Sachari Efimowitsch Chernyakov

Sachari Jefimowitsch Tschernjakow ( Russian Захарий Ефимович Черняков ; born May 26, 1900 in Propoisk ; † November 28, 1997 in Moscow ) was an ethnologist and linguist who was known as a specialist in Sami in the Soviet Union.

Life and work

Sachari Tschernjakow was born on May 26, 1900 in Propoisk (today Slauharad ) in Belarus . He later lived with his family in Lodz, Poland, and in Saint Petersburg . He spoke Russian , Belarusian , Polish and, due to the family's regular summer stays in Finland, also Finnish .

The son of a manager in the textile industry completed his high school education in 1917. Chernyakov became a Bolshevik and joined the Red Army as a volunteer in 1919 . He fought in Petrograd , Ukraine and Crimea from 1920 to 1924 during the Russian Civil War . After that he served in the reserve and worked in popular education. He was involved in the establishment of the first workers' faculty of the USSR in 1923/1924 and trained workers and farmers to become teachers.

The Latin Kildin alphabet from 1933

At the same time, Chernyakov studied ethnography at the Faculty of Geography at the Petrograd State University (Leningrad from 1924). After completing his studies in 1926, he became an assistant at the ethnographic seminar led by Tan-Bogoras and at this time also took part in field research in northern Russia for the first time as a participant in a larger expedition . The so-called Lappish Expedition ( Russian Лопарская экспедиция ), on which Chernyakov worked with the ethnologists Vladimir Tscharnoluski and Dawid Zolotarev and the doctor FG Ivanov-Djatlow , took him to the seeds of the Kola Peninsula for the first time in 1927 .

Chernyakov devoted his entire life to researching and preserving the cultures and languages ​​of the indigenous peoples of the north , especially the Sami. In 1927 he became a research assistant at the Institute of the Peoples of the North in Leningrad. During his first research on the Kola Peninsula, Chernyakov acquired active knowledge of the Kildin Sami language . Later he taught Sami students himself in Leningrad and between 1933 and 1936 also in local teacher training in Murmansk, where a Sami department was established at the time. Together with Aleksander Endjukowski , Chernyakov played a leading role in language planning and the creation of a uniform written language for the Sami languages in the Soviet Union . Chernyakov even moved to Murmansk for his work, where he became a member of a commission for territorial reform ( Russian районирование ) at the Central Committee of the Murmansk District (today Murmansk Oblast ). At the same body he was also secretary in charge of the committee for the New Alphabet ( Russian Комитет нового алфавита ).

In 1933 Chernyakov's first Kildinsamische textbook was published. He also translated other school books for other subjects and texts for communist propaganda into Kildinese. However, the Latin alphabet developed for Sami and other languages ​​of the peoples of the north and all textbooks and texts already published were branded "politically harmful" only shortly after their publication in 1935. The occupation with Sami language planning came to a standstill for several decades.

Like the two researchers and language planners Wassili Kondratjewitsch Alymow and Endjukowski, Chernyakov was also suspected of membership in a " counterrevolutionary Sami nationalist separatist-subversive resistance movement". But Chernyakov escaped the fate of his colleagues, who were both executed in 1938, for reasons that are not clear.

In 1937 Chernyakov moved to the Institute of the Peoples of the North at the Central Executive Committee of the USSR in Moscow as a research assistant, where he was able to continue his work with ethnology. Among other things, he worked on school atlases on the geographical distribution of national minority groups in the USSR and in other parts of the world. In connection with the work on the mapping of ethnic groups, he founded a working group at the Ethnographic Institute of the Lomonosov University in Moscow . In 1941 this working group was affiliated with the Military Cartographic Service ( Russian Военно-топографическое управление (ВТУ) ) at the General Staff of the Red Army . In 1943 Chernyakov and the entire working group moved to the Ethnographic Institute of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR .

Cover of the book "What did the October Revolution bring to working seeds" in Kildinese (1933)

After the end of the Second World War , Chernyakov resumed his educational work with schoolchildren and students. However, he interrupted his work as a teacher one more time at the end of the 1950s. In 1958, he was given the task of helping to plan a census and preparing the sections on ethnicity and mother tongue. In January 1959, as a representative of the Statistics Bureau of the USSR, he personally took part in the conduct of this census in the Murmansk Oblast.

Even after his retirement in 1962, Chernyakov worked in various research institutes as a statistician and language planner for the minorities and non-Russian-speaking nationalities of the Soviet Union. He studied education in non-Russian schools, first on behalf of the Research Department of the Statistics Bureau of the USSR, and a year later at the Research Department for National Schools at the Academy of Pedagogical Sciences of the USSR. Between 1968 and 1978 he collected important material on this topic in all the Soviet republics of the time. In 1975 he once again traveled to the Kola Peninsula in connection with this work.

In the 1980s, language planning work for Sami in the Soviet Union was officially resumed and a corresponding working group was founded under the direction of the pedagogue and linguist Rimma Kurutsch . At that time, Chernyakov also got involved in the practical work for the revival of the Sami culture and language. He made another trip to the Kola Peninsula in 1984 and in the same year finished the manuscript for a book with essays on Sami ethnography. After perestroika in the 1990s, Chernyakov organized events on Sami ethnography with students at the invitation of the Russian University of International Friendship .

Sachari Chernyakov died in Moscow on November 28, 1997. In 1998 his book (in Russian and English) was published posthumously at the University of Rovaniemi in Finland.

Fonts (selection)

Monographs

• 1926. Sotsiologija v naschi dni. (Sociology in our day). Moscow
• 1998. Otscherki etnografii saamow, ed. v. Leif Rantala , Rovaniemi
• 1998. Essays on Saami ethnography, ed. v. Leif Rantala , Rovaniemi

Teaching materials

• 1929. Pervaj urohk Saam̦a ĸ̦ıl. (Manuscript of a primer for Tersami). Leningrad
• 1933. Saamski bukvar. (Primer for Kildin Sami). Moscow

Translations into Kildinese

• 1933. Men antij Okţabr Revolucia robtus̷dədь saamit. (What did the October Revolution bring to the working seed). Leningrad.
• 1934. Mi lij mogka industrializacija jemnest. (What is the industrialization of the country). Murmansk

literature

• Leif Rantala: Предисловие . In: Leif Rantala (ed.): Очерки этнографии саамов . Rovaniemi 1998 ( Electronic version [accessed June 16, 2015]).
• Leif Rantala: Saami studies: Russian / USSR . In: Ulla-Maija Kulonen (Ed.): The Saami . Helsinki 2005, p. 365-370 .
• Document om de ryska samerna och Kolahalvön . University of Lapland, Rovaniemi 2006, ISBN 952-484-022-7 , Ed. Leif Rantala. University of Lapland, reports on pedagogy, 1457-9553; 15th
• Florian Siegl et al .: Uneven Steps to Literacy . In: Heiko Marten et al. (Ed.): Cultural and Linguistic Minorities in the Russian Federation and the European Union . Cham 2015, p. 189-230 , doi : 10.1007 / 978-3-319-10455-3_8 .

Web links

• Literature by and about Sachari Jefimowitsch Tschernjakow in the catalog of the German National Library
• Chernyakov in the "Kolski Sever" lexicon (in Russian)

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Sorokazerdev 2006 64
2. ^ Rantala 2005, 364