Askold Bazhanov's How They Loved Us Half-Savages

One of the horrors of Soviet Union domination is the destruction of cultures and the way of life in regards to the ethnic minority groups. This tragedy may be witnessed by the governments attempts to equal all people through affirmative action policies. Yet the governments good hearted choices back fired on them as the people they attempted to help suffered through forced relocation, cultural degradation, as well as segregation. But regardless of the governments attempts to create a sort of “Soviet Culture”, writers and poets stood up to the cause and made their voice heard by all the people. The writer and poet Askold Bazhanov of the Saami people once wrote about the hardships and regret of his people in the Poem titled How They Loved Us Half-Savages.

To describe these damages, Bazhanov takes the homes he lives in and compares them to the homes he used to live in. Bazhanov describes how the “faceless brick houses” create a homesickness towards his “traditional and habitual” tents. The use of the word “faceless” shows the destruction of the Saami culture and its architectural traditions in regards to tent building. This also shows how plain and identical the new era buildings are giving a lack of identity to the Saami people. To add on, the use of the term “faceless” indicates the author does not find his living quarters as a home. This simple example shows the extent the Soviet Union went into creating a unified state. By doing something as simple as creating identical housing for all people, the term home looses its true meaning and everyone becomes equal. By doing so ethnic groups are already forced to pick up the Soviet culture through the means of their homes becoming identical to all the rest.

Bazhanov also enlightens the reader by describing his distaste for collectivization and how this broad change critically effects the Saami culture. Bazhanov points out the fact that he can no longer “bear the torch of our family’s honest work” implying that the collectivization method has critically harmed his family work ethics ands his lively hood. By writing this sentence, Bazhanov implies to the reader that embracing the changes that are brought by the Soviet Union not only change the Saami culture but also disrupt the living habits of its