For over five hundred years the Russians wondered what kind of people their Arctic and subArctic subjects were They have mouths between their shoulders and eyes in their chests reported a fifteenthcentury tale They rove around live of their own free will and beat the Russian people complained a seventeenthcentury Cossack Their actions are exceedingly rude They do not take off their hats and do not bow to each other huffed an eighteenthcentury scholar They are children of nature and guardians of ecological balance rhapsodized early nineteenthcentury and late twentiethcentury romantics Even the Bolsheviks who categorized the circumpolar foragers as authentic proletarians were repeatedly puzzled by the peoples from the late Neolithic period who by virtue of their extreme backwardness cannot keep up either economically or culturally with the furious speed of the emerging socialist societyWhether described as brutes aliens or endangered indigenous populations the socalled small peoples of