Paper short abstract:

Employing an Indigenous research method—storying with sentient nonhumans, landscapes and horses—this paper investigates the power dynamics between Indigenous historicities and the state-enforced history in the Tyva republic, Russia.

Paper long abstract:

This paper questions the power dynamics between the state-enforced histories and Indigenous historicities taking as a case-study the diversity of postsocialist meanings conveyed by racehorse Ezir Kara, who lived in 1930 to 1939 in the Tyva republic, Inner Asia. In the early postsocialist period Ezir Kara was re-born as a symbol of the Great Purge; later he acquired a status of a respected kin among the clan of his owner Soyan Sandangmaa. Recently there has been a shift in Ezir Kara’s understanding beyond his South Tyvan homelands. A depersonalized narrative about the timeless ‘nomadic horse’ attempts to take over a story of the unjustly killed racehorse who became a symbol of repressions and a way to heal the severed human-nonhuman relationships.

I argue that meanings of Ezir Kara have diverged in response to two factors: a need to reconcile with the past at the community level and the changing geopolitical context. The latter is framed temporally as the early postsocialist period in the 1990s when ‘history was becoming possible’ (Humphrey 1992) and Putin’s Russia of the past two decades when the state reinstated the policing of the past. I draw parallels between stories of Ezir Kara and racehorse Kulager (c. 1870-1880s) who became prominent in political discourse in postsocialist Kazakhstan.