were doing with the White Army, which they fought well into the 1920's before they consolidated their power on the North and the Far East. The traditional economies were replaced by a communal farm system (kolkhoz and then sovkhoz) that negated the clan-based system and tried to erase traditional governance. Immense swathes of land used for traditional activities were occupied to make room for industries, roads, penitentiary colonies (the gulag), and also, gradually, for the building of towns and cities. The children of reindeer herders and hunters were taken away from their families and placed in boarding schools. The forests were cut down, the rivers polluted, the land poisoned. For forty to fifty years, nothing changed. Very few people outside of Russia (and even in Russia) knew there were indigenous peoples, or had any contact with them. They were almost completely isolated, and consequently forgotten for the most part, except for a few writers and artists compelled to sing praises to the regime