Local texts and contexts of the interview as a source on the ethnocultural identity of Russian old-timers in East Kazakhstan

The author aims to detect ethnocultural and religious identities of an old-timers group in the Shemonaikha village of the East Kazakhstan region of the Republic of Kazakhstan, taking into account the settlement history of this locus and the entire context of ethnocultural realities of the past and recent present (the 18 - late 20 century). There was expressed a hypothesis, that a complexity of ongoing identification processes among the first settlers, who were service men in the early 18th century, the exiled settlers of a later time, including Old Believers forcibly deported from former Poland in the 1760s. The main research source is a transcript of in-depth field interviews (narrative) with the oldest resident of the Shemonaikha village - A.N. Agafonova, born 1915 and with other informants from neighboring villages. The local text created during the expedition of the Institute of Archeology and Ethnography of the SB RAS in 1995 is largely autobiographical, as the informant, answering questions, gave examples from her own life and lives of her kin. In the 18 c. Peter S. Pallas observed a settlement of the former outposts of Shemonaikha, Ekaterininskaya, Staroaleiskaya by "Polish settlers". Over two hundred years later in the villages of the Southern Altai mountains and the upper Irtysh area (now the East Kazakhstan Oblast of Kazakhstan), during the expedition the author met the collective names of local old-timers “Poles”, “Chaldons”, “Kerzhaks”, along with the regional “Locals” / “Siberians” and ethnic “Russian” identities. The source analysis made it possible to find out the ethnocultural identity of the informants of the Shemonaikha village, who did not attach importance to facts from the distant "Polish" past, did not preserve the memory of the forcible deportation of their Russian ancestors from the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth to the Ust-Kamenogorsk fortress of the Altai Mountain District, essentially perceiving this as a legend. At the same time, local residents gave out as a fact a version of their "Chaldon" identity, tied to the Don River, which was popular in the south of Western Siberia in the 19th and early 20th centuries for all groups of Russian old-timers. An important point in the study of ethnographic texts is a development of the issue to what extent tests of in-depth interviews reflect a real picture of the past and to what extent a construction of such picture takes place (and, accordingly, how the reconstructed ethnocultural identity is correlated with the consciously constructed identity). The data of texts and contexts indicate not only the hierarchy of ethnocultural identity and a manifestation of the “splited identity” of Russian old-timers of the late 18 - first third of the 20 century, but also to active processes of acculturation, interference, which led the “Pole” heritage to the “Chaldon” look, widespread in Siberia at this time. Probably in the described case, a “Chaldon” identity is constructing as an attractive one for a significant part of Siberian population. This turned out to be possible only for those Old Believers who left Old Orthodoxy and became supporters of the Russian Orthodox Church.

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