Early Soviet policies towards the numerically small Northern and Far Eastern indigenous populations emerged from a nineteenth-century populist framework that saw cultural extinction as a major problem (Kuper 1988: 2–3). In the early 1920s, the Soviet press frequently presented the situation of the indigenous population of the North as ‘worsening’, ‘becoming harder’, and finally reaching a ‘catastrophic’ stage (cf. Ianovich 1923: 251–4; Slezkine 1994: 131–83). Soviet nationality policy, defined by Francine Hirsch as a ‘state-sponsored evolutionism’, grounded the Soviet ‘civilizing mission’ in the Marxist concept of development through historical stages (Hirsch 2005: 7). Within this framework, the indigenous peoples were seen both as underdeveloped societies to be modernised and as complex cultures worthy of extensive ethnographic research. Nineteenth-century romantic primitivism fused with positivism resulted in a peculiar view of indigenous populations as a ‘combination of the contemptible and the admirable’, in which ‘the native might be rebuked for eating rotten fish, abusing his wife, and killing his elderly parents, but he absolutely had to be praised for his simplicity, generosity, and stoicism’ (Slezkine 1994: 79).

Cinematography, as the Bolsheviks well knew, was a powerful tool for visualising diversity and demonstrating desired developments and achievements. In the Soviet context, the ‘disappearing’ minorities were supposed to benefit from the new regime, at least on screen. The landscape they inhabited was imagined as a complex composite: a territory rich in material resources and an underdeveloped land; a home to endangered peoples; a vulnerable frontier; and the futuristic venue for an anticipated economic miracle. This chapter outlines the evolution of the imagery of indigenous populations and the Arctic North in the Soviet cinema of the 1920–30s. By focusing on the films by Vladimir Erofeev and Vladimir Shneiderov, I trace the transformation of the visual language of representation of the Far North. This transitioned over the course of a few decades from being represented as an exotic borderland with a variety of cultures to a harsh but tameable frontier in which the image of the indigenous population becomes that of a body of diligent apprentices.