HISTORICAL AND CULTURAL TRANSFORMATIONS OF TERRITORIES IN THE FLOODED AREA OF BOGUCHANY HPP
Article is devoted to the course, the reasons and results of transformations of the historical, cultural and ethnographic environment of the territories of the Irkutsk and Krasnoyarsk Region which got to a zone of flooding of a reservoir of Boguchan Hydroelectric Plant (Boguchan HPP) on the Angara River in Middle Siberia (Krasnoyarsk and Irkutsk Region, Russia). It is a huge territory with the extent of the riverbed of Angara in 375 km (from the Ust-Ilimsk HPP to the Boguchan HPP, the area of the reservoir is more than 2300 squarekilometers). The Angara River since the 17th century was actively used by Russians as a transportation way from the west to the east, as a hunting and fishing destination for livestock and farming. For the 20th century the described area was almost monoethnic - Russian. Among local Russians - «angarets» - is distinguished a local historical and ethnographic group of the Russian people famous as «kezhmar». Evenks (Tungus) - the autochthonic Siberian people - left this zone before the Russians came to this land. The impact made on life of angarets by Siberian exile at the time of the Russian Empire (in 1898 in the Yenisei Province there were 51019 exiled, in the Irkutsk Province - 71 800), and also a «camp»-penal system of Soviet period is considered in the study. Impact on traditional economic and cultural way of the population of this territory is shown in the program for the liquidation of «unpromising» villages in the 1960s and 1970s. Process of final destruction of this historical, cultural and ethnographic community is connected with the program of resettlement of residents from the projected flood zone of the reservoir of Boguchan HPP at the end of the 20th century - the beginning of the 21st century. Over 13 thousand people were resettled from villages in Kezhemsky District of Krasnoyarsk region. More than 2 thousands of inhabitants were moved from this zone to the Ust-Ilimsk District of the Irkutsk Region.