Arctic mirrors

Yuri Slezkine (Author)

Over dit boek

  • Type: Book: Non-fiction
  • Subtitel: Russia and the small peoples of the North
  • Uitgever: Cornell University Press
  • Land: USA
  • Plaats: Ithaca
  • ISBN: 9780801481789
  • Taal: English
  • Pagina's: 456
  • Locatie: 5.2.3

Lees de synopsis van dit werk

Since the groundbreaking 1922 silent documentary Nanook of the North, not much has changed in the everyday life of the Alaskan Eskimos. Nor has much changed for the Arctic people of Russia, despite the incursions of many armies, both military and missionary. Despite their obvious primitiveness, the small Russian tribes of the North saw perhaps lesser levels of brutality by the Stalin regime and beyond, and the most obvious reason for this is the weather. Slezkine spends some time on the northerners' ability to cope with the climate, but mostly concentrates on the changing face of the Soviet Union in the microcosm of the northern people: from "savage Indians" to the slow evolution from icebound hunters and trappers to industrialized laborers. The book is an intellectual treatise, and occasionally Slezkine's clinical language can be as dry as a Siberian plain, but his descriptions of the trials of the northern Russians help make this book an invaluable look at the people the totalitarian Soviets forgot. Joe Collins.