Reindeer in Russia

[12] By the end of the 19th century, the indigenous Sami population had been mostly forced north by the Russians and the Komi and Nenets people who migrated here to escape a reindeer disease epidemics in their home lands.

Siberian tundra reindeer (R.t. sibiricus) "may be divided further into regional forms: the Taimyr Bulun, Yano-Indigirka and Novosibirsk islands (Egorov, 1971).

[18] The Putorana Nature Reserve, covering 1,887,251 hectares (4,663,500 acres), (a World Heritage Site since 2010),[19] was established in 1988 to protect Taimyr reindeer herd as well as snow sheep.

Taimyr tundra reindeer migrate to winter taiga pastures in Evenkia and Putoran Mountains.

The shift in winter distribution occurred after the increase in population size, which resulted in deterioration of forage (Kuksoc, 1981).

Lineitzev's (1983) observations at the biological station at Ayan Lake in the Putoran Mountains revealed the pattern of reindeer distribution in the piedmont.

In years with a warm autumn, reindeer were observed to linger on the southern Taimyr tundra until December (up to 100 thousand head).

Egorov (1971), Vodopyanov (1970), Stremilov (1973) and Mukhachev (1981), however, inferred from their studies that the forest reindeer of Evenkia, Trans-Baikal Territory, Southern Yakutia and Far East are the same subspecies.

[20] As the ice sheets melted 10,000 years ago, wild reindeer reached Fennoscandia from the eastern side of the Baltic Sea.

At that time wild forest reindeer inhabited nearly the "entire Eastern Fennoscandian and Northwestern Russian areas all the way to Ilmajärvi.

They were "hunted to extinction in Finland in the late 1910s, but continued to live in the remote backwoods of Russian Karelia."

By the early 2000s "the southern boundary of the range of wild forest reindeer in Karelia has retreated to the north, and the population is fragmented."

[24][25] Domestic "reindeer are sharply distinct in conformation and colouration and their morphological and ecological characteristics vary regionally.

"[1]: 333 The coast of the East Siberian Sea was inhabited for many centuries by the native peoples of northern Siberia such as Yukaghirs and Chukchi (eastern areas).

[30] Petri described a difficult period in Russian history claiming that Soyot reindeer herding was a "dying branch of the economy.

"[30][31][32] Pavlinskaya argued that "later research and data collected from Soyot elders show that the herding tradition easily overcame the period’s difficulties and endured until the middle of the 20th century, when the government interfered.

[33] Plumley suggested that the Soyot of Buryatia's Okinsky Region, the Tofilar of Irkutsk Oblast, the Todja-Tuvans of the Republic of Tuva in Russia, and the Dukha of Mongolia's Hovsgol Province, who are "cultures of reindeer-habitat" in Central Asia may well "have traded, inter-married and related across the breadth and width of the Sayans.

"[33] Anderson, David G. "Identity and Ecology in Arctic Siberia: The Number One Reindeer Brigade (Oxford Studies in Social and Cultural Anthropology)."

Conversations with Power: Soviet and post-Soviet developments in the reindeer husbandry part of the Kola Peninsula.