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Siberian Shamanic Music in the Soviet and Post-Soviet Eras

Portrait of a Buryat shaman (1904). Public domain image.

As Romanian historian Mircea Eliade stated, shamans are practitioners of a “technique of religious ecstasy” (1964: 4). They achieve this ecstasy, and the healing or revelation it brings, through a ritual using musical instruments and conveying the imagery of rising, often in the manner of a bird. This rise is gradual but unwavering. Consider an account of the physiology of a Siberian shaman recorded in 1909 by Dr. W.W. Karelin: “The shaman’s pulse increased from 80 to 100 before the magic action, to 200 afterwards, the respiration from 20-24 to 36, the temperature from 36.5 to 38.7 [...]. The reflexes of the legs, which were generally very weak, disappeared completely after the magic action” (Oesterreich 1974: 296). This medically-perceptible intensification of physical exertion as the ritual progresses is mirrored by the outward performance of the shaman, which balances prescription and variation: “Amongst the more highly developed peoples he (the shaman) is the only actor—the centre of general attention and of dramatico-religious interest [...]. The prosody and music of the songs are very strictly prescribed, even when the text is improvised and variable” (Hoppál and Šipoš 2010: 15). Yet this must not be taken out of context to suggest that the musical rhythm is variable, as the regularity of the shaman’s “magic drum” has been recorded in texts from the observation of shamans since the late eighteenth century, such as those recorded by Ferdinand von Wrangel (Oesterreich 1974: 296).

More recent observations of shamanic rituals by founders of the International Society for Academic Research on Shamanism Mihály Hoppál and János Šipoš have also noted the rhythmic monotony of the drum’s role while accessing transcendence through spiritual ecstasy (2010: 15). While there can be variation from spirit to spirit, these rituals always follow a general progression toward what Karelin describes as the “magic action”: the moment of ecstatic breakthrough.

During the early Soviet era, shamanism, as it was practiced by communities throughout Siberia, was identified as a threat to Moscow. The Bolsheviks deemed some of its elements “superstitious,” including the emphasis placed on “luck” in favorable weather and livestock raising (Bulgakova and Sundström 2017: 232). As the Soviet era continued, shamanism was derided by the government for the fact that it supported a sense of ethnic and cultural identity rather than encouraging adherents to submit to Stalinism in their art. Along with Orthodox priests, shamans were disenfranchised, and some were exiled from their communities (Znamenski 1999: 335). It is important to recognize that the relationship between Christianity and shamanism in Siberia is complex and rife with colonialism dating back centuries prior to the Russian Revolution. That being said, the fate suffered by spiritual leaders of both religions during the early years of the Soviet regime is remarkably similar.

By 1928, Stalin’s Komitet Severa had set to work categorizing shamanism as a religion, claiming that it “serves as a direct instrument for the kulaks in their exploitation of the working masses among the indigenous peoples of Siberia” (Sundström 2012: 18). Ensuing propaganda used the slur of “kulak” to negatively brand the shaman as an oppressor of indigenous Russians, rather than as a leader and healer within their communities. This justified the confiscation of ritual objects—most notably, drums—from those accused of being shamans or practicing shamanism. The confiscation of drums and banning of spiritual practices led many shamans to practice their rituals at night using ordinary kitchen pot lids in place of drums (Bulgakova and Sundström 2017: 236).

This ban was observed until nearly the end of the Soviet era, with the gradual loosening of its stringency beginning around the end of the Second World War, though many shamans had been interned in forced labor camps by that point. By 1964, Sevyan Izrallevich Vainshtein claimed that Snochur, the “last ‘great’ Tuvinian shaman,” continued to lead his community, but that very few others remained (Balzer 1997: 43). This led Soviet ethnographer Leonid Potapov to declare in 1991 of the people he studied, the Altai: “under the present conditions there are no remnants or survivals of Shamanism as such left in Altai” (Sundström 2012: 350). Sundström notes, importantly, that it may be true that the shamanism of pre-Soviet Russia was no longer present by the end of the Soviet era but that the spiritual tradition in and of itself is very much alive and well throughout Siberia and that it was under the force of such oppression that shamanic practices had to be adapted.

