Spiritual Culture of the Sakha People History and Modernity

The three-hundred-year-old spiritual culture of the Sakha people underwent major changes at the beginning of the twentieth century, as a result of Sakha becoming a member of the Russian state.The process of Christianization of the Sakha people, which began in the seventeenth century, facilitated integration of the Yakut society into the widest spiritual and cultural space, 1 made education accessible to them, and familiarized them to Russian and via it to European and world cultures.It led to the appearance of Yakut writing and belles-lettres, the national press, and formation of the spiritual and intellectual elite.Thus, at the beginning of the twentieth century, the foundation was laid for the formation of the modern culture of the Sakhas on the basis of interaction of traditional and Russian cultures.But a new type of culture was formed among a small group of people, which consisted of mainly representatives of the upper crust of the Yakut society.This group also included people who had achieved success in education and state service on their own abilities.The main Sakha population lived in a traditional socio-cultural environment, a special feature of which was syncretism.The outlook of the Sakhas to the world, as well as traditional, religious and mythological ideas and the system of rational knowledge of the people, remained a syncretic one.The Sakhas mainly followed the rituals of the Orthodox, but also retained their own traditional rituals and customs.Arts such as oral poetry, music, song, dance, theatre, and fine art, which joined various kinds and genres, were syncretic.After a new political regime established in October 1917, all nations had equal rights.There were programs conducted for the development of education, literature, and art.But under the Soviet power, policies relating to national and cultural building in different regions of the country were implemented inconsistently.The main doctrine of the ruling party was to build a new public social civilization and to develop it into a communist one worldwide.Party leaders tried to realize this aim by changes of a man, all spiritual life of a new society.All innovations in cultural building were determined mainly by ideological considerations, and the Bolsheviks realized the role of Soviet cultural and educational institutes in introducing communist ideology, which could give a new perspective to people.Nevertheless, the liberal linguistic and cultural policy existing in the 1920s promoted the rapid development of Yakut writing and literature and the appearance of