Abstract: Fieldwork conducted among the Eastern Khanty between 1993 and 1996 disclosed that patterns of land use, community development and political activity among the Eastern Khanty are not motivated by external ideologies or by the collapse of the Soviet system, but represent transformations of historical models adapted to resist the impact of petroleum development in the post-Soviet era. We conclude by arguing that, apart from improving the broader institutional problems which undermine local development everywhere in the former Soviet Union, a secure future for the Khanty requires that the legacy of native-state relations peculiar to Russia be restored in the present circumstances by specifically investing family-kinship communities (semeino-rodovye obschiny) with effective local political power to manage their lands.

From the struggles of indigenous peoples worldwide to recover sovereignty, land and heritage which had been eroded or even lost during the period of colonization, a variety of models of self-determination have emerged. A comparative overview of these struggles would suggest that two of the strongest factors shaping the outcome of this process are the nature of the sociopolitical context, which establishes the ground rules within which this struggle takes place, and presence of industrialization, which lays powerful counterclaims to the contested land. This article, data for which is drawn from historical sources and from the authors= fieldwork over the past six years, discusses how these forces are impacting the definition of the problems, the development of expectations, and the emergence of indigenous organizations and leadership among Siberia=s Eastern Khanty whose traditional lands are now part of Khanty-Mansiiskii Autonomous Okrug, Tyumen= Oblast. Specifically we argue that contemporary Khanty models of community, land tenure and leadership do not represent new forms motivated by external forces or by the collapse of the Soviet system, but transformations of historical models adapted to resist the impact of petroleum development in the post-Soviet era. We conclude by arguing that, apart from improving the broader institutional problems which undermine local development everywhere in the former Soviet Union, a secure future for the Khanty requires that the legacy of native-state relations peculiar to Russia be modified in the present circumstances by specifically investing family-kinship communities (semeino-rodovye obschiny) with effective local political power.

HISTORICAL LAND USE, GROUP IDENTITY AND LEADERSHIP

The Khanty are one of the largest of the twenty?three or so "small nations," as the Soviets called the tribal peoples of Siberia, whose numbers total only a little over a million. Among the 22,000 or so Khanty, three groups ?? Northern, Southern and Eastern ?? can be distinguished by differences in dialect, subsistence patterns and material culture. Called the Ostyak in Russian ethnographic literature, the Eastern Khanty live in the taiga among the low hills and marshlands along the banks and tributaries of the Ob= and Irtysh Rivers, the third largest river system in the world, which flows through Khantty-Mansiiskii Autonomous Okrug (Fig. 1). Traditionally they did not live in villages but in widely scattered extended family settlements, where they continue to avail themselves of traditional family hunting territories. Everywhere they support themselves through hunting, and trapping of sable and fox. Fish constitute 70% of their diet, but reindeer herding is common north of the Ob=. Many are literate in Russian and fluently bilingual, but prefer to speak Khanty. And despite the efforts of the Orthodox Church, which in some areas has gained converts of varying degrees of allegiance, and despite the suppression of native religion under the Soviets, traditional belief and ritual still flourish.

Khanty social organization is based on extended families or lineages, with related lineages grouped into clans (Khanty: cir ). While the present settlement pattern has been influenced by migration and forced relocation within the Middle Ob= region, evidence from our own fieldwork and the ethnographic record indicates that different Khanty clans even today claim traditional use rights to different river systems tributary to the Ob=, in part because they believe their lineage was founded by divine ancestors who were also responsible for the creation of the river systems on which the majority of the clan lives. Most Khanty extended families live on traditional family hunting territories, protected by family gods who are considered offspring of the lineage's founding deities. These lineage deities are the seven sons of the high god, each a patron of a major tributary of the Ob=. Roughly speaking, the principal deities are responsible for cosmological-level events, their first generation offspring for the watersheds of the major tributaries, and the second generation offspring for individual family lands along each watershed. Khanty thus believe that sacred power has been historically invested in both the landscape and the lineage.
Archaeology suggests that the extended family hunting territories that exist today may have originated much earlier. Throughout the Iron Age, fur trade with the south through the upper Irtysh grew enormously, and so, apparently did internecine warfare, probably as a result of the desire to control this trade. A nearly?feudal stratified caste society emerged to consolidate power and to control resources. Palisaded, moated townsites housed the warrior chieftain, his extended patrilineal family, and his retinue of warriors. The patrilinies of these warrior chieftains began to form an emergent aristocracy. Such warrior chieftains were singular leaders, distinguished in war from more traditionally armed soldiers by coats of mail, iron helmets, and battle?axes. In this way, they defended their local territories and seized new ones, engaging in small but evidently violent and frequent attacks against each other. Religious authority, which had probably been decentralized aboriginally as forms of family and local group shamanism, also began to be concentrated by association with the warrior chieftain. Outside but near to the palisaded settlements, ruins of which exist today, were the houses of freemen, who received protection from the chieftain which they paid for by surrendering a portion of their furs. In the hinterlands of the chieftain's territory lived the rododanniki, who harvested furs some of which they paid to him as tribute in exchange for his protection (Kosarev 1984; Cherepanova and Morozov 1994; Bugrov et. al. 1994). The chieftain in turn would deliver these to those over him, including later representatives of the Tatar Khanate of Sibir.

