Snezhnoe
A Village on the Anadyr' River

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Snezhnoe, which is Russian for "Snowy," is located about 300 km west of Anadyr' along the Anadyr' River. It is a tiny village of about 375 people. Snezhnoe is what the Soviets liked to call (and everyone still does from force of habit) a "Native Village," which refers to villages whose population is predominantly indigenous.  Most "Native Villages," although they have been heavily sovietized, are at least located in a place where indigenous occupation predated the arrival of the Soviets. Snezhnoe, however, is a bit different.

In 1929, it was decided to establish a state farm (sovkhoz) on an unoccupied spot along the Anadyr' River, and a team was sent to build the town and then bring in residents to populate it (the book you see is a handwritten history of the founding of Snezhnoe, shown to me by the village librarian). The Soviet government was collectivizing many villages in Chukotka at that time, but this was the only case where a village was built entirely from scratch. The village's founders had to search far and wide to find residents for the village, and as a result, Snezhnoe is one of the most ethnically mixed populations of any village in Chukotka: Chukchi, Chuvantsy, Koriak, Eveny, Russians, Ukrainians, and others all make their home here, some from the surrounding tundra, some from all the way out on the coast.

The economy of Snezhnoe is built around its former state farm (that's the headquarters in the photo), and the main occupation of this state farm is reindeer herding. During the Soviet period, reindeer herding, like the rest of the Soviet economy (only even more so), was heavily subsidized by the government. Management had been wrested from the hands of indigenous herders and given to immigrant Russians and Ukrainians, while the herders were relegated to labor positions within the state farm -- they were the ones who worked directly with the reindeer herds, but they were not necessarily given any say in decision-making.

Today the Soviet Union no longer exists, and Russia has supposedly made a transition to a market economy. Thus, almost all government support has been withdrawn from the state farms, including Snezhnoe's, and as a result the reindeer herds nearly collpased in the 1990s.  There used to be ten reindeer brigades attached to Snezhnoe's state farm (each brigade tended a large herd of reindeer); by the time of my research in 1996 there were only two. Employees of the state farm had not received a paycheck in years, and they lived by taking some staple foods on credit, sharing the few old-age pensions received (in cash) by families, and living off the resources available in the tundra -- reindeer meat, fish, berries, mushrooms, and pine nuts.  

Anatolii Iakovlevich Tyneru is the directorof the former state farm, and here he is in his office (in the building shown above). The state farm was reorganized more than once in the 1990s, and today it goes by the title Municipal Unitary Enterprise of Rural Agricultural Producers "Anadyrskii." It is neither a state farm nor a private enterprise, but a municipally owned enterprise controlled by the district administration.

Life in the village of Snezhnoe

Brigade No. 4, a reindeer herding camp in the tundra
 
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