U D M U R T I A

Izhevsk, where we lived for three years, is the capital city of the Udmurt Republic within the Russian Federation, about 1000 kilometers due east of Moscow and 500 km west of the Urals. Udmurtia is 41,200 square kilometers in area, about the size of the state of Vermont or the country of Denmark, and smaller than our home state of Wisconsin both in area and in population. There are about 750,000 Udmurts in Russia, with about 650,000 living in Udmurtia and the rest living mostly just across the borders in neighboring regions or republics. Total population is about 1,600,000 people. The cool continental climate is very similar to Wisconsin, except the winters are longer in Udmurtia: almost six months. The rolling wheat fields of the Udmurt countryside remind us of the American upper Midwest, and the Kama River, which downstream flows into the Volga, looks for all the world like the Mississippi River on the Wisconsin border.

Udmurtia is where Piotr Il'ich Chaikovskii, Russia's greatest composer, was born. There are several ensembles of Udmurt folk dancers and singers who perform locally, throughout Russia and internationally, perhaps the best- known being the group "Italmas," which is named after the european Trollius, a small golden-yellow flower native to the Urals and western Siberia. "Italmas" is to Udmurts what "Edelweis" is to Austrians: a national flower and a symbol of their uniqueness. You can have an evening of delightful entertainment by attending the performance of the "Italmas," "Andan" or "Udmurtia" folk ensembles! The Udmurt people are on the average smaller in stature than most peoples of Russia, and they are very agile dancers.

Udmurts have a rich and ancient history, linked to the indigenous tribes living between the Viatka and Kama rivers who were contemporaries and ethno-cultural partners with the Scyths (mentioned in the Bible and possible precursors of the Russians) and the Sarmatovs, the peoples of Cenral Asia and the Caucasus. As far back as ancient times they had trading relations with Persia, India and Egypt, testified to by frequent archeological discoveries of ancient settlements and burial sites (the middle-Scythian and Permian style of animal depiction) on the territory of Udmurtia. Southern Udmurts entered into contact with the Volga Bulgars, the Golden Horde and the Kazan Khanate, indicated by words in common among these languages.

To a Westerner, a typical Udmurt might remind us of an Eskimo: pre-Udmurts, according to some theories, migrated about 8,000 years ago from northern Mongolia where the Eskimos also originated, through Siberia to the Urals. Other anthropologists consider the Udmurts to be Indo-European. From here the Hungarians, Finns and Estonians migrated westward about 1,000 years ago. On one ancient map, the mid-Urals area was shown as "Hungaria Magna." Many Udmurts have dark eyes and black hair, sometimes with a reddish tint. Along with the Irish, the Udmurts have the highest proportion of red-haired people in the world. But due to intermarriage with various nationalities there are all kinds of Udmurts, including tall, blond, blue-eyed people.

The year of 1995 celebrated the 75th anniversary of the Udmurt Republic. It was called "autonomous" after the October 1917 revolution because the Udmurts and some other nationalities with a large enough population were given more self-governance than some of the other "regions" of the USSR that were directly governed from Moscow. During the Stalin era there was a period when studying Udmurt was curtailed, but now Udmurts and Tatars in the capital and the villages study their native language in the schools. For many years now, Udmurts have been given priority in university entrance exams. Still, many Udmurt parents in the larger towns and cities often speak to their children only in Russian so the children will know Russian as their native language and have a better chance when it comes to getting a higher education and a job. About 18% of Izhevsk's 800,000 population is Udmurt; many hardly speak a word of Udmurt, and many have intermarried with Russians or Tatars.

Although "city Udmurts" are tending to forget their language, about 70% of Udmurts consider Udmurt their native language, and these mostly live in the villages. Village Udmurts grow up speaking Udmurt, but since until recently it was often not taught in the schools, many read and write Udmurt poorly but speak "household Udmurt" well. Thus there is a need to encourage Udmurts to become literate in their mother tongue. About 50% of the population in the villages are Udmurt, sometimes living in separate villages but often with Russians and Tatars in the same village.

The Udmurt language belongs to the Finno-Ugrian family of languages, Finnish, Hungarian and Estonian being the three main languages. Three other republics in Russia have a few hundred thousand people who speak a Finno-Ugrian language: Mari - 320,000; Mordovia - 313,000; and Komi - 280,000. About 200,000 more Komis live in an autonomous region of the Perm Oblast. Udmurts and Komis, most closely related linguistically and together numbering over a million, make up the Permian branch of the Finno-Ugrian languages. The Sami (Lapps), Karelians, Tuvash, Permyak, Khanti-Mansi, Nenets, Enets and Veps are Finno-Ugrian peoples in the tens of thousands or less, down to a few hundred, many living in remote Siberian tundra or coastal areas of the Arctic sea.

