When the Whales Leave Again

Chukchi writer Yuri Rytkheu’s novella When the Whales Leave tells a parable about kinship between humans and whales—creatures who coexist in harmony for centuries until a tribal leader violates a sacred covenant by killing a whale. Following this betrayal, the whales depart from Chukotka’s shores forever, condemning the humans to struggle to survive and spiritually decay. The story is based on a legend, and it vividly illustrates how tightly marine animals are woven into the social and ecological fabric of Chukotka’s Indigenous peoples. At the same time, it turns the whales’ permanent departure into a poignant metaphor for modern environmental crises.

According to a number of studies, traditional Chukchi practices of interacting with the sea and ocean may well prove to be among the most effective and sustainable responses to today’s environmental and climate crisis. However, Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine has both significantly worsened the condition of Indigenous peoples within Russia and also severely complicated communication between relatives in Chukotka and Alaska. In other words, the war has impacted not only people and institutions, but also ways of sharing ecological knowledge, making it increasingly difficult to compare observations of ice, wildlife, weather, and sea conditions between the two sides of the Bering Strait.

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Before the Twentieth Century: A Trans-Bering Space Without a Hard Border

Chukotka occupies a distinctive place in Russia’s sociopolitical landscape. Although initial attempts at colonization can be traced back to Semyon Dezhnev’s 1648 expedition, Russian presence in the region remained weak well into the early twentieth century, leaving vast areas effectively beyond the control of the metropole. Consequently, Indigenous communities (primarily the Chukchi, Siberian Yupik, Even, and Chuvan) existed with a high degree of autonomy, maintaining localized trade, diplomatic, and ecological relationships among themselves and with their kin across Alaska. (Author’s note: the Chukchi refer to themselves as Luoravetlan; the Siberian Yupik, as Yupiget, though Russian government documents still  use “Eskimos”; the Chuvan people, as Etel.) The trans-Bering space effectively lacked a clear political border, functioning instead as a unified realm for shared trade, social communication, and natural resource management.

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The 1920s: Sovietization and the Establishment of State Control

It was only with the implementation of Sovietization policies in the 1920s that Moscow managed to establish the centralized authority required to displace American merchants from the territory and institute the policy of korenizatsiya (indigenization). In 1924, the Committee of the North was created to provide institutional support for the formation of “new Soviet nationalities.” On the one hand, korenizatsiya provided written scripts for previously unwritten languages, stimulated the development of national cultures, and expanded access to healthcare and education across Chukotka. On the other hand, it was unquestionably an instrument through which Indigenous communities were colonized and subjugated via Soviet institutions: the Soviet state independently constructed administrative boundaries, established a hierarchy of Indigenous ethnicities, and shoehorned the history of Chukotka’s inhabitants into a Marxist framework of progress and state development.

While Indigenous communities had previously enjoyed autonomy in their trade and social ties with relatives in Alaska, the Soviet state sought to criminalize travel to St. Lawrence Island and the western coast of Alaska. What were once routine Bering crossings to visit relatives could now be classified as smuggling, espionage, or unlawful entry.

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The 1930s–1980s: Collectivization and the Ice Curtain

The heaviest blow to Chukotka’s Indigenous communities came with the collectivization policies of the 1930s. The Siberian Yupik, who had traditionally relied on marine hunting, were reorganized into state-run cooperatives, artels, subordinated to the logic of a centralized planned economy and state supply systems. Many Chukchi, who led a predominantly nomadic lifestyle and managed large reindeer herds, were categorized as well-off peasants, kulaks, and lost legal and employment rights. The imposition of Soviet class categories onto Chukotkan life disrupted the traditional structure of Indigenous societies: the persecution of shamans under Soviet anti-religious policy, for instance, disrupted the intergenerational transmission of knowledge, including knowledge of environmental practices and human-ocean interactions.

