“I do not know if Mum knew what was going on”: Social reproduction in boarding schools in Soviet Lapland

ABSTRACT

This inquiry into the history of boarding schools for indigenous and quasi-indigenous, tundra-connected children in the Soviet part of Lapland tries to answer why children were sent to a boarding school despite their parents living in the same village, and also why an additional school for mentally disabled children, a school half as big as the boarding school for “regular” children, was opened. Data from oral history interviews among former pupils and teachers, both indigenous and incomers, are combined with archival materials. Using the concepts of cynical knowledge as well as the Bourdieuan notions of social exclusion and reproduction, concealed functions of the boarding school system are identified, among which are the attenuation of housing shortage and the operation of the school out of economic interests, alongside with ethnocentric and paternalist patterns. The stigmatization of mostly Sámi children from relocated families as mentally disabled is set in a frame of individualization of the negative, which sought to present failures of the state’s social engineering as personal fallibility.

KEYWORDS:

• Sámi
• Komi
• boarding school
• Russia
• Soviet Union
• oral history
• special education
• Kola Peninsula

Acknowledgements

Special thanks go to all the anonymized contributors in my field site and to the State Archive of the Murmansk Region for granting access to documents and being so helpful in finding needed information. I am thankful to the following persons for discussing the topic with me and/or commenting on the article: Elena Khlinovskaya Rockhill, Florian Stammler, Yulian Konstantinov, Julia Obertreis, Cristina Allemann-Ghionda, Andrej Kotljarchuk, David Sjögren, Outi Rantala, Madoka Hammine. I thank the University of Lapland and the Finnish Academy for supporting my research financially and logistically.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

ORCID

Lukas Allemann http://orcid.org/0000-0001-8636-1226

Notes

1 For the sake of anonymity, no more exact references are given for this and all following cited interviews. Due to the small population of Sámi people in Russia, indicating the age and the place of residence of interviewees could lead to their identification.

2 The surnames in the article reflect the mentioned Komi-Sámi hierarchy: Rochev is a Komi surname. This individual was the author of the article and chairman of the comrade’s court; Zakharova is a widespread Sámi surname.

3 “State” in the Soviet Union has a very wide meaning, well beyond “government”, and close to “society”: Alongside with the bureaucratic vertical edifice, mechanisms of power rested also with ‘ordinary’ people through mutual surveillance, self-identification and self-indoctrination (Khlinovskaya Rockhill 2010, 19). This is why when I personalize the state, here we can include the responsible actors of lower ranks of representation of state power, such as teachers.

4 A counter-example is Italy, where, in an attempt to increase social cohesion, the segregation of children with special needs in separate classes and schools has been abolished by law as early as 1977, prescribing their inclusive tuition in regular classes (Allemann-Ghionda 2013, 134).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Academy of Finland under the research projects ORHELIA (Oral History of Empires by Elders in the Arctic, 2011–2015, decision no. 251111) and WOLLIE (Live, Work or Leave? Youth – wellbeing and the viability of (post)-extractive Arctic industrial cities in Finland and Russia, 2018–2020, decision no. 314471).