Date: November 14, 2011Copyright InformationTHE FATE OF FISHING IN THE TSARIST RUSSIA: THE HUMAN-FISH NEXUS IN LAKE BAIKAL An NCEEER Working Paper by Nicholas Breyfogle Ohio State University National Council for Eurasian and East European Research University of Washington Box 353650 Seattle, WA 98195 [email protected] http://www.nceeer.org/ TITLE VIII PROGRAMProject Information* Principal Investigator: Nicholas Breyfogle NCEEER Contract Number: 825-03g Date: November 14, 2011 Copyright Information Individual researchers retain the copyright on their work products derived from research funded through a contract or grant from the National Council for Eurasian and East European Research (NCEEER). 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Neither NCEEER nor the United States Government nor any recipient of this Report may use it for commercial sale. * The work leading to this report was supported in part by contract or grant funds provided by the National Council for Eurasian and East European Research, funds which were made available by the U.S. Department of State under Title VIII (The Soviet-East European Research and Training Act of 1983, as amended). The analysis and interpretations contained herein are those of the author.Executive Summary This paper explores the history of fishing on Lake Baikal in an effort to understand the fish-human nexus, to expand our understandings of the Russian relationship to the environment before the 20th century, and to think about the colonial encounter in Siberia from an environmental angle. Fishing has long been a crucial, life-sustaining, and culturally important component of life at Baikal; and fish and people have long existed in mutually influential and intertwined webs of relations. Fish stocks declined markedly in Baikal from the late 18th century on—a drop that Soviet fishers and policymakers struggled with throughout the 20th century. Notably, this massive population decrease came about before any industrial change affected the area. The changing fate of the fish was more the result of an increase in the Slavic population and of the tax-farming economic structures that the new settlers brought to the practice of fishing. Humans, this story shows, do not need to have industrial machines with their extractive capabilities and pollution by-products in order to bring about systemic ecological changes.In the early days of spring 1918, a small group of men, led by K.K. Panteleev, met in Irkutsk with the goal of bringing about a revolution in the relationship between fish and humans in the Lake Baikal region. As the Civil War erupted around them, they darted through the streets to meet clandestinely in damp, barely-lit basements. They courted daily danger in their work and expected Bolsheviks to break through the doors and arrest them at any moment. Many were indeed arrested in the streets on their way to and from meetings (and the usually soon released). The Irkutsk Provincial Soviet power had declared their work to be “counter-revolutionary” and ordered them to stop all their functions forthwith.1 Yet, in the heady if deeply troubled days of the post-1917 struggle for power, the Regional Baikal Fishing Committee (KBRK), as they styled themselves, refused to honor the order. They worked, in their own words, “conspiratorially” to recalibrate the processes of fishing on Baikal and with it the fish-human nexus that had played such an important ecological and human role for centuries.2 The goals of the KBRK were two-fold. First, they wanted fundamentally to transform the ownership structures of fishing rights that had existed under the tsarist system for more than two centuries. In tsarist times, the rights to fish certain locations were granted to specific people and institutions (such as monasteries and favored nobles) who then subcontracted those rights to local merchants who themselves then sub-subcontracted their rights to fish to artels (made up of Research for this working paper was supported by funding from the National Council for Eurasian and East European Research (NCEEEER), under authority of a Title VIII grant from the U.S. Department of State, American Philosophical Society, American Council of Learned Societies/Social Science Research Council/National Endowment for the Humanities Area Studies Fellowship, Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies, Kennan Institute for Advanced Russian Studies, Mershon Center for International Security Studies, and The Ohio State University. None of these organizations is responsible for the views expressed within this text. 1 The Bolsheviks had no opposition to these fish policies, per se, but considered their work unacceptable because their meetings had not been approved by the All-Siberian Congress of Soviets but rather by “counter-revolutionary” forces. 2 Gosudarstvennyi Arkhiv Irkutskoi Oblasti (GAIO, Irkutsk, Russia) R-330/1/2/1918, ll. 1-1ob, 7ob, 13. The story that follows is drawn from GAIO R-330/1/3/1918, GAIO R-330/1/5/1918-19, GAIO R-330/1/9/1919, GAIO R-330/1/11/1919, and GAIO R-330/1/13/1919. The Fate of Fishing in Tsarist Russia 1more well-to-do peasants in the area) and other fishers. This was a system that markedly restricted access to fishing to the poorest levels of society. The KBRK sought to overthrow this old structure, “to recognize fishing and nerpa3 hunting on Baikal and its basin to be free and open for all the people of the region.” Fish, they argued, were part of the common good and should not be—could not be—treated as the personal property of the social elites. Reflecting the deeply egalitarian ethos of the KBRK members, fishing, and the miraculous food that fishing produced, was to be unrestricted and open to all