The Russian conquest of Siberia in the sixteenth century built on earlier fur tribute practices, but often in a haphazard way. Where they met resistance, Russians used hostage?taking and hinterland tax collection were used to enforce the iasak or fur tribute, which contributed to a decline in the status of the Khanty chieftains. Some chieftains were able to obtain gramota (deeds) in which the Tsar confirmed the rights of native leaders in exchange for annual fur tribute. Sometimes the issuance of such gramota seems to have come in exchange for peace, as in the case of a Khanty chieftain named Luguy, from Beryozovsky region, who made a trip to Moscow for just this purpose, and received a gramota from Tsar Fyodor Ioannovich in 1586 to gather the iasak on his own responsibility from Ahis tribe and his people@ and to deliver it personally or through his brothers or nephews in exchange for freedom from Russian military pressure. This gramota was reconfirmed by Empress Catherine II in 1768 to one of his descendants, a chieftain named Artanziev (Sheglov [1883] 1994: 44-45; Dunin-Gorkavich [1904] 1995: 77). Interesting here is that the chieftain/leader is represented as the head of the kinship group and through him responsibilities for the land were negotiated and confirmed. Nevertheless, although the Khanty chieftains felt themselves under the special protection of the Tsar, to whom they could appeal directly, bypassing governors and other local officials, their authority was often further undercut by having Moscow=s answers to their petitions channeled through the local administration officals and local Russian courts (Bugrov et. al. 1994: 110-113).

Despite some erosion of the authority of Khanty chieftains, some kinds of group identity persisted even into the nineteenth century. Khanty exogamous clans had been traditionally identified with the basins of specific river systems. By this time, if not earlier, as a result of accomodations to new economic arrangements local group identity (Kh. yakh) based on the river system on which one resides probably began to seem as important a form of group self-identification as various forms of fictive kinship, such as totemic clans (Kh. cir). Mid-nineteenth century ethnographers, such as N. L. Gondatti, reported that group umbars or cache houses had existed in the previous era from which any group member could take food or furs if he later replaced them, though by the late nineteenth century these had been regularly vandalized by Russians (1888: 9). The Codes for Governing Siberia issued in 1822 (the so-called Speransky Codes) confirmed the rights of non-christians to the exclusive use of the specific territories on which they lived and which they used for seasonal transhumance (Sheglov [1883] 1993: 258). Dunin-Gorkavich, visiting the middle Ob= and its tributaries in Western Siberia in 1898 on an commission from the Ministry of Agriculture and State Properties, determined that this system was still very much intact. He found that hunting territories were being used exclusively by the resident families who were prohibited from selling them or using them as collateral for loans ( [1904] 1995: 189). Territories could only be leased by the head of the extended family settlement to tenants, mostly Russians, only with the permission of other members of the extended family. Nineteenth-century Russian fishermen who leased Khanty fishing places paid to the Khanty lessor half the catch as well as a cash payment. In Dunin-Gorkavich=s summary view, the native peoples of Beryozovsky and Surgut regions did not own, but had exclusive use rights to the land, the waters and the forests. Only the state could preempt these rights, as it was beginning to do in managing the forests.

During the Soviet period, according to one of our informants , those government agencies principally responsible for organizing and managing collective production in the traditional economy sector, ZVERPROMHOZ ( Wildlife Economy Agency) and LESPROMHOZ (Forest Economy Agency), only minimally impacted Eastern Khanty land tenure. In contrast to the strong collectivization measures taken among the Kazimski Khanty, ZVERPROMHOZ, for example, left Eastern Khanty families on their existing land, tacitly confirmed the boundaries of traditional family hunting territories, and established quotas, organized labor, and so on, based on the extended families= customary use of the land. Khanty families were told that the state recognized their tenure on the land, their ownership of the structures they had built on it, and their right to use its resources in exchange for participating in the state system of production. This policy was not restricted to the Khanty. One Russian family was given land on upper Malyi Yugan in the 1980s because it was headed by a hunter participating in the state system, and who was, in fact, a friend of the Khanty family whose land he shared with their consent. In effect, the Soviet system was based on a continuation of the principles of Tsarist policy toward the Eastern Khanty regarding land, kinship, and production.

Eastern Khanty hunting territories today vary in size but are usually between 400 and 600 square kilometers in area. Typically, they are transected or closely adjacent to major rivers or their tributaries. Usually the extended family settlement is built on this river for ease of transportation. Figure 2 illustrates boundaries and the distribution of registered family hunting territories on the upper Bolshoi Yugan River. The hunting territory of an extended family supports two to six closely related nuclear families, with a total population varying between six to forty individuals. North of the Ob=, a strong reindeer herding component overlays the subsistence hunting and fishing base. Whether or not reindeer are kept, however, Khanty families follow a seasonal round between their main (usually summer) place near the river, and a hinterland winter location, stopping during the fall and spring at an intermediate camp. Transhumance is based on a knowledge of the seasonal availability local food and fur resources. Figure 3 is a resource exploitation map drawn with the help of one large Khanty extended family numbering about thirty people living on the upper reaches of the Malyi Yugan River. The map illustrates the principal types of flora and fauna harvested on the hunting territory as well as the permanent winter and summer residences and the transitional camps used during the spring and fall movements between the permanent houses. Note that the oil license territory impinges on their main source of winter food, both fish and moose, and harvestable furs.
In the 1950s, the state did affect land tenure through causing the removal of families from the land. Removal, sometimes in the form of voluntary relocation, occurred in 1955-56 as a result of a plan to centralize government services, shutting down government stores and clinics in remote areas. On Salym River, for instance, families were relocated from upriver to Seliyarovo on the Ob= in order to be nearer to these services.

Today West Siberia, and Khanty-Mansiiskii Autonomous Okrug in partcular, is the site of one of the world's most extensive petroleum developments. The process began in the late 1960s with the first discoveries of oil (Wiget and Balalaeva 1997a). At that time, Surgut had less than 10,000 people (it did not receive city soviet status until 1968). In the 1970s and 1980s, geological work dominated the western part of the region, between Surgut and Khanty-Mansiysk, while the first production began in earnest in the eastern half of the region (Surgut to Nizhnevartovsk). By the late 1980s all but a few areas (Kazym River, Yugan) had been seized for production by the Ministry of Energy and the government oil monopoly, and the region virtually supported a collapsing Soviet economy by providing a cheap domestic petroleum supply and petrodollars generated from export. This period was marked by the forcible relocation of Khanty families from their traditional family hunting territories (on Agan River) or by the destruction of the natural resources of occupied family territories (on lower Pim and Trom-Agan river systems) which eventually forced the families to voluntarily relocate. Although we have no direct data, we infer that relocations, forcible or voluntary, probably happened on the Vakh and Vas-Yugan Rivers as well because both were regions of very early oil development and Khanty there are now substantially resettled in villages. The result is that after 5,000 years of occupancy, there are today virtually no traditional Khanty extended family settlements on Vakh, Agan, Salym and Vas-Yugan Rivers, although these were all well-populated areas, rich in terms of traditional economy, twenty years ago. Other river systems like Pim and Trom-Agan are heavily impacted and the Khanty marginalized. Only the Khanty families on Lamin and Yugan River systems have been minimally impacted.

