ABSTRACT
This chapter focusses on the period when the Soviet government introduced a new festival culture to replace traditional celebrations. In the process, the spiritual content of ethnic festivals was substituted with ideological and political meaning. We consider this pressure for ideological conformity as silencing of cultural identity and use the concept of silence to analyse pressures exercised on ethnic communities by dominant ideological and political powers. This type of silence and ideological pressure resulted in many ethnic traditions being threatened or even lost. We look at how yhyakh was transformed during the Soviet period and how generations of people were denied celebrating this festival in the capital city, Yakutsk, where yhyakh was banned until the early 1990s. Where the celebrations of yhyakh continued, they were transformed to comply with the ideological requirements of that time. Yet the imposed silence resulted not only in social paralysis, it also created subversive opportunities for quiet, almost surreptitious, celebrations which kept the tradition of yhyakh continuing.
