ABSTRACT
The Republic of Sakha (Yakutia), also referred to as Sakha Sire, is Russia's largest political unit territorially (Figure 1.1). Situated in the north-east of the country, administratively it belongs to the Dal'nevostochnyi federal'nyi okrug (The Russian Far Eastern region). It comprises almost one-fifth of the entire territory of the Russian Federation and is 3,103,200 square kilometres. Despite its vastness, Yakutia remains little known beyond its borders, apart from clichéd visions of its remoteness, wilderness, and climate. It has, however, been known for centuries for its trade of mammoth tusks. As discussed later in Part 1, Indigenous people had long-standing trading connections with southern countries and engaged in barter exchange with their immediate neighbours as well as with merchants from China, Mongolia, and Arabia, long before the arrival of Russian explorers (Digby 1926; Cohen 2002; Kuznetsova and Starodubtseva 2009). According to some scholars, the mammoth ivory trade with China started as early as the ninth or tenth century (Laufer 1925; Cohen 2002:65). Later, Yakutia became recognised for its reserves of gold, discovered at the end of the nineteenth century, and diamonds in the 1960s; mineral explorations of these natural resources, as well as coal, initiated several waves of economic development in the region and determined its industrial profile for many decades (Argunov 1985: 236–242; 1988: 14). Rich reserves of mineral resources turned the area into a supplier of raw materials for the Soviet state.