The establishment of the Yuganskii Zapovednik in 1982 deprived the Khanty families of Malyi and Bolshoi Yugan of their traditional winter hunting territories, which they were then forced to relocate to the opposite sides of these rivers (Baikalova et. al., n.d.; Wiget and Balalaeva 1997b). These areas are now being threatened by the petroleum development which has engulfed all of West Siberia.

POST-SOVIET POLITICAL DEVELOPMENTS

The first years following the dismantling of the Soviet state saw a burst of political activity among Russia=s native peoples. In March 1990 the Association of the Peoples of the North was founded for the purpose of providing a national forum and lobbying group for the concerns of Russia=s indigenous peoples. According to V. M.Ytelin (1996: 6), a native scholar working in the Russian Academy of Science in Chukotka, in May of 1991, newly elected native deputies tried to form a caucus in the new Duma known as the Deputy Assembly of Native Peoples of the North, Siberia and the Far East in order to develop a coherent legislative agenda on native issues. The Deputy Assembly also tried to integrate all native deputies to legislative bodies at the central, regional and local levels, but failed. Native deputies were active enough, however, that on 22 April 1992, President B. N. Yeltsin issued a decree (Ukaz) entitled AConcerning Urgent Measures for Protecting Places of Living and Economic Activity of the Native Minority Peoples of the North.@ This decree had five main points: 1) the ministers of the republics are directed to, a) define the territories of traditional land use that are part of their national heritage and which cannot be alienated without their consent for industrial or other development which is not connected to traditional economy; b) to transfer without cost to kinship communities and families belonging to the native minorities of the north those lands associated with traditional economy for a lifelong, inheritable ownership or leasing; c) to give priority rights to make agreements and receive licenses for the use of renewable natural resources to kinship communities and families belonging to the native minorities of the north; d) to define traditional territories in order to effect there sustainable resource development; and 2) to the government of the Russian Federation, to work out a regulatory system for the use of lands and resources on the traditional territories of the peoples of the North only with the approval of environmental expertise. ( Status: 199) What was clear to all native peoples, nationally and locally, was that the central question for cultural survival was securing control over the land use. The issue of control, however, was complicated by Article 12 of the new 1993 Constitution of the Russian Federation, which determined that organs of self-government were not units within the structure of state power, i.e., not substitutes for local administrations, such as village administrations.. In short, although people could organize themselves for the control of economic activity, such units of Alocal self-government@ were specifically excluded from political decision-making power over fundamental administrative spheres such as land use.

In Khanty-Mansiiskii Autonomous Okrug (hereafter, KMAO) political activity was also evident. A younger, more locally active cadre of native intelligentsia had emerged in the late 1980's. Some of them formed Spasenie Yugra (Salvation of the Yugra), a voluntary organization aimed at preserving the unique cultures of the region=s Ugrian peoples, the Khanty and the Mansi. Others participated locally in native affairs, often as members of village or regional soviets. For the Khanty, who were being overwhelmed by petroleum development, this was especially critical. In the paragraphs that follow, the general West Siberian struggle to achieve this goal is developed through extensive reference to the particular process among the Yuganski Khanty of Ugut village district, southern Surgut region, Khanty-Mansiiskii Autonomous Okrug.

The Council of Elders and Zone of Traditional Living (1987-91)
On the Yugan, the acknowledged beginning of political activity was the 1987 annual meeting of hunters and fishermen (Russ. okhotnichii slyot ). The contemporary slyot originated in the pre-Soviet skhod, a twice-yearly gathering of families for paying the fur tax, which, Dunin-Gorkavich reported, was also the occasion for electing community leaders (see below) and for resolving community disputes, including those over territory (78). Though always something of a holiday, the slyot was also an occasion when serious issues were discussed, because families from the region were gathered together, and at the 1987 meeting Vladimir Kogonchin of Ugut proposed that the community apply to the Supreme Soviet to designate the Yugan a zone of priority land use, a Agreen zone@. People from the other areas all supported it. Even the local representatives of the Otdelenie PROMOKHOTA (Department of Hunting Economy) supported it and the idea of local self-government, because they had noticed a decrease of furs and black muskrat. Yeremei Aipin, a writer and the most prominent Khanty figure, put the Agreen zone@ proposal in his book and carried the idea to Yeltsin. Aipin had several talks with Yeltsin, but nothing came of them.

On Yugan, they even established a council of elders, which had its first organized meeting in 1989, where a charter was drafted and V. Kogonchin elected chairman. The Council of Elders had five members, all elected, according to the charter which was never approved by the administration. During the 1980's Ugut had lived on business generated by petroleum geologists who came in 1982. Then they left, and the oil companies wanted to come in 1989-90. The Council decided that all questions of industrial development should be undertaken by referendum. They held a referendum, but before the federal law of referendum was passed, and so it was declared illegal. According to V. Kogonchin, the Council of Elders worked well enough with the elected soviet and local representstives of GOSKOMSEVER, but it resisted the oil companies. Compromises were made: Ugut was to be the center of development, and Kinyamino and R. Akhus-Yakh were supposed to be protected from development.

