Yakutia (Sakha) Faces a Religious Choice: Shamanism or Christianity

Abstract

The religious situation in postsoviet Yakutia (Sakha) is most similar to that in the Finno-Ugric republics of the Volga region, Mari El and Udmurtia, and in the Turkic republic of Chuvashia. In all these regions two religions are battling for souls: national paganism and Orthodoxy.' However, the situation in Yakutia has many unique features. The peoples of the Volga have preserved far less of their pagan heritage, having been subjected to intensive russification, europeanisation and christianisation from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Their current world-view, even among those who consider themselves pagans, has been formed over several generations of Russian schooling and many centuries of Christian influence. Paganism is preserved in the form of folklore and various elements of ancient beliefs. Individual pagan priests in Udmurtia and their slightly more numerous colleagues in Mari El have become more like organisers of festivals and rites that they themselves have difficulty understanding rather than custodians of a priceless prechristian worldview. The leaders of the neopagan movements in these republics are mostly involved in reconstructing an ideology that has disappeared, and they are doing so on the basis of European (essentially Christian) concepts that they are familiar with, as a response to the popular desire for national revival; they are not preserving and reviving some­ thing that already exists. The situation is different in Yakutia. The Russians arrived here much later. The first Cossack vanguards, who were not very numerous, began to build their fortified settlements at the end of the seventeenth century; but the real conquest of Yakutia began a century later. Only from the end of the eighteenth century did mass baptisms of the native population begin. However, the genuine christianisation of the Yakut (Sakha) nation took place much later still, with the work of St Innokenti (Veni­ aminov) in the second half of the nineteenth century. As bishop, Innokenti initiated and oversaw the translation of the Bible and a number of other theological texts into the Yakut language. Nor was he afraid to incorporate elements of pagan rites into the liturgy and to use the names of their Yakuts' own pagan gods in the translation of the scriptures. The missionary and educational activity of Innokenti and his colleagues had some success. Before 1917 there were Yakut-Ianguage parishes with Yakut priests, and some of the population had adopted Orthodoxy, giving them a pro-Russian cultural and political orientation. Nevertheless, the majority of Yakuts remained pagans or dual-believers with a very shallow Christian overlay. Shamanism was the basic form