At the outset of the 20th century, the Nivkhi of Sakhalin Island were a small population of fishermen under Russian dominion and an Asian cultural sway. The turbulence of the decades that followed transformed them dramatically: while Russian missionaries hounded them for their pagan ways, Lenin praised them; while Stalin routed them in purges, Khrushchev gave them respite; and while Brezhnev organized complex re-settlement campaigns, Gorbachev pronounced that they were free to resume a traditional life. But what is tradition after seven decades of building a Soviet world??;pBased on years of research in the former Soviet Union, this book draws upon Nivkh interviews, newly opened archives and rarely translated Soviet ethnographic texts to examine the effects of this remarkable state venture in the construction of identity. It explores the often paradoxical participation by Nivkhi in these shifting waves of Sovietization and poses questions about how cultural identity is constituted and reconstituted, restructured and dismantled. Part chronicle of modernization, part saga of memory and forgetting, this book is an interpretive ethnography of one people's attempts to recapture the past a