Siberian shamanism is not one tradition but many: the distinct practices of the Evenki, Yakut (Sakha), Buryat, Tuvan and dozens of other peoples across Siberia. They gave the word “shaman” itself to the rest of the world, and they kept their practice alive through nearly seventy years of Soviet persecution. Rituals were burned. Practitioners were disenfranchised, fined and, in some cases, killed. But the response was not to disappear. It was to go quiet: drums were hidden, ceremonies moved to the forest or to the middle of the night, and families kept the knowledge until it was safe to bring it back out.
I already cover the general origins of the word and the practice in what shamanism is. Here I go further into Siberia itself. Which peoples carry this tradition? What did a shaman’s equipment actually mean? How did the Soviet state try to end it, and how did it come back?
Why is Siberian shamanism not a single tradition?
Siberia is not one culture any more than Europe is. The Evenki, a Tungusic people, gave the world the word itself: saman, built on a root meaning to know. But the Evenki are one people among dozens across this territory, including the Yakut, who call themselves Sakha and live around the Lena River. There is the Buryat near Lake Baikal, the Tuvan further south near the Mongolian border, and smaller peoples such as the Nanai, Nivkh and Khanty further east and west. Each had its own language and its own spirits, each with their own names. Each had its own version of the costume, the drum, the journey. What they share is a family resemblance, not a shared script.
That matters because so much writing about “Siberian shamanism” flattens this into one generic picture. A Sakha shaman addressing the spirit of the Lena is not doing the same thing, in the same language, to the same being, as a Tuvan shaman working near the Mongolian steppe. The resemblance between them is real. So is the difference.
What did a Siberian shaman’s equipment actually mean?
The drum was never just a percussion instrument. Across these traditions it is understood as the shaman’s mount, the animal, usually a reindeer or horse, that carries them into the spirit world and back. Many costumes carried metal ornaments, iron discs, bells and sometimes antlers, each piece tied to a specific ancestor spirit or helper rather than chosen for decoration. A heavy costume could weigh many kilos, and putting it on was itself part of the transition into the work.
This is worth knowing precisely because of what came next. When a state wants to end a religion quickly, it goes after the objects first. In Siberia, that is exactly what happened.
How did the Soviet state try to end Siberian shamanism?
The campaign built up over roughly two decades. In the 1920s, shamans lost the right to vote in local elections, which cut them out of the new collective farms and, in practice, out of their own livelihood. Framed at first as part of the wider campaign against kulaks, the pressure on shamans soon ran on its own track. Founded in 1925, the Union of Warring Atheists took anti-religious propaganda into factories, farms and schools right across the Soviet Union, Siberia among them.
The 1930s were the worst of it. Officials raided homes, confiscated drums and costumes, and burned them. Sometimes a shaman’s own children were made to take part in the search. In the Nanai district, a 1937 report found 130 people living as shamans where an earlier count had claimed only six, which gives some sense of how deep the practice went beneath what the state could actually see. That same year, Bogdan Onenko, a shaman from the village of Nay Khin, was arrested and executed. Pavel Tumali, from the same region, threw his own father’s drum and belt into the Amur River rather than wait for someone else to take them.
| Decade | What happened |
|---|---|
| 1920s | Shamans disenfranchised, excluded from collective farms, sometimes evicted from their villages |
| 1930s | Raids, confiscation and burning of drums and ritual objects, arrests, documented executions |
| 1940s to 1950s | Ban continues, enforcement becomes less violent but practice stays hidden |
| 1960s | Fines continue, rituals move into homes, held after midnight with the lights off |
| Early 1980s | Official reports stop mentioning a campaign at all, as though the matter were already settled |
Practitioners adapted rather than stopped. Through the worst years, some swapped a loud drum for a small axe worn quietly around the neck, since an axe draws no attention and a drumbeat carries for miles. Ceremonies moved into fields and forests, and later into private homes after dark. None of this looked like resistance from the outside. It looked like silence. It was not.
Did Siberian shamanism actually survive?
Yes, and the clearest proof is what happened the moment it became safe again. Researchers working in Tuva during the 1970s and 1980s, while the ban was technically still in force, already found elderly shamans quietly practising. The knowledge had not been destroyed. It had been passed down inside families, in private, waiting.
How is Siberian shamanism practised now?
Tuva saw the fastest and most visible revival. In 1993, the Tuvan shaman Dugar-Syuryun Oorzhak founded Dungur, the first officially registered shamanist association in post-Soviet Russia, and people from the neighbouring Khakassia and Altai republics soon approached him for help setting up similar groups of their own. Three decades on, shamanism in Tuva is treated by local authorities and the wider population as an ordinary part of regional life, not a curiosity.
Growth has brought its own problems. Oorzhak himself has been openly critical of what the revival turned into in places: short courses lead to a new “clinic.” People start calling themselves shamans mainly to attract paying visitors from Europe and North America. The anthropologist Valentina Kharitonova reads this less as corruption than as a predictable response to history. Once the Soviet safety net disappeared, people paid in cash instead of livestock and food, because cash was what they now had to give. Oorzhak still receives food offerings from local clients alongside paid work abroad, which says something about how the old and the new economy sit side by side rather than one replacing the other cleanly.
Why this history shapes how I teach
My own training sits inside this lineage, carried through Siberian and Mongolian teachers into the cross-cultural method most Western practitioners call core shamanism. Knowing this history changes how I hold the practice. A drumbeat that someone’s grandmother had to hide in a field at night is not raw material for a wellness brand. It is a method that survived an actual attempt to erase it, and I try to teach it with that in mind rather than as a lifestyle accessory.
Frequently asked questions
The word shaman comes from saman, a term in the Evenki language of Siberia, built on a root that means roughly to know. European languages picked it up through Russian contact with Siberian peoples from the seventeenth century onward.
Shamans were disenfranchised, fined, raided and in some documented cases executed, such as Bogdan Onenko in 1937. Some researchers argue that mass executions did not occur and that punishment varied by case, but persecution across the 1930s is well documented.
They are closely related rather than identical. Buryat communities live on both sides of the Russia-Mongolia border and share much of the same cosmology, including the white and black shaman distinction, but Buryat practice in Siberia developed under different political pressures than shamanism inside Mongolia itself.
Tuva is usually named as the region with the fastest and most visible post-Soviet revival, with the Dungur association founded there in 1993, but Sakha (Yakutia) and Buryatia also have active, ongoing shamanic practice.
A shaman in 1960s Siberia practised with the lights off after midnight so the knowledge would still be there when it was safe to use again. It was. If you want to see where this tradition fits beside Mongolian, Korean and other living practices, the map of the world’s shamanic traditions is a good next stop. Tell me in the comments: which Siberian people’s practice was new to you here?