In 1990 a new, intense phase of political activity began with the elections for village, region and okrug soviets. These elections were then and are still today perceived to have been the only really free and open, democratic elections. Many Khanty won victory as delegates to these bodies. On May 6, 1990 Khanty representatives to the okrug Council of People=s Deputies, building on the Agreen zone@ concept, worked to pass throuogh the Council of People=s Deputies a decision to give a special status to the territories of Khanty traditional landuse that would give traditional uses of the land priority over other forms of development, including industrial uses such as petroleum production and timber harvesting (AOb obrazovanii territorii prioritenogo pripodopol=zovaniya@, Status 308) On the Yugan, the Council of Elders decided to determine a Azone of Khanty living@, to map it, and send to the government a proposal to set aside a zone of special land use along with request for needs. The KMAO proposal went up the administrative ladder to Tyumen= (Khanty-Mansiiskii Autonomous Okrug is a subordinate unit of Tyumen= Oblast), which did not approve the special regime of land use. Native deputies to the okrug Council of People=s Deputies also developed a proposal for granting legal status to the so-called Council of Elders (Soviet Stareishin), which was meant to be the principal organ of governance among native communities, but this never became law.

The contemporary concept of the Council of Elders only partially reflected traditional forms of leadership among the Khanty people. Dunin-Gorkavich reports that at the end of the nineteenth century, native administration was organized around a clan headman (starosta) and his two native assistants, several of these were grouped together under a regional inorodnaya uprava, or native administration office, antecedent to today=s local GOSKOMSEVER=s Otdel Narodov Severa, and both equivalent to and parallel to the local volost administration which governed Russians. All of these were native representatives were elected by skhod, and their election as starshina was to be confirmed by the local governor and the starosta by the local police inspector. All small problems and suits are solved by rodovoye upravlenie or (clan governance). But this latter never was fully realized, not only because the great distances involved precluded frequent gatherings of starosta and his assistants, but also because Khanty preference, even in the nineteenth century, was still to submit disputes and issues of consequence to the community gathered together as a whole and to avoid the judgments of individual starosta. For these reasons, many problems were postponed to the next skhod and resolved by the community (77). Although the Speranksy Codes describe the Khanty as Agoverned by their clan founders and honorable people according to steppe customs A (Sheglov [1883] 1993: 258), cases in Surgut region indicate that this formal, elected parallel native administration appears to have replaced the hereditary distribution of power by the seventeenth century (Bugrov et. al., 113).

During our fieldwork we tried without definitive results to secure positive affirmation of the existence in former times of such a Council of Elders as formulated in the contemporary institution.. At best, our Khanty informants could offer us examples where elders functioned as a kind of traditional court, during the time of their grandparents= youth near the beginning of this century. For instance, on Ai-Pim River we recorded a story about the grandfather of one of our informants, who had lived prosperously with his family and a herd of two hundred reindeer. Because of the size of his herd, during a particularly severe winter, he and his family didn=t suffer at all. Meanwhile, several of the other members of his clan living along the same river died from freezing and starvation. When in the spring this man appeared in the village and told about his good fortune to have comfortably survived such a severe winter, the elders met and determined to punish him for his indifference to the sufferings of his peoples by beating him with birch branches. In another case on Trom-Agan River, the elders punished in the same fashion a woman who had given birth to a child fathered by a man who was not her husband. The administration of the punishment didn=t necessarily alter the behavior of those who were punished. For example, in the case of the Trom-Agan woman, after the punishment was administered, she left her husband and, taking her two other children with her, went to live with the man whose fathering had brought down the punishment upon her. Thus it appears the punishments only expressed the communities disapproval of non-normative behavior.
Our data suggests that a standing Council of Elders with specific composition and membership never existed as a formal institution among the Eastern Khanty. Although a local group of elders may have been convoked as needed from among the heads of the nearest neighboring families, the circumstances surrounding both the Ai-Pim and Trom-Agan cases suggest these cases refer to a traditional judgment rendered at a skhod. In contemporary Khanty communities an individual is recognized as an elder not simply because of age, but by virtue of having the status of being senior among the married heads of households in an extended family; women who are widowed or who are married but who have their land from their father because he had no sons may also qualify as heads of households. Even today, in questions of property, social relations or politics, such a head of the family, male or female, is considered to speak for the whole family. Nevertheless, in interfamily disputes or issues of a larger scope, the Khanty tradition seems to have relied on broad, community judgments, rather than on judgments of a single individual or of a very small group. The latter, an elected representative small group, seems to have derived from early forms of Russian imperial administration.

There are a number of reasons why it is difficult to say how effective such a structure as the proposed Council of Elders would be in making political decisions in the contemporary sociopolitical environment. First, there is the historical Khanty preference, at least in the time since the erosion of the power of the chieftains in the eighteenth century, for entrusting decision-making to the community as a whole, rather than to a small elected group or to an individual. In addition, local self-government in the contemporary sociopolitical environment requires a variety of expertise and a degree of daily administration that seem beyond the capacity of such a geographically-dispersed and occasionally-convened Council of Elders. In any case, and perhaps for reasons other than these, the Council of Elders as an organ of self-government was never formally approved.

National Communities and Local Self-Government (1991-93)

