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This paper investigates the socio-economic changes that took place during the Soviet era and in the 1990s among arctic ethnies of the Kola Peninsula (the Sámi, Komi and Nenets). Between 1991 and 1994 a Finnish-Russian team went on field expeditions to remote reindeer-herding villages. Ethnographic data was collected according to the model of the so-called human ecology theory. The regrouping of peoples from multi-ethnic villages led to the emergence of a common arctic culture in which every people preserved its own identity.