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

Abstract

Biographical note: Lukas Allemann is an anthropologist and historian at the Arctic Centre of the University of Lapland (Finland). He is currently finishing his PhD thesis on the history and consequences of social engineering among Northern indigenous minorities in the Soviet Union, on the example of the relocations among the Sámi people, using mainly oral history methods. He holds a master's degree from the University of Basel (Switzerland) in Eastern European history and Russian language and literature. AbstractThis inquiry into the history of boarding schools for indigenous and quasi-indigenous, tundraconnected 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 stigmatisation of mostly Sámi children from relocated families as mentally disabled is set in a frame of individualisation of the negative, which sought to present failures of the state's social engineering as personal fallibility.

The Perspective of Former Pupils: Indigenous Children and Boarding Schools on the Kola Peninsula, 1960s to 1980s

“…Under such conditions, being placed in the local boarding school instead of in the local daytime school looks, at a first glance, like a paradoxical situation. However, there were manifold, but not obvious, reasons for this, as I have shown previously (Allemann 2018). They included: Firstly, structural racism, resulting from a benevolent paternalistic policy mixed with vague but tenacious prejudices about the otherness and needs of the indigenous population, as shown in this sociological report to the Murmansk Regional Government about the living conditions of the indigenous population:…”

“…From the 1960s onwards, after the mass relocations, also most Sámi children from relocated families attended the NBS, in spite of the fact that their parents lived in the same settlement (Afanasieva 2019;Allemann 2018).…”

“…Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan. 6 local authorities to -apparently -alleviate these problems, and to massage the housing statistics, was to send the children of relocated families to the boarding school (Allemann 2018;Afanasieva 2019, 191 f.).…”

“…The reasons behind the relocations included collectivisation, sedentarisation, economic rationalisation, industrial and infrastructural development, and the requirements of the military. It is beyond the scope of this text to go into more detail about such relocations; they are discussed by Konstantinov (2015, 96-196), Afanasyeva (2013), Allemann (2013), and Gutsol, Vinogradova and Samorukova (2007). The boarding school period discussed in this chapter mainly covers the 1960s to the 1980s.…”

Boarding schools in transition: A post-socialist analysis of “relevance” as an education policy problem in Mongolia

“…New methodologies emerged, such as Makarenko's approach to schooling as an education in integrating the individual personality within the collective, that dominated educational science (Caskey, 1979). This broad overview, though, hides national stories that tell multiple tales of the boarding school; how those boarding schools in Cuba aimed to instil the rural ethos into children which was so important to a socialist revolution launched by a rural guerrilla army (Luke, 2018); how those in Soviet Lapland gave children of the indigenous Sami population opportunities for social mobility but imposed "ethnic depreciation" (Allemann, 2018); and of course, how those in Mongolia were created with the needs of children in mobile herding families in mind. Herder children in Mongolia grew up as fully integrated members of the family production unit, caring for animals and in close proximity to nature.…”