Following the resistance to and setbacks surrounding the proposals for the Agreen zone@ and the Council of Elders, the Khanty tested new strategies for securing local, native control over land use. It appeared to the Khanty delegates in the KMAO Council of People=s Deputies that establishing traditional land use zones was not a realistic strategy, because so much territory had already been developed, especially north of the Ob=, that in some regions of the okrug only small islands traditional living were left. Thus the idea of communities (obschiny) was proposed. Activist Khanty deputies from Surgut region included R. I. Yermakova, A. S. Pesikova, I. D. Kechimov, E. Molotkov, and E. Kelmin. The idea of community (obschina) derived from the fact that it was difficult to divide family territory into individual or even nuclear family units. The nuclear families grouped into extended families and sharing a common territory were first called an obschina. This was the root of the concept. The new law, it was hoped, would provide a legal mechanism for uniting their interests by permitting the establishment of a socioeconomic structure, the family-kinship communities (semeino-rodovye obschiny), taking the form of chartered voluntary associations. The law authorized the confirmation of use rights to specific territories based on their traditional use by kinship groups; confirmation was to be accomplished through the issuance of governmental acts to the families holding the territories. The proposed legislation also permitted individual families of minority groups holding land to join themselves and their territories together for the purpose of local economic development. Groups of Khanty families who had newly-registered family hunting territories worked with their local leaders to ask them to combine their family territories and their families into this new structure, which in Surgut region is locally known as natsionalniye obschiny or national communities, because such a structures, though their membership is not restricted to minorities, are aimed at the minorities or Anationalities@ and carry some tax privileges. The Khanty delegates worked on developing the law for two years, including circulating a draft to the extended family settlements and incorpating revisions from that experience. Then the revision was circulated and accepted. On 5 February 1992, despite resistance from delegates representing oil interests, the Council of People=s Deputies of KMAO issued APolozhenie o statuse rodovyx ugodii v Xanty-Mansiiskom avtonomnom okruge@ [Regulation concerning the status of kinship communities in KMAO], which was followed by AO mexanisme vnedreniya Polozheniya o statuse rodovyx ugodii v Xanty-Mansiiskom avtonomnom okruge@ [Concerning the Mechanism for Applying the Regulation concerning the status of kinship communities in KMAO], a Decree issued by the Head of the Administration of KMAO on 27 February 1992 (Status: 310-321). Two forms of national community were authorized: (1) community and corporation, that could organize and invest, and (2) community that organizes its own work. The law permitted a portion of all contracts negotiated to be preserved centrally for community-wide needs. Roughly concurrent with this debate in the okrug was the development of a federal law establishing local self-governments alongside the soviets.
The passage of these laws set in motion a legal process of formally defining the boundaries of family hunting territories (rodovye ugodya) and issuing governmental acts certifying that the use rights on these territories belonged to the families living on them. This process was begun quickly enough because, according to Art. 21 of the afore-mentioned ARegulations@, the oil companies seeking access to the subsurface resources in these territories were required to obtained signed releases from the Khanty families before exploration or production work could begin:

Acquiring of parcel of land on the territory of kinship lands [for industrial purposes] can be carried out ...only with the consent of the owner of the kinship land, and also native residents whos interests are involved in this taking. In order to get the consent of native people for this acquisition, a referendum of these native people is carried out, and the results of this is the basis for the administration to make its decision.
Decisions about taking a piece of land on the the territory of kinship lands is made by the okrug administration, in conjunction with the regional administration, after getting written consent for this taking from the landwoner, positive results from the referendum of the native people and state environmental approval. (Status, 319)

Art. 22 of the same legislation required a clear economic agreement, approved by the appropriate administrative authority, between the owner of the land and the company developing the land, specifying (1) the terms and conditions of development, and providing (2) full compensation for all losses in connection with development, (3) an agreed-upon share of the profits from the development of this land, as well as (4) a lease payment for the use of the land (Status, 319). Two months later, President Yeltsin issued the Ukaz AConcerning Urgent Measures for Protecting Places of Living and Economic Activity of the Native Minority Peoples of the North,@ referred to above, also requiring territorial definition and consent before taking.
Oil companies needed to know, therefore, whose lands they were interested in. Working commissions or coordinating councils on local implementation of national communities were established. V. Kogonchin was named chairman the Yugan commission. During 1992-93, the commission spent a year and a half in serious work, travelling to extended family settlements in theYugan region, identifying family members accurately and defining the boundaries of family hunting territories. The Russian adminstration created a small business firm, ARumb@, based on geological surveying expertise, to accomplish the technical work of mapping in cooperation with community members. The knowledge of hunting territory boundaries is part of Khanty traditional knowledge shaped over the centuries. For this reason the process of fixing the boundaries proceeded without conflicts. Despite the fact that the administration often drew on maps boundaries of geometric regularity rather than ethnographic accuracy, Khanty people continued to respect the boundaries that were in their heads rather than on paper.

The status of the emerging national communities alarmed non-natives who thought they=d be deprived of their gathering, hunting, and fishing territories, but the commission=s maps of traitional territory demonstrated that Ugut=s Russian interests were not neglected over the southern territory and passions calmed down, though in other places there were real conflicts over such issues Perov, then head of the Surgut Region administration, approved the work of territorial mapping, and individual family hunting territory survey maps were distributed to each Khanty family. Governmental acts confirming use rights were issued. According to V. Kogonchin, a good deal of confusion and misunderstanding still surrounds these acts. First, Khanty thought then and still think now that the acts confirmed not simply their limited (surface) use rights, but their ownership of the land. Second, most, if not all, do not realize today that these acts were unilaterally voided, for reasons which are not known, by the KMAO Duma in 1994.
The need for larger, stronger communities soon became apparent. The many smaller communities consisting of only a few families began arguing over land; some wanted to form their own village soviets; some wanted to seek government support for their individual community. The weakness of relying on these small communties became especially acute for Eastern Khanty when, in 1993, Yeltsin dissolved the system of village soviets thus eliminating any effective legal Khanty voice in the face of growing pressure from the oil companies.

Reactionary Response (1993-96)

Following the October 1993 events in the White House, Yeltsin cancelled all village, region and okrug soviets. This was done in a series of Ukazy, or presidential edicts: first the village soviets were cancelled without referendum; then the regional soviet; finally the okrug and oblast soviets.
Old organs were replaced with a restructured executive. Under the new Astrong executive@ restructuring that followed the White House events, Yeltsin appointed the KMAO okrug Administrator, who appointed the Surgut Regional Adminstrator, who, in turn, appointed the village administrators. So when Surgut Region Administrator Perov Aretired@ after budget review brought to light mismanagement of funds, Sarachev, who had been his vice-deputy, was appointed to replace him. Legislatively, an Okrug Duma (but no regional Duma) appeared. Following the elections in 1994, only one Khanty, from north of the Ob=, was elected to the Okrug Duma. In Ugut, a village municipal committe replaced the soviet, but political activists knew nothing about its formation, structure or authority. Unannounced elections were held >in private.@ It quickly became a local puppet legislative organ. In the end, after the Arestructuring@, it appeared that there was no effective representation of Khanty interests in either legislative or executive positions. Political activity among Khanty declined.