In Udmurt there are 15 grammatical cases (but only 8 for animate objects); nouns and pronouns have different endings for first, second and third person, singular and plural like verbs, in addition to their 15 case endings, giving a total of about 200 different endings for inanimate nouns. Verbs have six past tenses including three that indicate maybe something happened but the speaker wasn't a witness to it, and special ficticious suffixes that mean pretending to do something or pretending not to. The word "not" conjugates somewhat like a verb, and verbs used with it have special forms. One thing to be thankful for is that there is no concept of gender, not even separate words for "he," "she" or "it". You just have to know!

Historians have sometimes compared the eastward movement of Russian peoples to the westward movement of European peoples in North America. But there are also significant differences: there were once over 1600 Indian languages spoken in the Americas, but many if not most have ceased to exist today. Russia has for centuries maintained the languages and cultures of those native peoples that Russia conquered. In Russia today, about 130 languages are spoken, many of which are official languages of their republics. There are television and radio stations and newspapers in many of the native languages of Russia. Every morning one can listen to the news and weather in Udmurt, and in the evenings watch Udmurt programs on TV.

Like the American Indians Udmurts were conquered by an expanding state. When Ivan the Terrible's armies besieged Kazan in 1552 to break the "Tatar yoke" that ruled Russia for 240 years, the Tatars took refuge inside the city walls, abandoning their Udmurt vassals to the advancing army, and thousands of Udmurts living around that city perished or fled as far as Bashkiria. Then began the period of Christianizing the Udmurts, when they were offered tax incentives to convert and exemption from serving in the imperial army, or at other times soldiers would come into the Udmurt villages and have the Udmurts stand in the snow while an Orthodox priest read the liturgy and "zakon Bozhii" (God's law) to them, and they were given Christian family names. (Those who migrated to Bashkiria, now called Bashkortostan, adopted the Islam religion and Muslim family names.) So to most Udmurts, their Orthodoxy is somewhat superficial, with animism and shamanism dominating their beliefs. A few have told me outright: "I'm not a Christian, I'm a pagan." Animal sacrifices are still practiced in some villages in southeastern Udmurtia and Bashkortostan.

Udmurtia is part of what was called the Viatka Gubernia under the tsars. Due to the rich deposits iron ores found here, Izhevsk was established in the 1750's as an iron-producing factory. It was in Izhevsk that cannons were cast to fight against the advancing armies of Napoleon in 1812. Just prior to World War II, Marshall Ustinov who is from this area and commanded the Red Army foresaw the advance of Hitler's armies into Russia, and ordered much of the USSR's weapons factories to be moved toward the Urals. This decision may well have enabled Russia to survive and win that war. Thus Izhevsk became the center of the former Soviet military-industrial complex. It was in the former "dacha" or summer house of Marshall Ustinov near Votkinsk that the "SALT II" Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty was signed. Due to the influx of Russian industrial workers during the war, the population of Udmurtia is now 58% Russian. Nearly 100 different nationalities live in Udmurtia.

Fifty years ago, Russia allied itself with Britain, France and the United States against Nazi Germany to win the war against Fascism. We in the West can hardly fathom the immense losses that Russia suffered during that war. The U.S. lost 300,000 soldiers in Europe, but Russia lost over 27,000,000 soldiers and civilians in the war: nearly 100 times as many people. Tiny Udmurtia alone sent 257,000 solders to the front, and 58% of them did not return alive. It was in Izhevsk during the war where Mikhail Kalashnikov invented the sub-machinegun named after him. In 1995 he was awarded the rank of honorary general of the Russian Army. Thousands of Udmurts built and labored in the arms factories side by side with Russians in Izhevsk, often working 12 to 18 hours a day on short rations. Many died and are buried in mass graves behind the Orthodox church. It is from this very church that Deacon Mikhail Atamanov, an Udmurt linguist become Orthodox clergy, is translating the Bible into Udmurt.

Before World War II, the Udmurt intelligentsia was just starting to blossom when Stalin in the 30's changed policy on the nationality question, switching from Lenin's internationalism to assimilating all the peoples living in the USSR, and the intelligentsia was eliminated. We in the U.S. have something similar in our concept of the American "melting pot," in which minorities gradually adopt the English language and U.S. culture. This process usually takes two or three generations.