In 1948, free movement across the strait was brought to a definitive end. The tightly sealed border between the two continents came to be called the Ice Curtain, after the Iron Curtain. This decision by Soviet leadership, driven by the onset of the Cold War, meant that until 1988, coastal Yupik and Chukchi populations were cut off from visiting their relatives on the western coast of Alaska and the islands of the Bering Strait.

This not only rendered shared sites of memory (such as ancestral graves and settlements) inaccessible to Soviet citizens; it also weakened the linguistic and ecological ties between Indigenous groups on both sides of the strait. For instance, it complicated traditional Yupik whaling practices, as a portion of the animals’ migratory routes now lay on the other side of the border. Moreover, trade in biological resources (seal and whale blubber, clothing made from reindeer hides, and furs) effectively ceased. This both deprived communities of the resources needed to survive in the extreme conditions of the Far North and also dismantled a centuries-old system of mutually beneficial natural resource stewardship based on careful sharing that resembles modern concepts of sustainable development.

The Ice Curtain was officially lifted only in 1988, when the separation of these related communities was symbolically brought to an end by the Friendship Flight from Nome, Alaska, to the Chukotkan settlement of Provideniya. This rapprochement went beyond the formal restoration of ties: on July 10, 1991, an agreement on visa-free travel for Indigenous residents of the Bering Strait region entered into force, allowing members of Indigenous communities in Chukotka, western Alaska, and the intercontinental islands to visit relatives and sacred sites on both sides of the strait, though the practical execution of these visits was limited by economic hardship and border controls. While this thaw helped restore some social and cultural ties, Indigenous communities did not return to environmentally friendly commerce on the scale of the early 1900s.

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The 1990s: Self-Organization and the Dark Decade

Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, Indigenous communities gained greater scope for autonomous self-organization. At the turn of the 1980s and 1990s, a broad spectrum of Indigenous associations emerged, ranging from the national Association of Indigenous Peoples of the North, Siberia and the Far East (RAIPON) to regional organizations such as Yamal to Our Descendants!, Yasavey, Tkhsanom, and the Association of Indigenous Minority Peoples of Chukotka, alongside independent expert and human rights networks. They advanced demands not only for cultural revival, but also for the formal recognition of collective rights to land, natural resources, traditional livelihoods, and political participation. Later, however, much of this movement was incorporated into state structures, made dependent on administrative and corporate funding, or subjected to political pressure.

Despite the emergence of political self-organization, a key obstacle to Chukotkan Indigenous self-governance of their own territory was, among other factors, the economic crisis of the 1990s. In a personal conversation with the author Dmitry Oparin, an anthropologist and researcher of Yupik communities in Chukotka, noted that “Chukotka was a terribly poor region in the nineties.” Owing to its remoteness from the capital and logistical hurdles, many Indigenous settlements faced severe shortages of resources and food.

The situation in Chukotka during the 1990s can be described as a form of “colonial abandonment,” a framework I am coining here to combine anthropologist João Biehl’s concept of “zones of social abandonment” with Ann Laura Stoler’s work on imperial ruination. After the collapse of the USSR, the state largely retreated from the system of supply, transport, healthcare, and traditional economic support that it had created, yet failed to transfer actual control over land, resources, or political institutions to Indigenous communities. The crisis in Chukotka cannot, therefore, be reduced to a mere absence of the state: the central government’s retreat from welfare provision went hand-in-hand with preserving its administrative authority and even suppressing independent Indigenous mobilization. Anthropologist Patty Gray, who studied the region during this period, labels the 1990s the “dark decade.” She demonstrates that the breakdown of economic infrastructure, privatization, and a demographic crisis occurred alongside the strengthening of authoritarian regional governance. In this sense, the concept of colonial abandonment is applicable to Chukotka if understood as a selective retreat of the state from its social obligations while retaining its territorial control and limiting Indigenous political agency.

Dmitry Oparin emphasizes that revived trans-continental ties played a vital role at this precise juncture: “The [Alaskan Native] Americans provided immense help to Chukotka, including food, medicine, and clothing during the crisis of the nineties.”

