ABSTRACT
The Sakha cultural and spiritual revival began before the Gorbachev era but intensified in the late 1980s, leading to a campaign for the rebirth of the Sakha language and literature. Historical memory recovery stimulated by a revision of the Soviet propaganda that stressed the peaceful incorporation of Yakutia into the Russian empire in the seventeenth century and belittled the degree of economic efficiency and literacy among prerevolutionary Sakha. For the Sakha, a self-conscious ethnicity was present well before the Soviet period, along with regional and clan identities, state-oriented nationalism until the twentieth century. Instead of displaying chauvinist or ethnocentric brands of nationalism, many Sakha are responding to new post-Soviet opportunities by trying to expand their horizons, orienting themselves in several different logical directions, given the Sakha geopolitical position and cultural background. Issues of leadership, land claims, historical grievances, refugees, national chauvinism, and Popular Front strategy then become mixed into a potentially incendiary interethnic dynamic.
