Michael A. Chlenov (1940–2024). Change and Survival for a Russian Yupik Scholar and Advocate

Russian cultural anthropologist Michael Chlenov, who spent almost 50 years studying and writing about the Yupik of Chukotka, passed away in Moscow, Russia on August 7, 2024. He was 83. He was called “Mika” (Mee-ka) Chlenov by almost everyone, young and old, and Mikak (“little Mika”) by his Siberian Yupik friends (Figure 1). In the 1970s, he transformed the old-style Russian “Eskimo ethnography” into a modern brand of western social anthropology and was later instrumental in integrating the study of Siberian Yupik into the international field of Inuit Studies, then called “Eskimology.” He was a person of many skills—and of many “hats” that he used to wear with his remarkable intellectual vigor and unmatched charm. Mika Chlenov and I first met in the summer of 1971 in the Yupik community of Sighineq (Sireniki) in Chukotka, on the Russian side of the Bering Sea, where we were part of a field crew led by biological anthropologists Valerii and Tatyana Alexeev. For their bio-morphological survey of Russian Yupik, the Alexeevs invited Chlenov, an aspiring social anthropologist, to make family genealogies in three communities they were to visit. They soon placed me, then a junior student, as his field assistant for this task. Together, we visited the three largest groups of Russian Yupik residing in Sireniki, Nunyamo, and New Chaplino, in a swirl of village surveys, helicopter and aircraft flights, and boat rides. The title of our co-authored book, Yupik Transitions: Change and Survival at Bering Strait (Krupnik and Chlenov 2013), was very much the life story of Mika Chlenov himself. Born in Moscow at the onset of WWII, he spent his childhood years in the war-torn Soviet-occupied zone in East Germany, where his father was stationed as a “cultural resource” Russian army officer. He graduated from the Moscow Institute of Oriental Languages with a BA in Oriental studies, as both student and interpreter of Indonesian language/s, adding fluent Dutch and Malay to his almost native German as well as good English and French (and later, a superb command of Hebrew). As a student of foreign languages, he received an exceptional chance in his college years to spend a year and half on Ambon Island in Eastern Indonesia, with his then-wife and fellow student Svetlana Chlenova, working as a Malay/Dutch/Russian interpreter at a Soviet construction site. While translating for Russian engineers and construction advisors, he also managed to use his time to explore local Austronesian languages of the nearby areas. This is where he first practiced his skills in language documentation, village surveys, and long rides in small Indigenous boats across the islands of Maluku and the adjacent seas. Upon his return to Moscow, he entered the Ph.D. program at the Moscow Institute of Ethnography of the Russian (then-Soviet) Academy of Science and obtained his Ph.D. in ethnology (history) in 1969, with his thesis on the ethnohistory of the people of Central Maluku. He remained on the research staff at that institute until the 1990s. Mika Chlenov’s professional path went through many “bifurcations.” Being unable to pursue new field research in Indonesia—even to visit that country until the 2000s—he instead moved north and joined his colleague, ethnologist Vladimir I. Vasil’ev to study the Nenets and Khanty people on the Ob and Pur Rivers in West Siberia in 1969 and 1970. Although an exploratory trip to the Siberian Yupik in 1971 looked like a brief comparative visit, Mika remained dedicated to the Yupik people through two decades of fieldwork (trips in 1976, 1977, 1979, 1981, 1986, 1987, and 1990) and almost five decades of research and writing. At that same time, he …

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