The Yukaghirs. Surrounding society and the main economic activity of the region of residence

The mining industry is a crucial area of Yakutia’s economy. Yukaghirs’ traditional settlement area includes the Zyryanka coal field between the Indigirka and the Kolyma. Developing of the Nadezhdinskoye coal deposit in the Verkhnekolymsk district is extremely important for people living in Northern Yakutia and in the Chukotka autonomous area and in the Magadan region. In addition to industrial-scale coal mining, gold digging was launched in the Verkhnekolymsk district in the 1990s. The district also operates basic infrastructure utilities, such as boilers and diesel power stations. The district also has the Kolyma Navigation Company JSC based at the Zyryanka river port; it is the only river transportation organization in the Kolyma river catchment area. 

The district’s agriculture is based on animal husbandry, meat horse farming, and reindeer herding. The reforms of the 1990s dealt a major blow to the local economy. To adapt to food shortages and high prices on goods brought in from other regions, local residents became actively engaged in the greenhouse business and vegetable growing in their allotments. They massively grew potatoes and other vegetables thereby increasing food resourcing. Even now, fishing, hunting, and gathering are important occupations for most of the district’s residents. The period after the reforms of the 1990s created extremely unfavorable conditions for Forest Yukaghirs’ traditional economic activities. The state agriculture support system collapsed, prices for gas, oil, and lubricants, equipment, and food skyrocketed. Sakhabult, Yakutia’s joint-stock hunting concern, purchased furs at knock-down prices making hunting unviable, and consequently, hunting gradually declined. Economic changes primarily affected hunters and reindeer herders. The share of fishing in the economy increased since it does not require such spending and skills as hunting and reindeer herding. Fishing allowed Yukaghirs to sustain themselves and their relatives in dire economic straits. Currently, locals engage in agriculture in their allotments; there are also production cooperatives, workmen’s cooperatives, and clan communes. 

Economy in the Nizhnekolymsk district has the following elements (arranged by the economic share of their goods and services in descending order): industry, agriculture, communications, commerce, transportation, utilities, public road system, and certain other economic areas. Industry is based on gold mining. The district center, urban-type settlement Chersky, is a major transportation hub on Northern Yakutia.  

Chersky urban-type settlement. Photo: Nikolay S. Goncharov. 2021

Radical economic reforms of the 1990s plunged agriculture in the Verkhnekolymsk district into a protracted crisis. Rapid and unprepared transition to market economy produced an uncontrolled spike in prices of fuel, equipment, food, clothes; communication systems and sales strategies for local artisans, hunters and fishermen and support systems for fragile northern economic sectors were destroyed. Traditional regional sectors, reindeer herding, hunting and fishing, were affected, particularly herding and hunting. Reindeer herds shrank significantly. While in 1985, reindeer herds in Andryushkino numbered 18,155 head, only about 2,100 were left in 2021. Such a sharp drop in animal count stemmed from a series of negative factors: depreciation of tangible assets, high cost of gas, oil, and lubricants, low motivation among reindeer herders (particularly among the young generation), loss of professional skills, environmental causes (excessive snow in winters results in famine among, and consequent loss of reindeer). Besides reindeer herding, animal husbandry in the district includes horse and cattle breeding. In 2018, official statistics recorded 54 horses and 5 cattle. 

The post-Soviet period is characterized by decline in hunting owing to low purchasing prices for white arctic fox and other pelts. Many hunters were left unemployed, and the system of hunting routes and traps and an elaborate hunting infrastructure that had been decades in development fell into a dilapidated state. Due to its greater adaptivity, fishing held a more stable place in the structure of economic practices employed by Forest Yukaghirs primarily as a means of providing the local population with food. In the 1990s and the 2000s, mammoth ivory mining has been on the rise. However, this occupation is sometimes frowned upon and some members of the local community believe that the traditional culture of Yukaghirs and Evens prohibited mammoth ivory mining. 

Therefore, the economy of Yukaghirs’ traditional areas of settlement today combines traditional nature use sectors and “urbanist” occupations. The latter dominate; they include utilities, education, healthcare, municipal governance, commerce, etc. It should be stressed that traditional and non-traditional areas are not separated by an impenetrable boundary, these are connected vessels linked by a variety of means people used to adapt to their surrounding space.