In the winter of 1919, the settlement of Anadyr, just below the Arctic circle, was a cluster of cabins: storehouses of fox, bear, and wolverine pelts; the offices of a few fur companies; and the imperial Russian administrator’s post. Anadyr was built on extracting animals from Chukotka, the peninsula that nearly touches North America at the Bering Strait. The wealth that resulted from those animals often did not go, as maps would indicate, to the Russian Empire; four thousand miles from Moscow, practical jurisdiction of Chukotka was elusive. Much of the profit derived from fox pelts and walrus went to traders from Alaska, just a few hundred miles east. This made Anadyr a village built by a “capitalist system,” Mikhail Mandrikov, a young Bolshevik from central Russia, argued, which would “never free workers from capitalist slavery.” Anadyr’s workers were mostly indigenous to Chukotka’s tundra and rocky coastline. For almost a century, they had sold pelts and tusks to Americans. Mandrikov and his colleague Avgust Berzin had come north to preach liberation, to impart a vision for a world where “every person . . . has an equal share of all the value in the world created by work.”

The Bolshevik Revolution was two years old when Mandrikov and Berzin took control of the regional administration, seized fur storehouses, and proclaimed the establishment of the first Soviet revolutionary committee, or Revkom, in Chukotka. Six weeks later, most members of the Revkom were dead, executed by merchants with little sympathy for revolution. It was 1923 before the Red Army declared Chukotka liberated from “White [Army] bandits and foreign predators and plundering armies,” and part “of a new world, a new life of fraternity, equality, and freedom.” It was the beginning of a grand experiment in the Arctic, as the Soviet Union brought its theories of collective production, Party participation, and Marxist social transformation to Chukotka. Walruses and reindeer, and the indigenous societies that made a living from their flesh, were about to join the workers’ revolution.

For the Bolsheviks, Chukotka was a particular challenge. Its people—nomadic Chukchi reindeer herders, on the tundra, and Yupik walrus hunters, on the coast—were all potential Soviets. But in Marxist terms they lived on the first rung of history’s ladder, before the rise of agriculture and industry, let alone socialism. In 1924, a group of Bolshevik faithful—many of them ethnographers experienced with “backward peoples”—formed the Committee of the North. From Murmansk to Chukotka, the committee sent “missionaries of the new culture and the new Soviet state,” as one member put it, “ready to take to the North the burning fire of their enthusiasm born of the Revolution.”

Tikhon Semushkin, a teacher from southeast of Moscow, was so moved by descriptions of Soviet work in the Arctic that he took a train east and a sea voyage north from Vladivostok. Arriving in the Bering Strait, Semushkin found himself looking at the past across the International Date Line. Chukotka, he wrote, was the meeting place of “two days—New and Old—and two worlds, new and old, socialist and capitalist.”

In winter, the only way to get around was by dog team or reindeer sleigh; in the summer, the land was swampy. Insects were a torment. Food was often fermented walrus or boiled reindeer. Yupik and Chukchi people practiced shamanism, and lived in a time that human history was supposed to have surpassed, without literacy, temperance, science, or gender equality. There was no proper bread or clothing—and no soap.

The Chukchi were not interested in Semushkin’s description of how “all our people were making a new life, just as Lenin said.” In his memoirs, written some years after arriving in Chukotka, Semushkin describes trying to persuade a Chukchi elder named Tnayrgyn to send nomadic children to boarding school at the cultbaza, or culture base, in the Soviet settlement of Lavrentiya. Pointing to a portrait of Lenin, Semushkin explained “how he that we see hanging on the wall taught that all peoples will live well only when they themselves make their own lives,” by learning to read. Tnayrgyn responded, “What you say is nonsense. Doesn’t he know we make our own lives for ourselves?”

Tnayrgyn’s was a common sentiment among the Chukchi. In 1927, the secretary of the reëstablished Chukotka Revkom tried to organize elected leaders among the Chukchi, but he was told that they had no “chiefs” and were “all equal,” at least over time. And no one wanted to discuss reindeer. The Chukchi, who had begun domesticating reindeer hundreds of years before the Soviets arrived, knew that the animals helped increase the native human population and boosted political power, allowing individuals to amass wealth in herds of thousands. “The Chukchi received me warmly and willingly talked about general, abstract themes and topics that did not directly concern their livestock,” a Revkom committee member reported. “But when issues began to touch on the deer and reindeer herding, the Chukchi became wary and stopped talking.”

An expert from the committee wrote that the only way to “fully increase the productivity of the indigenous economy” was “collectivization in the north.” Productivity would ease poverty, collectives would provide meaningful work, and both would enable conscious action. But collectivization had to “start with the simplest forms—associations for common use of land, artels (workshops) for the communal manufacturing of products—and ascend gradually to higher forms of socialist production.” Each artel would become a kolkhoz, or collective farm, where workers owned their means of production, and eventually a sovkhoz, the state farm, with centralized ownership and quotas. As collectivization advanced, production would expand. In Chukotka, this meant producing more reindeer meat and walrus blubber, creating a future in which “the fat of sea animals flows in a fast, broad wave into the tanks” of hunting artels, one marine specialist wrote. The way to make more walruses and reindeer was to collectivize their herding and killing.

Some Yupik embraced the Bolsheviks’ vision. As a child, Mallu, a young man from the village of Ungaziq, had learned how to hunt walruses on the sea ice. He also learned Russian from the Chukchi coast’s lone Orthodox missionary. When the Bolsheviks came, Mallu’s understanding of their plans was not limited by their terrible Yupik. What he heard was an escape from winters “when we had hunger, because the sea animals did not come,” leaving “children without fathers.” So, he wrote later, “I decided to organize a kolkhoz” named Toward the New Life. By 1928, Mallu and half a dozen other young Yupik men were elected as members of the local Soviet administration. The Bolsheviks had converts.

Inland, however, among the tundra’s reindeer herders, the Bolsheviks preached liberation to people who did not see themselves as oppressed. The Chukchi had been determining their lives for centuries, and their reindeer helped them do so. Semushkin told Chukchi parents that school was a useful and moral place; but all the Chukchi saw was foreigners drinking, arguing, and cheating, along with an outbreak of influenza that killed children. Semushkin himself was rumored to have spread gonorrhea. The Soviets promised to lift Chukchi from timeless stasis into conscious, historical action, not seeing in Chukchi histories of war and domestication a people who already understood the future as theirs to shape. Where Mallu saw opportunity in Soviet ideas, Tnayrgyn saw ignorance and threat from foreigners who “do not understand our way of life” and “cannot live on the tundra.”