In Ugut, the coordinating council for implementing the national community process was eliminated. It became clear, then, to local leaders that small communities wouldn=t survive because no one was paying attention to them. So they moved to create a single, large community that would unite as many of the extended families and their territories as possible. The 1992 law on kinship communities provided that only communities holding governmental acts on the land could join together into larger communities. On the Yugan, however, acts were only issued to eleven small communities (extended families), much less than the number of territories mapped and family-communities identified. That would soon become a moot point. Surgut Region administration quickly ceased to issue new acts on the land for the remaining families, and in 1994 an administrative decree from the KMAO head, Filipenko, unilaterally voided those acts already issued.
. The process of legally establishing these family-kinship communities in Surgut region has been continuously obstructed. Four such communities are now in the process of formation in Surgut Region. The charters submitted by them as part of the process of legalization each specified that the community was first of all a self-governing structure that managed its own lands and profited from the use of its natural resources. Though within limitations, such powers are provided for in the authorizing legislation supporting the formation of national communities and local self-governments, such a blanket claim was intolerable both for the oil companies and for the local administration.

Such communities were intolerable to the local administrations because the main source of money for the administration budgets came from the sale of licenses to the oil companies. Administrations were not eager to share this money with the communities. For the oil companies, such a situation would mean that instead of having to persuade only a single extended family to give up their land for oil development, now they would have to get a consensus agreement from the representatives of the whole community to develop any part of the community land however small. Moreover, the compensation would have to be negotiated with and paid to the community as opposed to the locally impacted families, and certainly on another, larger scale.

This situation also caused problems among the Khanty, because the oil companies, abetted by the regional administration, fell back upon their own successful divide-and-conquer strategy and tempted individual Khanty families to unsubscribe themselves to the pending community charter by offering them seductive individual economic agreements in exchange for development rights on their family territory. At a June 1995 meeting in Jubilenie (Stariy Trom-Agan), north of Surgut, members of one community gathered to vote to confirm their charter and elect board members to direct the community. Although they had voted but twenty minutes earlier to approve a charter that permitted only the community structure to represent the members in making economic agreements and only on behalf of the entire membership, some individual members still wanted to retain the option to sign individual agreements. When another Yugan community, ANegus Yakh@, headed by Pytor Stepanovich Kogonchin, decided as a community not to enter into an agreement with an oil company, a Surgut regional administrator sent a letter to the jurisdiction in which that oil company was based saying that all economic agreements shoukd be with individual families, not with communities.
Nevertheless, community organizing work continued under several strong leaders who understood quite well that these structures represented their only real hope to regain some local control over their lands and their futures. The first elections to the newly constituted Surgut Regional Duma saw four out of nine members directly controlled by the oil companies. The community registration process has become such a hot issue that the oil companies tried to torpedo it in Surgut in March 1995 by staging a public protest and having their workers picket the administration office building. They argued that the registration of these communities (which was the Khanty=s legal right under current federal and okrug law) would be the end of the oil business in Western Siberia. Shortly thereafter that KMAO Acancelled@ all acts on native lands, claiming that Moscow had said the the laws were not in the correct form. The okrug administration, headed by A. Filipenko, also required re-registration of national communities. Filipenko promised to form commission to review the law on national comuntiies, but the commission was never formed.

Subsequently, on March 6, 1995, head of Surgut Regional Administration, Sarychev, based on Filipenko=s decision, issued a decree (AO statuse rodovyx ugodii v Khanty-Mansiiskom avtonomnom okruge@, Document No. 21) asserting, in contradiction to general state law on native land, that Khanty people who have houses in villages shouldn=t have a family hunting territory. People do live in village, but hunt, fish, and otherwise support themselves with their hunting territories.Those Khanty who had been forcibly relocated or who had voluntarily removed to villages at an earlier time were thus summarily declared to have no right to use lands on which they still hunted and fished in order to feed their families. The decree caused such a wave of protest that the administration delayed its implementation. The fate of the decree is unclear: on the one hand, it has not been cancelled; on the other, it has not been enforced.
At present, after several years of obstructionism, the process of registration has resumed, following intensive discussions during 1996 concerning the developmentof a new federal law on the status of minority peoples. Nevertheless, confusion and uncertainty are rampant. An article entitled ANews from Iugra@ in the West Siberia edition of Argumenty I Fakty (No. 27, July 1996, p. 2 B), a prominent national newspaper, announced that the KMAO Duma had passed in 1996 a law on subsurface resources, one article of which stated that community land and family hunting territories cannot be used without the useholder=s consent. The law protects only existing statuses, however, and since acts on the land, including those issued in 1992-93 as a result of the Coordinating Council=s work and survey on the Yugan, have been nullified, it is difficult to understand who is protected. The article concluded by saying that the law was revised based on Canadian law governing relations there between the Council of Chiefs and the Canadian government, but Ahere we are not yet ready for elected chiefs.@

ECONOMIC MODELS OF COMMUNITY

Unable to legalize themselves as communities, the concerned families have nevertheless organized themselves into cooperatives in order to sell their products on the market. But limited to increasingly ineffective state organizations like ZVERPROMHOS, with pricing structures and marketing mechanisms that are not adequate to the changed national economic environment, the economic, as well as the political, potential of these communities is frustrated. During the past three years, two economic models for the legal kinship community structure have emerged. Generally, the choice of economical models has been determined by local living conditions.