Throughout the 1990s, in the vacuum left by the collapse of the USSR, many former Soviet citizens turned to the antithesis of state atheism: religion. While some efforts have been made since 1991 to incorporate indigenous spiritual education into school textbooks, such as those among the Nenets (Sundström 2012: 371), the very nature of Siberian shamanism results in a lack of a centralized institution. Unlike the Russian Orthodox Church, it does not have a central

Further complicating the study of post-Soviet shamanism is a rise in “neo-shamanism” (an offshoot of New Age religion) within Moscow itself, popular among Soviet youth during Perestroika (Zhukovskaya 2000: 26). The practice of drum-induced meditation, popularized in American anthropologist Michael Harner’s book The Way of the Shaman (1980), has led many in both the East and West to seek shamans in Siberia, and some Siberian shamans have responded in kind by integrating themselves into urbanized life as a self-preservation tactic. However, some who elect to remain in their traditional lands see the increasing urbanization of Siberia as a threat to their spirituality. In a 2010 interview with Dugar, a Tuvan shaman and musician, Australian journalist Nick Lazaredes notes the community’s anxiety about the possibility of a rail link between Tuva and the Trans-Siberian Railway (Smith, Potts, and Tucker-Evans 2011: 11'19"). Dugar says of the epidemic of alcoholism and suicide in the Tuvan republic: “The problem of drunkenness, of alcoholism, comes by itself because there is no work. In the villages and elsewhere, there’s nothing.”

The suicide epidemic and the employment crisis, Lazaredes notes, stemmed in part from the Republic’s abandonment during the “free-market chaos that followed communist rule.” Young people in particular die by suicide at alarming rates due to poverty and unemployment. In notes to a field recording entitled “Séance chamanique de l'ours” on the album Nganasan: Chants chamaniques et narratifs de l’arctique sibérien (liner notes, 1995), French ethnomusicologist Henri Lecomte describes how a Nganasan shaman named Delsjumjaku Demnimeevič Kosterkin performed a ritual on the skin of a bear. The aim of this ritual was to call upon the brotherhood of the bears in an appeal to save the Nganasan youth from suicidal thoughts. This ritual intersperses the jingling of bell-adorned clothing, drums, solo chanting, and responsorial chanting among a group of five participants (e.g. 2'42"), concluding with Delsjumjaku symbolically stabbing himself with a knife, taking onto himself the potential for self-harm among the youth in his community. This is one of the ways in which a shaman integrates physical and psychological healing with musical practices.

We have recently seen important contributions to sound studies in Siberian shamanism. Mally Stelmaszyk's Shamanism in Siberia: Sound and Turbulence in Cursing Practices in Tuva (2022) investigates the intense power of Tuvan curses as part of the practice of shamanism, including within the music of rituals. The proliferation of anthropological and ethnomusicological interest in the shamans of Siberia throughout the post-Soviet period shows both a fascination with, and a sense of responsibility toward, understanding and preserving these ancient practices, even though they may take a modified form following the oppression of Soviet policies.

Though Gubaidulina was born in Tatarstan, and Tatar shamans do exist, she was not raised among them. In the 1930s, when Gubaidulina was born in Chistopol and raised in Kazan, Tatars—already aware of their potential to be targets of Soviet oppression— were careful not to disclose their religious affiliation. This was particularly pressing after the 1921-22 famine killed up to two million Muslim Tatars. Not long after Gubaidulina’s baptism into the Russian Orthodox Church in 1969, she began to meet with her colleagues Vyacheslav Artyomov and Viktor Suslin in Moscow to perform improvisations on folk instruments indigenous to Siberia, Uzbekistan, Armenia, and Georgia. Performing as a member of “Astraea” from 1975-81, she familiarized herself during this time with many instruments used by Siberian shamans for ritual purposes (Koay 2015: 47). The influence of shamanism began to extend to her compositions throughout the following decade and beyond (Lukomsky and Gubaidulina 1998a: 6). The implications of Gubaidulina weaving textures and gestures from shamanic music into her concert music is of great import, particularly when paired with the music of Russian Orthodoxy, the faith she held personally. The combination of the music of these two faiths in her concert works—including the examples we will see in ...The Deceitful Face of Hope and of Despair—shows her unique perspective on Soviet sacred sounds as a post-Soviet emigree.

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