Chaldons Erotic

Chaldon is Siberia's word for the Russians who got there first. It covers the descendants of those who crossed the Urals in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries: Cossacks and service men, fur hunters, state peasants and runaways, most of them from the Russian North, around Vologda, Veliky Ustyug, Vyatka and the White Sea coast. Nobody agrees on where the name comes from. Vladimir Dal's nineteenth-century dictionary glossed it as a vagrant or escaped convict and called it a Mongolian loan. A popular family story derives it from two rivers, the Chalka and the Don, which the ancestors supposedly left behind. It clearly began as an insult, thrown by the later migrants who poured in after the end of serfdom and along the Trans-Siberian Railway, and the old settlers eventually took it over and wore it with pride. They had their own names for the newcomers: lapotniki, bast-shoe wearers, or rasseiskie, people from Russia, as if Siberia were somewhere else.

That sense of being somewhere else is the core of it. Siberia never had serfdom in the European Russian sense, land was plentiful, and the old settlers grew into a prosperous, self-reliant peasantry known for big log houses, floors scrubbed bare, heavy tea drinking and a certain reserve toward strangers. They farmed, but also hunted, fished, trapped and gathered pine nuts in the taiga, and they learned a good deal from Tatar, Khanty, Evenk and Buryat neighbors, with whom the early, mostly male settlers also intermarried. One custom travelers remarked on: bread and milk left on a shelf by the window at night for fugitives passing through, part charity, part insurance.

Their speech is the old-settler dialect of Siberian Russian: northern at its base, with unstressed o kept round, verb endings clipped (znat for znaet), and a layer of words borrowed from Turkic and other Siberian languages. The religion is Russian Orthodoxy, carried on in a land where parishes were vast and priests scarce, so household ritual and folk belief did much of the work. Old Believer communities such as the Kerzhaks and the Semeiskie lived alongside them and are usually counted apart.

Collectivization, industrial cities and further waves of migration dissolved most of the visible boundary. Today Chaldon is less a community than a lineage claim: people in Tyumen, Omsk, Tomsk, Krasnoyarsk or Irkutsk who say their family was already here when the others arrived. The village dialect is fading, but the word survives in folk ensembles, local museums, and the quiet conviction that a Siberian is not quite the same thing as a Russian from the west.