Siberia occupies 67 percent of Russian territory and is inhabited by over 30 ethnic groups. The Republic of Sakha is the largest region. Spanning 3,100,000 square kilometres, it’s 10 times as large as Italy with only a million inhabitants. Around half of it is beyond the Arctic Circle and it’s all enclosed within the permafrost area with permanently frozen soil. There is an active surface layer of around three metres that melts during the summer to freeze again in the winter. Below this is a layer measuring 300 to 1500 metres that has not melted since the last Ice Age 10,000 years ago. In Yakutia in the village of Oimyakon, there is the ‘Pole of Cold’, the coldest inhabited place in the world, where temperatures of –71° C have been recorded.

Thirty-two-year old Ivan is the head of the first of the three Dolgan encampments I’m going to live in. He has driven from his camp on a snowmobile to meet us in the village of Yuriung-Khaya. We finally reached here after five hours of a cold and bumpy flight from Yakutsk, the capital town of Yakutia, to the village of Saskylakh. This was followed by 11 hours in a jeep along the frozen Anabar River. The Arctic Sea of Laptev in front of Yuriung-Khaya has captured some ships that now have to wait until spring to be freed from their long and forced hibernation. Here everything and everyone patiently and meekly await their fate; you decide very little yourself in Siberia. You can only learn to build up your defences to withstand the deadly cold. All your efforts would have to be concentrated on surviving; and if you do, you are either a hero or have been saved by a miracle. The Dolgan belong to the first category. The name of this ethnic group has a relatively recent origin. At the end of the 17th century, four of the clans from the Ewenki tribe that lived in Yakutia near the river Lena adopted the local Yakut language (from the Altaic group of Turkic origin) and moved west to the present Autonomous Taimyr Region.

The group of nomads who left Yakutia called themselves the Dolgan named after one of their clans, but today they claim they have an identity distinct from either the Ewenki or the Yakuts. They have their own language, although many scholars consider it only a dialect of Yakut. Except for the older members everyone speaks Russian. Today there are nearly 7330 Dolgan (1992 RAIPON) of which over 70 percent live in the Taimyr Peninsula and the remaining 30 percent still live in the Anabar district in the Republic of Sakha.

We leave Yuriung-Khaya. Ivan drives recklessly, as if plummeting into emptiness. He is not equipped with a compass or any kind of instrument – all he has is a deep and instinctive knowledge of every difference in the snow and ice streaming from below us. His valued vehicle, a legacy of the old Soviet system, pulls our rudimental wooden sleigh. Bold, my assistant, Maria, my interpreter from Yakutsk and I remain glued to our seats for seven long hours. We are racing towards a totally unknown horizon. Our initial enthusiasm at the novelty of the experience of being surrounded by this spectacular landscape with its almost surreal colours and boundless space begins to wane after the first two hours. There is a sudden sense of emergency that changes the atmosphere. Our toes start to go numb. From now on our energy will be concentrated exclusively on attempting to save our limbs by moving them. But Ivan’s encampment is still a five-hour jour–ney away and our minds are easily distracted.

His three-year old son Alexei lives in the camp, along with his 56-year-old mother Zinaida, his 63-year-old father Anufri and Anufri Jr. who is his 24-year-old brother. Sometimes his wife comes down from the village to visit him, along with their eight-month-old-daughter Svetlana. Next month, when the weather becomes milder, they will move back to the tundra with the family.