Their Ancestral Traditions Under Threat, a Village in Russia s Far East Stands Up to Gold-Mining Giant themoscowtimes.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from themoscowtimes.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
“I would want to come back to a free Yakutia,” Sargylana Kondakova says when asked about returning to her home region. “I would like for it to be an independent state, of course, but it is even more important for me to see that our people have a free conscience, free mind and a free soul.” A native of Russia’s Far East republic of Sakha (Yakutia), Kondakova is a co-founder of Free Yakutia Foundation, the region’s largest anti-war and indigenous rights group.
"I have seen the dead forest with my own eyes, it's a very eerie sensation,” Andrei Ozharovsky, a nuclear physicist and antinuclear campaigner, told The Moscow Times. “The explosion happened in the 1970s but in one direction, for about two or three kilometers, there are still dead trees standing.
For nearly two months now dedicated cinephiles in Russia have been engrossed in a public row over the fate of “Ayta,” an award-winning thriller by Yakutian director Stepan Burnashev. The movie was effectively banned by the Kremlin in September in a move that caused widespread public outrage and made many fear for the future of regional film industries. In the latest turn of events, Alexander Dyukov, a member of the Presidential Commission on Interethnic Relations, last week described “Ayta” as “textbook nationalistic cinema.” “This is a perfect example of a nationalistic movie, filmed in an ethnocratic republic where silent ethnic cleansing has already taken place: within 30 years, the number of Russians [living in Yakutia] has decreased by exactly half,” Dyukov wrote to his over 18,000 subscribers on Telegram. “Ayta,” which has become the highest-grossing film ever in the Far East republic of Sakha (Yakutia), tells the story of a standoff between indigenous
Kazakh authorities this month arrested anti-war activist and musician Ayhal Ammosov, a Russian national hailing from the Far East republic of Sakha (Yakutia). Though Ammosov’s name might be known to few abroad and elsewhere in Russia, he is something of a local celebrity in his native Sakha, first rising to prominence as an eccentric punk frontman and later becoming one of the region’s most noticeable critics of the invasion of Ukraine. Ammosov whose legal name is Igor Ivanov fled Sakha for Kazakhstan at the end of last year after authorities opened a criminal investigation against him on suspicion of spreading “fake news” about the Russian army. Despite his physical absence from the country, he continued to face pressure from the Russian authorities.