9 Chukotkan Reindeer Husbandry in the Twentieth Century: In the Image of the Soviet Economy

The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 had far-reaching effects that precipitated social transformation throughout Russian society. Although most of the information that reaches the West concerns more visible locales such as Moscow, the most cataclysmic changes occurred in rural areas far from Moscow, about which little is generally heard. This paper concerns one particular region of the North that is located as far from Moscow as one can go in Russia – the far north-eastern Chukotka Autonomous Region. It moreover concerns one of the key economies of the North, reindeer herding, which is also one of the economies most severely affected by the post-Soviet transformation.