Introducing HIDE’s new work Indigenous Christianity: Missionaries, Modernity, and Marginality in the Siberian Tundra by Tatiana Vagramenko. This book extends the scope of the History Declassified project by adding a deeply ethnographic dimension, tracing the origins and social foundations of Putin’s regime in one of the world’s most remote regions. This book traces the story of a Nenets indigenous community in Siberia and how their lives were transformed by religious conversion in post-Soviet and Putin’s Russia. Based on over a decade of ethnographic fieldwork in a region now largely closed to outsiders, it offers an intimate account of faith, power, and endurance in one of the Arctic’s most marginalized communities.
Long shaped by Russian colonialism and Soviet modernization, the Nenets experienced sweeping evangelical conversions in the mid-1990s, leading to the creation of a tundra church. Amid Putin’s tightening control and persecutions, the book follows Nenets and missionaries navigating tensions between faith, state, and tradition. Through stories of hope, loss, and resilience, it shows how global evangelical Christianity reshapes kinship, belonging, and modernity in the Siberian tundra.
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