Allemann, L. The sami of the Kola Peninsula : about the life of an ethnic minority in the Soviet Union / Lukas Allemann ; [transl. by Michael Lomax]. - Rovaniemi : University of Lapland Printing Centre, 2013. - 151 p. : ill., map, portr. ; 25 см. - (Senter for samiske studier, Skriftserie ; 19).

The Sami of the Kola Peninsula ‘"Yes, the time will come when the Kola Peninsula is accorded the commercial and political significance that nature her­ self intended for it." Aleksandr Platonovic Engelgardt, governor o f the Province o fArchangel'sk, 1897 1. Introduction 1.1 Objectives of this work The Sami, the indigenous people of Lapland, today inhabit the territory of four na­ tional states, Norway, Sweden, Finland and Russia. In this way the fate of this ethnic group was for many years divided in two not just by national borders, but also by an ideological border, the Iron Curtain. In this work I explore with the help of oral history interviews the living conditions of the Sami in the Soviet Union, with a particular focus on the period between the end of Stalinism and the collapse of the Soviet Union. The interviews were conducted by myself from 2006 to 2008 with five Sami women in Murmansk and Lovozero (Rus­ sia) .1I n the present thesis I set out to show how my interviewees succeeded in navi­ gating in their everyday lives the narrow path between welcomed progress and bad planning during the Soviet period. Little attention is paid to this question in the exist­ ing literature. This is dominated by strongly pro- or anti-Soviet positions, which scarcely reflect the 'real life' conditions in which men and women have to come to terms with the hard facts of existence. This oral history project on the Russian Sami is intended to close a thematic and temporal research gap. A thematic gap because the scientific literature on the Sami of the Kola Peninsu­ la has been primarily ethnological and socio-anthropological and less historiograph­ 1The fact that I interviewed only women was not intended from the outset and can be explained by a combination of several factors. On the one hand during my short stay in the Kola Peninsula none of the men who had previously agreed to an interview were reachable, many of them having travelled out for longer periods into the tundra. On the other hand, apart from this rather random factor, I should mention that the life expectancy of Sami men is much lower than that of women, and as such is the fact that my list of potential interviewees contained significantly more women than men is quite representative. More detailed information about life expectancy and the procedure for selection of the interviewees can be found in Chapters 1.3.2. and 2.3.1. Senterfor samiske studier, Skriftserie nr. 19 1