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bank of the Mrass-Su River. “It almost looks like as if the village never existed,”
says Aleksandr Tokmagashev, a former resident of Kazas and a representative of
the indigenous people of Kemerovo, the Shors. In 2012 extremely unfavourable
environmental conditions forced the residents of Kazas to sell their properties to
the Yuzhnaya coal company. According to the official narrative, the sale happened
on a voluntary basis. Yet, some residents claim that they were harassed by repre-
sentatives of the mining company. “Now people say ‘you shouldn’t have sold your
land, if you didn’t want to. You could have stayed’. But we actually received threats.
People were scared. That is why they left,” Tokmagashev says. He was one of the few
residents who refused to sell his land. In the winter of 2013 – 2014 his house was
set on fire together with some other remaining villagers. The person responsible
for the arson was never identified. Since then he has lived in a city apartment as
his disability pension does not allow him to rebuild and repair his house.
The old Shor is stubborn, however, and refuses to sell his property, adding that
he still feels responsible for the land of his ancestors. He regularly visits the old
cemetery next to the village where Shor tombs are hiding in the midst of purple
lupines. His father, who fought in the Great Patriotic War, is also buried there.
“What did my father fight for?” he asks himself. “He built our house, left it to me
as a legacy and now...” Tokmagashev intended to pass on the house to his children,
but the motherland, for which his father had fought, no longer exists.
Not far from the ruins of Kazas, the Shor village of Chuvashka is surrounded
by three coal mines: Kiizassky, Seberginsky and Krasnogorsky. “They have been
detonating and polluting our river. They are intentionally creating these condi-
tions to force us to leave,” complains Valentina Boriskina, a resident of Chuvashka,
a Shor pensioner and activist. She welcomes us in her house where there is little
evidence of the culture of her ancestors. On the kitchen table she has prepared
Russian pancakes and tea.
“The Russian colonisers erased our traditions, our customs and our language.
They depersonalised the Shors,” the woman tells us. Boriskina laments the ineffec-
tiveness of the law on “Territories of Traditional Natural Use” which is supposed
to safeguard the Shors’ ancestral lands, but fails in practice. In 2007 Shors were
deprived of the right of self-administration and their land was eventually destined
to exploitation. Boriskina believes the Shors to be the main victims of the indus-
trialisation of the region. “Traditional skills like fishing, hunting and gathering are
slowly being forgotten. Most young Shors leave the countryside and move to the
cities, where they forget their language and traditions,” she says. According to Bo-
riskina, the destruction of their ancestral territories is leading to the slow extinc-
tion of the Shors as a nation: “Many of us become alcoholics. Others die working
in the mines. We are children of nature. We should live on our own land.”Reports Stories from Russia’s coal country, Giovanni Pigni