But now times have changed: the new democratic government in Russia is again making great progress in recognizing the right of non-Russian nationalities to preserve their language and culture, and Udmurt is now being taught in many schools right in Izhevsk and in the villages. The new government also offers special privileges to victims of political repression under the former government. Russians and Udmurts are putting the past behind them and looking to the future. As recent history in Ireland and the Middle East illustrate, to keep dredging up the past only leads to tensions in which no one side is all right or all wrong, and nobody wins. Russia is trying to create a "win-win" situation, in which all peoples come out winners.

The future in Udmurtia holds great opportunities: it exports oil and minerals to the rest of Russia and abroad. Udmurtia is also rich in agriculture, exporting grain as well. Thirdly, the skilled work force in Izhevsk, Glazov, Votkinsk, Mozhga and Sarapul, made up of highly-educated Russians, Udmurts, Tatars and other nationalities, are developing new businesses and consumer products as the economy is being transformed from defense production to producing goods that will benefit all the people: paper-making and oil exploration equipment, "Moskvitch" autos and "Izhkombi" pick-ups, "Izh" motorcycles (the first motorcycles in Russia were produced in Izhevsk), medical equipment, computers and video games, stereo tape recorders, molded plastic articles for the household, and so on.

Udmurts are now beginning to speak Udmurt in front of Russians. And they are developing their own new literature, and republishing what they can from the literature of the repressed Udmurt intelligentsia: Kuzhiebai Gerd, Petrov, Kedra Mitrei, Krasil'nikov, Poskriobyshiev, Semankin, Vasiliev, Sadovnikov, Zoia Bogomilova and others. There is an Udmurt national opera, "Natal," and a ballet, "Chipchurgan." The composers Koriepanov-Kamskii (who wrote the Udmurt national anthem) and G. Koriepanov are famous throughout Russia. Izhevsk hosts an annual Chaikovskii Festival that coincides with that great composer's birthday.

As we have in the past, we continue to emphasize mutual respect between peoples, and that they live together in peace. At the same time, we encourage the revival of the Udmurt language, because the foundation of each culture is its language, and without a living language, that culture will gradually become extinct. If an ethnic group disappears, the world becomes poorer. Yet whenever two cultures meet anywhere on earth, the process of cultural change and adaptation always takes place. This is an inevitable process, but a managable one.

My wife, Cheryl, and I lived in Izhevsk from April, 1993 to April, 1996. She is a nurse and vocational counsellor, and I am a translator and computer software consultant. My major at University of Colorado was Central and East European Studies, focusing on Russia, Germany and Hungary, so I have been interested in this area since 1964. In 1979 I earned another degree in data processing, and have done professional work in 20 computer languages, running my own consulting business. I know Russian and German well enough to translate and teach in those languages, and have also studied French, Hungarian and Greek. In 1994-95 I studied Udmurt and Cheryl studied Russian at the university here. In the fall of 1995 we began working with Profess- ionals International, a humanitarian organization which places professionals around the world, for our work with the Udmurt State University (UdGU).

We had a contract between Professionals International and the university, UdGU, to translate a Russian-Udmurt pocket dictionary into English-Udmurt and Udmurt-English. It includes a short grammar overview of the Udmurt language in English as an appendix to the dictionary, so that people who haven't yet mastered Russian can learn Udmurt, because at present nearly all linguistic materials on Udmurt are in Russian, Udmurt, Finnish or Hungarian. A second appendix is a description of English grammar in Udmurt, for Udmurt children in the villages to learn English through their native language.

We would encourage students of Russian language and academic researchers of Finno-Ugrian studies from the West to come and study in Udmurtia, where the cost of living is much less than in Moscow and St. Peterburg. UdGU has over 14,000 students and is growing, making it one of the leading educational institutions in Russia outside of the big cities. It has Russian language and literature "faculties" or departments, a Finno-Ugrian language department, business and computer sciences departments, among other departments, and an office for foreign students. Izhevsk also has several other institutes of higher learning, including a branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences, a technical university, an agricultural academy, a medical college for training nurses, and a medical institute for training physicians.

At present, my wife and I are teaching at the Mari State University and Mari State Pedagogical Institute in Ioshkar-Ola, the capital of the Mari El Republic. You can visit the Mari El Web site at http://www.mari.su

We'd be very happy to hear from you!

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Robert and Cheryl Hosken Our email address: Stargate@xc.org

Professionals International P.O. Box 720013 Orlando, FL 32872 USA

We look forward to hearing from you soon!