Participatory Profit-Sharing Model
The first model is only partially based on the traitional economy because north of the Ob= River, all three of the sectors of which Khanty traditional economy consisted-- hunting, fishing and reindeer herding--have been severely impacted by oil development. Typically, Khanty reindeer herds are small, no more than fifty animals per family. Such small herds are significantly affected by the loss of animals due to the reduction of pasture territory taken for construction of roads, railways, etc. As a result of oil by-products getting into the river system, fish die. Furbearers of commercial value flee the region in order to escape the influx of people and equipment.

Because oil development has so dramatically impacted traditional sources of income, the traditional economy cannot form the principal basis for economic activity in this region. As a result, such impacted communities have tried to get some proportional share of the profits of oil development on their territory by seeking the issuance to native land holders of new shares of stock in the oil companies or an agreement to set aside a fixed percentage of the profit to be paid as a royalty to the community. This is the position taken by the Trom-Agan community, whose meeting in Jubilenie was mentioned above. Although that strategy has the support of World Bank specialists assigned to Siberian projects, it has not proven very effective for several reasons. First such a strategy is weak because it it asks the local administration to reduce its own income from oil development in order to help native people. More deeply, the popular assumption that the community should share in the profits of oil development contradicts the state policy assumption that oil is a natural resource owned by the government for the national good not owned by the local population for local benefit. The state=s response has been to plan the establishment of a new Northern Fund, supported by a diversion of a fixed percentage (the currently circulating figure is 12%) of the profits of the oil companies, for supporting programs for northern Native peoples. In the absence of any legislative basis for such a profit sharing agreement, native communities and individual families are still making small, local agreements with companies associated with the oil industry.

Restructuring Traditional Economy

The second economic model for kinship-based communities is based on strengthening traditional economy. On the south side of the Ob=, where reindeer herding no longer exists, hunting and trapping valuable furbearers like sable and fox provide the main source of cash income, and fishing, although it almost all of the domestic food supply, has limited commercial value. At the beginning of the 1990s state collective fishing enterprises collapsed and the technology necessary for processing and preserving fish on a commercial scale disappeared. In addition, in relatively ecologically-clean areas, Khanty harvest swamp and forest berries, as well as cedar nuts, for commercial purposes. The cooperative traditional economy model would install the community structure in place of the former collective structure as a mechanism of production. Individuals would pool the harvested resources to market them at higher prices.
The development of this model presupposes the installation and use of small processing and preservation equipment which would permit the communitiy to combine the traditional way of life with the elements of a market economy. The weakness of this model is that its realization depends upon both financial and technical support of the state. The communities oriented to this model count on the restoration of the state system of trading posts/state stores, possibly based on the late reindeer and furtrapping collective system, in the context of which the state would not only purchase the products of Khanty traditional economy in exchange for supplying basic goods, but also strengthen the policy of subsidies.
Regardless of which model an individual community supports, each of the communities has adopted a charter which permits the community to develop and market community resources, to withhold a portion of the gross profits for community-wide development issues prior to proportional redistribution to members, and to preserve the right to invest a portion of the return from the sale of resources for further profit.

DISCUSSION
Land Tenure, Leadership and Authority

There is evidence to suggest that prior to the Soviet period the Russian state and individual businesses formally recognized Khanty family claims to exclusive use of their hunting territories by enacting special taxation regimes, entering into contracts with the Khanty for the use of the land, and identifying the head of the family as the legal representative of interests attached to the territory, and the only one authorized, with the consent of other members of the extended family, to lease it for profit. At the same time it appears that the identities of local groups (Kh., yakh), based on the river systems on which they resided, cut across clan identities (Kh., cir) and were especially evoked when land and resource interests were involved, although any local resident group claim was never as strong as that of the extended family. Such decisions over boundary disputes and trespassing were resolved by the community as a whole at the semi-annual skhod. Though much ethnohistorical work on land-tenure in the pre-Soviet period needs to be done, it nevertheless appears that the emergence of family-kinship communities (semeino-rodovye obschiny), taking the form of local chartered voluntary economic-political associations, provides a legal foundation for a pattern of land tenure among the Khanty that has historical validity in the skhod.

The same might be said for the authority of the emergent leadership, which has been only alluded to in this presentation. Khanty oral tradition from the protohistoric period (prior to and during the period of Russian conquest) witnesses to the existence in every region of local leaders, who had the capacity to organize military and economic capacity for entire river systems. Though this system was undermined by the Russian colonial administration, the tradition of local leaders remains. In addition, the fact that representatives of specific families are charged with caretaking responsibilities for the sacred shrines and images of the individual river system patron deities suggests that historically certain families had significant leadership roles in each local residence group. It is difficult to assess how this works in the present moment, but these families are certainly recognized, and to a limited degree deferred to, by other Khanty as perhaps a little more equal than most in a fundamentally egalitarian society. As well, the long history of today=s leaders as representatives of the interests of their communities and their experience of negotiating those interests with various levels of local and reginal administration, even in Soviet times, added weight and credibiltiy to their leadership roles. There is no question that their leadership roles, possibly rooted in historical realities but certainly demonstrated in the present, have elicited the confidence of the local resident groups they represent.
There is, nevertheless, a tension between the individual heads of extended families and community leaders rooted in the Khanty strong individualism and their reluctance to accede to decisions made by others, even elected representatives. This tension is historically rooted in the development of positions like the native starosta which the Russian imperial state authorised to represent Khanty interests in the local native branch of the colonial administration (rodovoye upravlenie). On balance, in practical terms, this is a productive tension. Although it means that it is much more difficult to arrive at consensual decision-making in large communities of 40 families than it is in smaller communities of ten families, at the same time it assures that Khanty local leaders are never move too far ahead of the interests of their community, whose confidence they must win by persuasion rather than simply assume in an authoritarian manner. In short, Khanty local leaders can be trusted to be representing the expressed interests of their communities.

