Home – Home – Jornals – Humanitarian sciences in Siberia 2019 number

Krasnoyarsk Krai is a leading region in Siberia on a number of Belarusians who settled the territory at the period of mass peasant resettlements in the late XIX - early XX centuries. Despite this fact, it remains one of the least studied Siberian as regards the ethnography of Belarusians living in its territory. The ethnographic expedition held in 2017 in Mansky District of Krasnoyarsk Krai partially filled the gap. The expedition materials become an empirical basis of this study. The research methodology is based on a comparative historical approach. Features of traditional culture of the Belarusian peasants-migrants were compared with its prototypes in Belarus and a new ethnic environment of migrants in Siberia. The expedition revealed the most stable patterns of traditional culture brought to the Siberian territory by the immigrant ancestors. Adaptation processes most actively took place among the first and second generations of migrants. Originally, they were connected with adapting to new climatic conditions and ethnic environment. Later such factors as changes of social and economic life of the Soviet village related to collectivization, life modernization, as well as the World War II consequences affected the adaptation. Nowadays, the prevalence of the multiethnic population is typical for all villages in the surveyed area, where descendants of the Belarusian migrants live. A number of factors contributed to its formation. Initially, lots of sites were populated by people from different provinces with equal economic and social situation. It promoted faster interethnic integration of Belarusians with other migrant groups in comparison with those areas where they lived neighboring Cheldons, Russian old-timer population. In the 1930-1940s the composition of population in the surveyed villages became more ethnically mixed due to resettling residents of individual farms (hutors) to large collective farms (kolhoz), and a demographic failure after the Great Patriotic War. These factors led to mixed marriages becoming more widespread during this period. Due to this situation, today, the migrants identification with Belarusians is connected only with echoes of historical memory kept in their families.