SIBERIA: After the Shaman

The final film in the Nomads series.

Producers notes

‘The Even, isolated in the Siberian Arctic, used helicopters and snowmobiles to help herd the reindeer. Late Soviet policy supported nomadism as a viable occupation. Arctic nationalism among minority people was on the rise.

Glasnost offered us the unique opportunity to film the Even, a little-known group of Siberian Arctic pastoralists, whose nomadic traditions were still being fostered in the vast Soviet collectives of the Siberian taiga. In the 1940s, when Stalin imposed the collective system on all reindeer-herding people throughout the Soviet Arctic, he effectively destroyed a way of life that had existed for centuries. The nomadic migration of herders and their families was forbidden. Shaman were imprisoned or shot. The people were forced into collective state farms with the men alone sent to the brigades which looked after the reindeer. The system was hated, and in retaliation, the nomadic pastoralists slaughtered the bulk of their herds, destroying the mainstay of the Siberian economy. It took forty years to bring the herds back to the level they once were at.

By 1990 nomadic reindeer herding was widely recognised as the most viable form of husbandry for the region. State collectives had become huge farming combines, the largest encompassing as much as two million square hectares. Each collective had an administrative centre which serviced up to twenty nomadic brigades, each responsible for herds of up to two thousand reindeer.

The disintegration of the Soviet Union threatened the future of the Even. The natural resources and energy supplies of the Arctic mean that the last great wilderness left on earth is under attack. The impact of external technology proved a mixed blessing. Combined with the debilitating impact of alcohol and drugs it is eroding the traditional Arctic culture.’

Director: Graham Johnston
Production Company: Malone Gill
Producer: Georgina Denison
Producer: Peter Carmichael
Year of Production 1992

Tuesday, December 12, 2006 at 7:30 PM (GMT)

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