Olga Kudrina
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Olga Dmitrievna Kudrina (c. 1890-1944) was a shamaness among the Reindeer Evenki of northern
Inner Mongolia Inner Mongolia, officially the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, is an autonomous region of the People's Republic of China. Its border includes most of the length of China's border with the country of Mongolia. Inner Mongolia also accounts for a ...
along the Amur River's Great Bend (today under the jurisdiction of
Genhe Genhe (Gegengol) ( mn, (Гэгээнгол хот) Gegen Gôûl Hôt; ), formerly Ergun Left Banner or Ergun Zuoqi (), is a county-level city in the far northeast of Inner Mongolia, China, under the administration of Hulunbuir City. The city spa ...
, Hulunbuir). She was accepted as an arbiter between the various Reindeer Evenki groups, helping to defuse conflicts between families when a member of one murdered a member of the other; after her death, the egalitarian hunters were left with no widely accepted shaman or other authority figure, and conflicts among them escalated into a chain of serious cases of blood revenge.


Background and early life

The Reindeer Evenki comprise three groups: the Mohe, Cigančen, and Three-River (Gunačen). Originally, Filipp Vasil’evič Sologon was the shaman of the Mohe group, while Kudrina belonged to the Gunačen in the south. She came from a family of shamans; her grandmother, uncle Vasilij Jakovlevič Kudrin, and cousin Innokentij Ivanovič Kudrin were all shamans. It was common for many shamans to come from the same family; however, the position was not necessarily transmitted lineally. Kudrina's responsibilities as a shamaness included aiding in the hunt, curing the sick, and watching over the souls of the deceased; she was required to be knowledgeable about spirits and religion. She started on the path to becoming a shamaness in 1923, in a dream in which she claimed to have seen the spirit of her predecessor and received his knowledge. During this time she was reported to have gone deep into the forest, remaining there for two weeks without fire or food.


Death and legacy

Sologon died in 1942, leading Kudrina to take over responsibility for his group. This meant that she had to make arduous treks over the
Greater Khingan The Greater Khingan Range or Da Hinggan Range (; IPA: ), is a -long volcanic mountain range in the Inner Mongolia region of Northeast China. It was originally called the Xianbei Mountains, which later became the name of the northern branch of th ...
mountains to reach the hunting grounds of the Mohe group. Conflicts broke out more frequently in these years due to the Japanese occupation, pitting pro-Japanese Evenki against anti-Japanese Evenki; in 1944, about fifty people from the Mohe group fled back to
Russia Russia (, , ), or the Russian Federation, is a transcontinental country spanning Eastern Europe and Northern Asia. It is the largest country in the world, with its internationally recognised territory covering , and encompassing one-eig ...
as a result. Kudrina died later that same year, leaving behind two other shamans: her cousin Kudrin, and Njura Kaltakun, neither of whom had widely accepted authority among all the groups. Blood revenge spread after her death, but older hunters made efforts to halt the cycle, seeing the threat it posed to their survival as an ethnic group, and Kaltakun would finally be able to bring the blood feuds to a halt in the early 1950s. Kudrina had no children of her own. She was survived by her adopted son, Victor Kudrin. She also took Anatolij Makarovič Kajgorodov (1927–1998), a member of a Russian Cossack family with whom the Reindeer Evenki frequently traded, as a godson; he would go on to become a well-known ethnographer of the Tungusic peoples.


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* * {{DEFAULTSORT:Kudrina, Olga 1890s births 1944 deaths Siberian shamanism People from Hulunbuir Evenks Shamans Female religious leaders