ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses how ethnic self-awareness emerged in the Mountain Altai region (an area nestled at the point where the Russian, Mongolian, and Chinese borders meet in Southwestern Siberia) at the end of the Russian Empire and the early years of the USSR. Here, we examine three strands of the development of ethnicity and nationalism among the Indigenous Altaians that wove together the narratives and identities of their “Oirot” past: through the activities of the local intelligentsia who worked to record folklore and other ethnographic material; the emergence of a prophetic, proto-nationalist religious movement (Ak-Jang or Burkhanism); and the development of Indigenous socialist forms (Bolshevism) combined with local iterations of nationalism.