Despite the economic crisis, the exchange of knowledge regarding marine resource management continued. According to Dmitry Oparin, the revival of whaling in the 1990s marked not merely a restoration of traditional hunting for Chukotka’s coastal Indigenous communities. It represented the recovery of a severed connection with the sea, encompassing wildlife, sustenance, skills, memory, and cultural autonomy. This is why it was so essential for Chukotkan hunters to learn from Alaska’s experience. On the other side of the Bering Strait, the Yupik hunt the same species, but do so within a distinct political and institutional context. Drawing comparisons with Alaska enabled Chukotkan hunters to rethink their own practice, viewing it no longer as an obsolete relic of the past, but as part of a living trans-Bering maritime culture and stewardship practice.

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The 2000s–2010s: Industrial Development and Constrained Agency

As Russia’s federal administrative hierarchy (the “vertical of power”) strengthened during the 2010s, the primary conflict shifted to the industrial development of territories inhabited by Chukotka’s Indigenous peoples. This included the extraction of oil, gas, coal, gold, and other natural resources, alongside the construction of pipelines, roads, ports, and hydroelectric facilities.

Although Russian legislation provides for the participation of Indigenous representatives in specific procedures set forth in the 1999 Federal Law On Guarantees of the Rights of Indigenous Minority Peoples of the Russian Federation, it fails to codify the principle of Free, Prior and Informed Consent (FPIC). Consequently, when developing the territories of Chukotka’s Indigenous communities, resource extraction companies often pursued dialogue only after key decisions had already been approved, excluding independent representatives of the local population from these discussions. 

Another telling policy regarding Indigenous rights was that, after the 2001 adoption of Federal Law No. 49-FZ On Traditional National Resource Territories of the Indigenous Minority Peoples of the North, Siberia and the Far East of the Russian Federation, not a single such territory was ever given that designation at the federal level, a fact noted in a report by the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination.

Russian government pressure also took the form of the bureaucratization of Indigenous identity. In post-Soviet Russia, belonging to an Indigenous people gradually became not only a matter of self-identification and kinship, but also an administratively provable status. The creation of a federal register of persons belonging to Indigenous minority peoples was intended to simplify access to benefits, hunting, and fishing. However, as researchers have noted, the register individualises rights that are by their nature bound to the collective, the territory, and a way of life. Having to prove to the state that you belong in order to access resources that your family has used for generations can be seen as an instrument of administrative colonialism.

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The 2010s: The Securitization of Chukotka and the Weakening of Ties with Alaska

Post-Soviet Russian policy was likewise restrictive regarding cooperation between Chukotka’s Indigenous peoples and their counterparts in the United States. As the authoritarian regime in Russia consolidated and foreign relations with Europe and the US deteriorated, Moscow increasingly came to view Chukotka as a realm of state security, leading to a tightened border regime and the securitization of the region. While in the 2000s Indigenous communities suffered from administrative pressure from the state and resource extraction companies, in the 2010s, particularly after the 2014 annexation of Crimea, ties between Chukotka’s residents and their relatives in the US were further constrained on political grounds.

Anthropologist Dmitry Oparin emphasizes that Chukotka has always been a complex region, not only because of vast distances and the high cost of travel, but also because of its border status. He recalls that for a time he himself had to travel there by permit, informing border guards of his destination. “If you are not registered as living in Chukotka, you can’t just hop on a plane and fly there. It’s a border region,” Oparin remarks. According to him, this control became a part of the region’s everyday reality that both local residents and researchers grew accustomed to. International contacts among Indigenous organizations have diminished, a number of activists have left Russia, and environmental and human rights activities are increasingly interpreted in terms of “state security” vs. “foreign interference.”

