Nenets

The Nenets are a reindeer-herding people of the Russian Arctic, living along the tundra and forest margins between the Kanin and Taymyr peninsulas. The largest of the Samoyedic peoples, they numbered 49,646 in Russia's 2021 census. Their name means "real people"; Russians formerly called them Samoyeds or Yuraks, a usage that faded in the early twentieth century.

Nenets is a Samoyedic language, part of the Uralic family that also includes Finnish, Hungarian and the Sámi languages. According to one theory, Samoyedic-speaking groups moved north from southern Siberia some time before the twelfth century and settled around the lower Ob and Yenisei rivers. There are two main languages, Tundra Nenets and Forest Nenets, spoken by the two main branches of the people. The Forest Nenets, around 1,500 people, live in the Pur and Taz river basins; the Tundra Nenets are far more numerous. A third group, the Yaran, arose from intermarriage between Nenets and Izhma Komi.

Reindeer are central to Nenets life, giving meat, hides and transport, and allowing families to cover huge distances across the tundra. Large-scale herding developed in the eighteenth century. Fish is the other mainstay of the diet. Families live in conical tents, and the Nenets bred the dog that later became known as the Samoyed, which polar explorers prized for its toughness.

Traditional Nenets belief is animist and shamanic, stressing care for the land and what it provides; the shaman is called a tadibya. During migrations, sacred objects travel on a special sledge, unpacked only by respected elders for rituals. Society was organised in clans.

The Primary Chronicle of Kievan Rus', compiled around 1113, is said to contain the first written mention of the Nenets, and Novgorod's influence reached the far north-east of European Russia. As Novgorod weakened in the fifteenth century the region passed to Muscovy, which in 1499 founded Pustozyorsk as a fortified hub for trade and government. In the Soviet era the state created the Nenets Autonomous Okrug in 1929 and the Yamal (Nenets) National Okrug in 1930, regions that still bear the people's name.

Collectivisation pressed nomads to settle, and children were sent to state boarding schools, weakening language and identity. Many herders lost their reindeer. In Yamal, however, collectivisation was enforced for only about a decade, and after 1953 herds recovered strongly, rising by half in the 1950s and nearly doubling again by 1980. Herders found ways to keep private animals within collective herds.

The Yamal Peninsula, home to some 10,000 Nenets, about half of them nomadic herders, has become a major centre of gas production. Since Gazprom arrived in 2008, roads, pipelines and plants have cut across migration routes, fenced off sacred sites and degraded fishing waters, while warming has lengthened migrations. Some Nenets have protested, notably the writer and herder Yuri Vella and the online movement Voice of the Tundra; others value the compensation and jobs the industry brings. Nenets writers and painters, among them Anna Nerkagi and Tyko Vylka, have carried their culture to wider audiences.

Our 1530 map shows Nenets territory in north-western Siberia, an approximate outline beside the Enets, Komi and Khanty, with the Khanate of Sibir to the south and the Grand Principality of Moscow to the west. The Nenets had lived there long before, and live there still. See also the Sámi and Russia.