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Arctic mirrors; Russia and the small peoples of the North – Yuri Slezkine
Peter the Great’s orders in 1710
Find their seductive false god idols and burn them with fire and axe them and destroy their heathen temples, and build chapels instead of those temples and put up holy icons, and baptise these Ostyaks …. And if some Ostyaks show themselves contrary to our great sovereign’s decree, they will be punished by death

The Shaman’s coat – Anna Reid
A Ukrainian priest, Grigoriy Novitsky, wrote an account of the three-year campaign. The Khant, he recorded, fought, fled, tearfully pleaded that their wives and children be spared baptism, or 'covered their ears with their hands, like vipers'. They were especially distressed at the destruction of their fetishes, which they hid or tried to bribe the Russians to leave alone. By the end of the expedition, Novitsky claimed, he and his colleagues had made 40,000 converts.
'All idols, all soulless wooden gods and disgusting places of worship were ruined and burned. And all these idols fell as if struck by a fatal sickness. They vanished like burned trees”

Arctic mirrors; Russia and the small peoples of the North – Yuri Slezkine
A priest’s report
In the last year of 1747, in the months of April and May, I beat the new Christian, Ostyak Fedor Senkin, with a whip, because he married off his daughter . . . during the first week of Lent. I also beat his son-in-law with a whip, because he buried his deceased son himself, outside the church and without the knowledge of the priest . . . I also beat the widow Marfa and her son Kozma with a whip . . . because they kept in their tent a small stone idol, to whom they brought sacrifices . . . and I broke the said idol with an axe in front of an Ostyak gathering and threw the pieces in all directions