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After 2022: The War and the New “Ice Curtain”

Following Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Chukotka once again found itself not merely a remote region, but a strategic borderland territory. War arrived here not through direct combat, but through mobilization, contract recruitment, the militarization of public life, and a sharp curtailment of international ties, with members of Chukotka’s Indigenous peoples becoming one of the most vulnerable groups.

Dmitry Oparin notes that with the outbreak of the war, many researchers lost the ability to conduct ethnographic fieldwork in Chukotka, though some continue their work using remote methodologies. Several publications point out that the impact of the war has been especially severe for smaller Indigenous settlements, where the loss of even a few young men can undermine the functioning of a marine hunting crew or a reindeer-herding brigade. 

The invasion of Ukraine also reshaped relations with relatives across the Bering Strait. Although residents of Chukotka and Alaska had gradually rebuilt family and cultural ties after the Cold War, by 2022 these connections remained tenuous, hampered by the lack of regular transport links and the securitisation of Chukotka as a borderland. According to Oparin, the war was not the sole point of rupture, as trans-Bering ties had already been fraying. Following the euphoria of the late 1980s and 1990s, when people from Chukotka and St. Lawrence Island once again visited one another, restrictions multiplied: boat travel was banned, and American grants and exchange funding dried up. Ultimately, however, it was the war that effectively brought the Ice Curtain back down between Indigenous peoples on both sides of the strait.

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Trans-Bering Natural Resource Use After 2022

Despite political barriers, relatives on both sides of the strait continue to maintain communication. As Oparin notes, St. Lawrence Island is home to people originally from the Russian side of the Bering Strait: some moved there as early as the 1990s, while others settled through marriage and kinship networks. Today, in-person travel has become far more difficult, yet everyday communication persists through messaging apps. Family members and acquaintances on both sides of the strait exchange messages, sustaining a shared space of memory, kinship, and language—now in digital form.

Moreover, both the cross-border nature of Indigenous kinship and a shared ecosystem help sustain the ties disrupted by the war in Ukraine: 

“They live in the same space as each other: the space of this sea, this tundra, these animals, these ancestors—like, literal shared ancestors—with a shared history, different in places, and a shared language, when people can still speak it.”

The Bering Strait constitutes a unified ecosystem indivisible by state borders. Whales, walruses, seals, and polar bears move freely between Russian and US waters, while hunters on both sides witness the exact same shifts in sea ice dynamics, migration schedules, and wildlife health. Yet since 2022, the sharing of such observations has dropped markedly. Formal frameworks remain in place, such as international quotas for aboriginal subsistence whaling and the Russian–American agreement on the Chukotka-Alaska polar bear population. However, these legal provisions do not guarantee genuine cooperation: joint scientific research, face-to-face encounters between hunters, and the direct exchange of traditional ecological knowledge have all become significantly harder.

Marine hunters in Chukotka act as constant observers of the state of the environment. They record changes in ice conditions, the timing of the arrival of whales and walruses, the condition of animals, unusual weather phenomena, and the appearance of new species. Such local observations are particularly valuable for monitoring global processes such as climate change and the climate crisis.

Before the war, cross-border initiatives brought together hunters from Chukotka and Alaska for joint meetings, observation exchanges, and parallel data gathering on both sides of the strait. One example was the Steller sea lion monitoring project, which involved fieldwork in Chukotka, community meetings in Gambell and Savoonga, and a workshop in Nome with Russian traditional knowledge holders. The war has made such projects significantly more difficult, although the shared ecosystem itself has not disappeared, nor have the challenges of the ecological and climate crises.

In this sense, a new Ice Curtain has descended over the Bering Strait since 2022. Unlike its Soviet predecessor, it is not impermeable: the internet, kinship ties, certain international organizations, and formal agreements remain in place. Yet human mobility, independent scientific collaboration, and the free exchange of ecological knowledge have once again been subordinated to the logic of geopolitical confrontation. The paradox is that resisting climate change and defending shared endangered animal populations require closer cooperation than ever before, while the war in Ukraine renders cooperation less and less possible.

