The Reindeer People Quotes

“In the 1980s one would see rows of silent commuters in the crowded undergrounds of Moscow and Leningrad, their heads buried in serious books covered in newspaper to protect the binding (and, in those open but still uncertain times, perhaps to hide the title: in 1988 I was roughly arrested on the Leningrad metro by young Communist
vigilantes who noticed that I was reading a book on shamanism).”
― Piers Vitebsky, The Reindeer People: Living with Animals and Spirits in Siberia

“I was appalled when I realized how quickly they went through sugar, and understood their many missing teeth (Tolya calls it 'white death', the white man's revenge for the black death, which had come to Europe in the Middle Ages from Siberia).”
― Piers Vitebsky, The Reindeer People: Living with Animals and Spirits in Siberia

“In the 1980s reindeer meat still made a substantial profit. Every other activity, even when the real cost of anything at all was masked by the Soviet tangle of cross-subsidies and phantom accounting, ran at a severe loss. Though this was to change beyond all recognition in the 1990s, reindeer herders in the 1980s were fairly well paid and well provisioned, and their exotic holidays were provided free.”
― Piers Vitebsky, The Reindeer People: Living with Animals and Spirits in Siberia

“It was illegal in the Soviet Union to live anywhere except where you were registered, and it was difficult for anyone born in the Farm to change their registration and move to another place except by entering an urban profession or going to jail.”
― Piers Vitebsky, The Reindeer People: Living with Animals and Spirits in Siberia

“Tolya had two desks arranged in the classic Soviet official's T-shape which I have found throughout the world [...]. The official sat behind the crossbar of the T, his desktop a background of calendars and memoranda pinned down under a heavy sheet of glass. Visitors sat ranged on either side of the stem of the T, turning their heads to face him. In the centre of the wall behind Tolya's chair hung a large oil painting of Lenin in sober shades of brown with small highlights of Communist scarlet [...]. As visitors craned their necks towards Tolya, the painting surrounded his head like a halo and suggested an identification between the two men.”
― Piers Vitebsky, The Reindeer People: Living with Animals and Spirits in Siberia

“Every empire has a contradictory attitude towards its frontier areas, seeing them variously as a source of raw materials, a security buffer, and a social responsibility.”
― Piers Vitebsky, The Reindeer People: Living with Animals and Spirits in Siberia