Afanasyeva, A. Forced relocations of the Kola Sámi people: background and consequences / by Anna Afanasyeva. - Tromsø: University of Tromsø, 2013. - 82 p.: ill., map, portr.

2 indigenous people. This case study documents the policy of forced relocations on the Sámi 4 people of the Kola Peninsula in Russia from the 1930’s -1970’s and analyzes its impacts on certain aspects of the community life, based on analysis of the data gained from the fieldwork interviews. The main focus of the study will be a brief reconstruction of events from the 1930’s to the 1970’s – the period during which most of the forced resettlements occurred. Thus, this work will provide a better understanding of the policy of forced relocations and their consequences. However, one of the central ideas in the following thesis concerns the distribution of the Sámi settlements historically and the occurred social changes in result of the implemented relocation policies from the 1930’s– 1970’s. In comparison to the large number of studies on Sámis in Northern Scandinavia, the Sámi community of the Kola Peninsula is relatively unknown both in Western Europe and in Russia. The main challenge to this study is the limited amount of literature on the forced relocations imposed on the Kola Sámi community in contrast to a large number of works devoted to reconstructing their society as it was in the 19th century. The works on Kola Sámi published during the Soviet period can be divided into two types. There are strongly politicized works whose intention was to demonstrate the benefits of social reforms on the Kola Sámi well-being. 5 On the other hand, there are studies of folklore and material culture, placing Sámi culture firmly in the past. The topic of the relocations of communities, or indeed the effect of the Soviet economic policies on Sámi, has been the subject of limited number of studies. 6 To adopt the language of historians of anthropology in Europe, many of the former studies tell us more about the “own cultural implications of the researches”, which as we know could be very different from the implications of the native people directly involved in a given event. 7 Due to the limited number of studies on the forced relocations of the Kola Sámi, the emphasis in the following thesis will be on oral texts gained from interviews of the community members. The time period of this study (1930’s -1970’s) reflects the period of time that many elderly informants remember and can comment upon. This also gives this study the quality of an urgent anthropological project due to the fact that a large number of people who experienced these relocations pass away every year. 4 The Sami people, also spelled Sámi or Saami. I will use throughout this thesis the term Sámi. 5 Kiselev 1987. 6 Gutsol 2007, Gutsol 2007a, Alleman 2010. 7 Barnard, Spencer 2002: 181; Spradley 1980: 65.