Politicization and Community Development
Though the emergent political leadership and structures have a sound basis in Khanty tradition and historical experience, their flourescence was motivated by two factors: first, the broad and visible disruption of Khanty life, and the land on which it depended, by petroleum development, and second, the shifting currents of the broader political and economic situation, which first offered the Khanty an opportunity to alter the trajectory of their future by participating in representative, decision-making structures and which now denies these opportunities to them.

By the time of the elections of 1990, which were a watershed in the political development of the Eastern Khanty, petroleum development, and the forced relocations and environmental destruction which accompanied it, had significantly and permanently impacted the Khanty of Nizhnevartovsk Raion. The Trom-Aganskii and Pimskii Khanty north of the Ob= were in the midst of a losing battle to contain development to the lower reaches of those rivers, and the Yuganskii Khanty were under pressure from oil companies to open up their territories. It was from these groups in Surgut region that the most vocal political leadership emerged. The principal concern of the leadership was to strengthen the weak coherence of local group identity as a response to the oil industry=s strategy of negotiating leases with individual Khanty families. If the effects of development could not be localized to an individual family, then decisions about development should not fall on individual families. This was the local motivation for the legislation on family-kinship communities (semeino-rodovye obschiny) created by the Khanty delegates elected in 1990. Unfortunately, deteriorating economic conditions, especially the collapse of state system for buying furs and selling necessary supplies at subsidized prices, put enormous pressure on Khanty families to sign punitive, often fraudulent agreements with oil companies, thus undermining the emergent voluntary associations. Shortly thereafter, political structures in which Khanty were able to play an effective role, were voided in a series of presidential decrees, to be replaced with a strong executive form of administration which obstructed Khanty socioeconomic and political development in favor of the oil companies= expansionist agenda. Today we know that rights to develop Khanty lands are being tendered for auction to oil companies without the Khanty=s prior knowledge, let alone consent.
Historical practice has been for the Khanty to appeal over the heads of the regional and oblast administrators directly to the central government. This strategy persisted late into the nineteenth century, and was rooted in the experience of receiving individual guarantees, in the form of the gramota, directly from the Tsar, and in having a separate but parallel administrative channel in the colonial administration (rodovoye upravlenie) reporting directly to Moscow, the antecedent of today=s GOSKOMSEVER=s Otdel Narodov Severa. Contemporary political circumstances are such, however, that the real sources of power are economic and at the okrug level, and Moscow is either unwilling or unable to manage them for the protection of the historical rights of the Khanty. Excluded from effective local participation in decisionmaking at both the regional and okrug level, and frustrated by the failure to intervene by the central government, the historic source of appeal in such situations, local Khanty groups pinned their hopes on the development of the semeino-rodovoye obschiny as the instrumentality through which they could preserve control over their lands and traditional way of life.

Economic Development
At present, the main thrust of these communities is economic development. Community leaders know, and many interviews over the course of our fieldwork confirm, that it is ecoonomic pressure which is compelling Khanty families to give up their family lands for oil development. The economic situation has several components. First, in the mid-1970s the Khanty, financed by oil companies, began a shift to expensive mechanical technologies, such as outboard motors and snowmobiles, on which they now depend, and which they cannot continue to maintain with direct or indirect support from oil money. Second, the state economic structures on which they depended during the Soviet period have virtually collapsed. Third, despite the public knowledge that oil companies are expanding their territories and making huge sums of money, and that financial support for the Khanty is a minuscule expense, the oil companies are not fulfilling all the conditions made in earlier economic agreements; we witnessed a meeting in Lyantor where the assembled Khanty unanimously refused to sign a new agreement for just this reason.
The economic solutions proposed to date do not promise significant positive changes.

The direct profit-sharing model for those communities heavily impacted by petroleum development, has been rejected outright by government at all levels and by the oil companies, for the reasons mentioned earlier. The state=s response, a Asocial services tax@ on oil, however apparently admirable, will only finance the state=s budgeted programs. It fails to guarantee any investable income to a specific community and retains all control of the resource in the hands of central government. In the end, it will likely suffer from the mismanagement and diversion of funds on the part of the bureaucracy, and the fraud, embezzlement and tax evasion from the oil companies, which are endemic to post-Soviet Russia. Leaders of communties where the traditional subsistence economy is still viable look to a policy of strengthened subsidies as the only way to stabilize the situation in traditional communities.

CONCLUSION
These solutions suffer from the state=s reluctance to change old Soviet-style policy of viewing all indigenous people=s problems as requiring a single, nationwide solution invented in, financed by, and controlled through Moscow by non-natives. The idea of local solutions to local problems is foreign to policy makers. In this respect, the situation among the Khanty is not unique, and shares with other peoples and regions of Russia the consequences of failed central government policies. On the other hand, the pre-Soviet historical relation between the Khanty and the central government was different from that of other non-native, Siberians and Russians in general. The relative autonomy of the Khanty was based on the central government=s assurance not only of a separate administration and right of appeal to the Center, but most importantly of guarantees to the Khanty of exclusive use rights to their traditional lands which the state protected in exchange for the continuous flow of furs harvested in the taiga. That agreement-- which was always historically understood as a real exchange (even in Soviet times) -- has been unilaterally abrogated.

The opportunity remains, however, to create a positive future for the eastern Khanty, because the national communities still have economic potential, social cohesion and political leadership with which to chart a new course. Despite the differences between these communties, the success of each appears to depend upon some common elements: (1) prompt legalization of the national communities as units of local self-government, with the power to develop and adminster a local land use plan; (2) the creation of a source of income investable by the community for community-wide needs; (3) a transitional period of support from the state budget; and (4) technical assistance in developing the economic and legal expertise necessary for insuring the long-term productive viability of the community. However dramatic such changes would be in post-Soviet Russia, these changes have a historical foundation and would restore to the Khanty the conditions of their existence and relationship to the state prior to the Revolution. Without significant changes, however, the prognosis for Khanty communities is a trajectory of deepening economic and political dependency.

LITERATURE
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