The seventh and final lecture of the Havighurst Center's Fall 2024 Colloquium series, "Humanity and the Arctic."
This lecture deals with the history of Novaya Zemlya, an Arctic archipelago, focusing on its transformation into a military zone and subsequent conversion into a Soviet nuclear bomb testing ground. This process, which took place in the 1950s, resulted in extensive environmental destruction and the forced relocation of Nenets and Pomor communities to the mainland and nearby islands. To comprehensively understand these events within the context of Indigenous sovereignty debates, this paper explores the life history of Tyko Vylka (1886-1960), a Nenets hunter from Novaya Zemlya. Vylka, known for his skills as a painter, epic singer, and guide in Arctic expeditions, eventually became a prominent political figure in the archipelago. He earned the semi-ironic but accepted title of "President of Novaya Zemlya," recognized even by Soviet officials. However, his ambiguous integration into Soviet politics led him to guide the Soviet military in establishing the nuclear test site and eventually sign the documents for the relocation of Indigenous communities from the archipelago. By analyzing Vylka's art, writings, Soviet official documents, and oral history accounts, this lecture offers insights into the intricate interplay of Soviet politics in the Arctic and the loss of Indigenous sovereignty during the early Cold War. The study draws on extensive archival research conducted by the author in Russia and Europe, supplemented by oral history accounts from Nenets families who were relocated from the archipelago.
Dmitri Arzyutov is a historian who is intellectually and emotionally connected to anthropological ideas and long-term fieldwork. His bi-disciplinary identity is shaped by his curiosity about our everyday lives, which are inseparable from our imaginations. Arzyutov is interested in how the paths, ideas, and practices of scholars and the people they collaborate with intersect, coevolve, and ultimately shape our "stable" notions of the environment, materiality, social life, and the past. The arguments in his writings often revolve around the intertwined lives of anthropological and natural science ideas, the long-term dynamics of human-environment interactions in the circumpolar North, and how these are narrated and inscribed in the scholarship and novels of Indigenous and settler-colonial authors.
Arzyutov is currently finalizing his first book manuscript, “The Northern Book of Origin: Siberian Indigenous Narratives and Metropolitan Ethnogenesis Theories” (under contract with the University of Nebraska Press). This work explores the history of how Russian and Soviet anthropologists, archaeologists, and linguists have constructed theories of Indigenous origin (ethnogenesis) based on stories recorded from Siberian and Northern Indigenous communities about underground dwellers who coexisted with or preceded today’s Indigenous peoples, as well as on artifacts they collected. Through this exploration, the book uncovers the intricate dynamics of knowledge (co-)production between scholars and communities under various political regimes, and highlights how these evolving theories have shaped—and, at times, strained—academic connections worldwide.
His second book project explores the environmental and Indigenous history of the remote Arctic archipelago of Novaya Zemlya.
