Indigenous intellectuals and suppressed Russian anthropology: Sakha ethnography from the end of the nineteenth century to the 1930s

In the course of the ideological shift to Soviet ethnography linked to the Soviet cultural revolution of 1928-31, the Communist Party targeted the old guard in the academic disciplines as "enemies of the people." Among those suppressed were three distinguished Sakha (or Yakut) ethnographers and political leaders. These three intellectuals managed to cope with the Bolsheviks' social revolution and to appreciate the great value of their indigenous cultures without rejecting the Russian concept of modernity. Their work fills a gap in Sakha ethnography between the classic ethnographies of the political exiles and the historical-ethnographic works of the 1940s. Their personal histories reveal that suppressed Russian anthropology was a study of otherness that entangled the others themselves and at the same time excluded them.