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Ecological Practices of Chukotka’s Indigenous Communities 

The ecological practices of the Indigenous communities living in Chukotka, honed over centuries through daily engagement with the sea, ice, and northern flora and fauna, may, in the view of some researchers, prove vital for monitoring and mitigating the environmental and climate crises. Rooted in ritual and religious worldviews, these practices embody a distinctive relationship with nature, grounded in principles of sufficiency, a relationship built on reciprocity, not consumption, and constant adaptation to the environment.

Dmitry Oparin describes the practices of the Siberian Yupik, whom he studied during his fieldwork:

“People’s conversations are always about the world they live in. And their world is a place where animals are of the highest importance. For rural Chukotka, especially for coastal Yupik communities, that means marine mammals—whales, seals, walruses—plus fish and birds. These animals come up in every conversation. They appear as food, as dreams, as hunting, preparing for the hunt, the love of the hunt, hiking out to hunt, as scary stories, jokes, and entertainment. Knowledge about animals permeates every stage of someone’s life, from childhood to old age.”

Marine hunting holds particular significance, functioning not merely as a means of subsistence, but as a vital social and ethical practice. It forms an integral part of the lived experience of many men, shaping enduring modes of interaction with animals and fostering an ethical orientation toward their catch. Yet hunting is not confined to direct interaction between humans and animals; it encompasses environmental observations of everything from sea ice dynamics to the migration of birds and marine mammals. Furthermore, it plays a key role in maintaining social cohesion within the community through the customary distribution of the harvest, which includes sharing with those in need, the elderly, and hunters’ widows. Thus, marine hunting fulfills not only an economic function but also a socially unifying one, serving as a vital element of cultural identity.

Hunting is embedded within a net of rituals and rules in which the sea is not a resource to be economically exploited, but an active participant in exchange: 

“All the hunters do an offering. Every April, they take a special reindeer meat sausage they get from the Chukchi and crumble it into the sea. They communicate with the sea, and it gives back. It’s not just you taking from it, the sea gives to you of its own accord: the fruits of the sea, objects you happen to find, even driftwood that you can use later be put to use.”

Under conditions of resource scarcity, Yupik communities utilize a wide variety of “fruits of the sea,” fostering a frugal and careful relationship with the natural environment. According to Dmitry Oparin, such gifts include not only marine mammals, but also seaweed, kelp washed ashore during storms, mollusks, and sea squirets. Even the frozen sea remains a source of food: people go out onto the bay, cut holes through the ice, and fish and harvest mollusks using specialized rakes.

At the same time, Oparin describes environmental knowledge not as a closed and static tradition, but as a “bricolage” composed of multiple sources. If a person lives “in the tundra, in the forest—in and around nature,” they know how to interact with it or gradually learn to do so. Such local knowledge does not replace scientific knowledge; on the contrary, different ways of understanding nature can coexist and complement one another. 

That is precisely why Oparin urges us not to exoticize Indigenous communities’ knowledge or “visit them on some wisdom quest” but rather to learn how local and traditional knowledge can coexist with other paradigms of environmental relations. According to him, what truly matters are “bridges and forms of collaboration, co-production between different knowledge holders. These forms of knowledge do not contradict one another at all. They coexist in a remarkable way. There is no epistemological problem here. The problem here is political, financial, and economic.” 

In Rytkheu’s novella, the whales leave when humans break the covenant of kinship with the sea. Today, this plot resonates not merely as a legend, but as a metaphor for environmental politics. Whales, walruses, seals, and sea ice still move through the Bering Strait, indifferent to state borders. Yet the ties between people who have lived in the same ecological and cultural space for centuries are once again severed by border regimes, war, distrust, and institutions that disregard their perspectives and knowledge. The main question now is not whether or not the whales will leave. The question is whether humans will be able to stay in touch with them—through hunting, language, memory, observing, and ritual.