Sakha

The Sakha, known to their neighbours as the Yakuts, are a Turkic people of the middle and lower Lena River in northern Siberia. Their ancestors were pastoralist tribes of the Baikal and upper Yenisei region. Pushed north by Buryat and Mongol expansion from the twelfth century, they settled along the Lena and blended with indigenous Tungusic and Paleo-Siberian hunters.

In the taiga they bred hardy Yakutian horses and cattle. In the 1620s Muscovite Cossacks reached the Lena, built Yakutsk and imposed the yasak fur tribute; Sakha revolts between 1634 and 1642 were crushed, and smallpox and war cut the population by an estimated seventy percent by the 1680s.

By the 1820s nearly all Sakha were formally Russian Orthodox, though they kept many Tengri customs. The region became a major source of furs and later gold for the Russian Empire.