Professor, Dr.Hab. A.A. Gorelov¹
Professor, Dr.Hab. S.N. Nikitin¹
Professor, Dr.Hab. V.P. Sushchenko¹
Candidate N.N. Nikiforov^2
1 St. Petersburg State Polytechnic University, St. Petersburg
² North-Eastern Federal University named after M.K. Ammosov, Yakutsk

Keywords: hapsagay wrestling, ysyakh, fighting techniques, heroic epos "Olonkho".

Introduction. From the earliest times wrestling as a fight, as the art of hand-to-hand combat was one of the main components of soldiers’ training. Many nations regarded wrestling as a martial art. Since extreme antiquity people have been seeking, finding, accumulating and passing to his offspring different ways of combat that ensured his advantage over opponents. Accidentally found movements turned into fighting techniques; they, in turn, were reinforced by all kinds of tactical tricks and ploys that improved from one generation to another, creating the rudiments of national kinds of wrestling.

One of such kinds, that have reached us from antiquity, is the Yakut national wrestling hapsagay, which literally means “a competition in agility”. It is popular in all cities and regions of the Republic of Sakha (Yakutia). Children become familiar with this national kind of martial art from an early age. As a kind of martial art it has been one of the basic components of the art of war for many centuries. At the same time, despite the fact that the hapsagay wrestling has been included both in the All-Union, and then in the All-Russian sports classification for quite a long time, theory and practice of combat sports have no scientific evidence about its origin and patterns of development.  

The purpose of the study is to generalize, abstract and specify the accumulated analytical material on the formation and development of the Yakut national wrestling hapsagay.

Results and discussion. The most intensive development of the hapsagay wrestling took place in the XV–XVI centuries, the so-called period of “kyrgys uyete” – “the age of battles and massacre” [6, 13]. Numerous stories, national legends of the peoples of Sakha have preserved information about interpatrimonial conflicts, battles of heroes, sanguinary wars and participants of these historic events which are based on real events in the life of the people. The causes of conflict included blood feud, personal insults, take-over of cattle and women. Naturally, it was in this period when training of male population of a clan or a tribe in the art of war was of great importance. Old and experienced warriors taught the art of war to boys since childhood, paying special attention to developing agility. D.P. Korkin, a well-known researcher and popularizer of the Yakut national wrestling hapsagay, describes the training of a warrior in the following way. In the era of “kyrgys uyete” boys were taught archery, swordplay, using a pike, wrestling and riding a horse since they were 3 years old. Already at a young age a child who was to grow into a bootur (a warrior hero), was taught to dodge blows and to be agile; they would teach him by throwing burning coals at him while he was naked. As the child got older, the coals were replaced first with wooden arrows, and then with combat ones. By the age of 18 a young man was to be able to hit a pastern with an arrow from a big distance, dodge blows of a warrior armed with a bare palm (a knife on a long stick). It was only when the young man successfully passed all the tests that he would be allowed to learn the tricks of the hapsagay wrestling [10].

The era of “kyrgys uyete” is also characterized by the fact that “war and the organization of war become regular functions of people’s lives” [23], which contributed to the unification of healthy male population into certain unions. Rapprochement of clans that had been separated by economic reasons was accounted for first of all by the need to jointly protect themselves from sudden attacks of enemies and to minimize the possibilities of emergence of disorders. Connections between clans were strengthened by holding symbolic celebrations and ceremonies. Ysyakh, an ancestral extant festival, is one of them. There were different reasons for holding an ysyakh: to celebrate a peace treaty, a wedding, the summer solstice, etc. Games, horse racing and archery were all indispensable parts of ysyakhs of the old times. However, the main elements of the festival were fights of wrestlers that essentially demonstrated the readiness to protect their clan from takeover attempts of the enemy and also helped to define the degree of influence of each warrior in the clan union. Furthermore, in time of peace thanks to this part of the ysyakh festival it became possible to carry out a kind of review of warriors’ readiness for a war, as well as to define the degree of influence of each of them in the clan union [19, 20]. Winners of a hapsagay tournament were eloquently and poetically praised in folklore.

Description of solemn and unusual rituals related to holding fights has reached the present days. For example, wrestlers were carefully hidden from each other before the fight. They were secretly taken to the fight venue, and were led onto the grassy carpet being covered with skins that protected them from the evil eye. Just before the start of the fight the covers were taken off by a command of the “judge”, and the fighters, having quickly run into the middle of the circle, began the fight [5]. According to the sources describing those times, the hapsagay wrestling contained quite tough techniques that were intended primarily for single combat with an enemy. Naturally, there were no strict regulations with regards to hand-to-hand combat during entertainment events either. This is evidenced by a legend about how during the ysyakh festival organized by Degen Toyon, Yakut king, legendary athlete, Mayagatta Burt Khaara, had a remarkable victory over one of his opponents whose arm he tore off, and that resulted in the man’s death [11]. This evidence, taken from the book “Elleyada” by G.V. Ksenofontov, a famous researcher of the Yakut history [11], also indicates that wrestling occupied one of the leading positions with the people of Sakha since ancient times. This is confirmed by the results of historical research of the art of war of Yakuts of V.M. Nikiforov [13] who not only revealed the high significance of martial arts in the cultural heritage of the peoples of Sakha, but also showed the substantial part of the training of warriors. This training was focused mainly on the ability to use all kinds of combat weapons and all the guards against it, on the development of the ability to combat without weapons for a long time. At the same time in the training system that existed then for warriors a special attention was paid to fights using fighting techniques and bare-knuckle boxing. According to Ya.S. Syrovatsky [20], who studied the ethnopedagogical basis for the national combat sport Sakha hapsagay, as the arsenal of techniques increased, and the ways of mastering them became more complicated, it was necessary to allocate into separate groups the striking technique and the purely wrestling ones. This way, gradually getting cleared from the “fist attribute”, hapsagay becomes the kind of combat that reached our days. Holds of the opponent’s body and clothing were almost unlimited; grassing, reaps, tripping were encouraged, as well as various techniques aimed at unbalancing the opponent. As time went by, the sphere of their operation expanded, too. They were widely used for educating the younger generation, for the formation of volitional qualities and communication skills, and of course as entertainment. Such multi-functionality met a variety of social needs that ensured stable operation of wrestling competitions during a long time. This, in turn, has led to a change in the scheme of functioning of hand-to-hand fighting competitions. The evolution of the content of martial arts itself followed in line with the limitations and exclusions of techniques and actions that were most harmful and dangerous to the health of combat athletes. 

For centuries the people of Sakha accumulated the positive experience of using the hapsagay wrestling in daily life. Techniques and actions were permanently improved, the rules of the competitions were polished. A continuous process of designing new techniques improved by all sorts of tricks and ploys that constituted a kind of “golden reserve” of the strongest hapsagay wrestlers that was kept secret and descended to the younger ones was underway. The first national researcher of this martial art, the founder of the modern school of the hapsagay wrestling in the Republic of Sakha, D.P. Korkin, who left behind a huge amount of research data relating to pedagogical, psychological, biomedical, ethno-sociological and historical aspects, believed that not every wrestler that has a good training in other martial arts can successfully compete with a well-trained hapsagay wrestler. This is primarily due to the fact that the techniques of the latter are imbued with deceptive movements, feints accompanied by lightning-fast and swift-passing attacks that lead to unexpected defeats of the opponent [10].

By the beginning of the XX century the Yakut wrestling hapsagay has acquired the features that characterize it as a moral, spiritual and intellectual kind of martial arts. Professor N.K. Shamaev, a famous Yakut scientist, an ethno-educator, an expert on national customs and rituals, a researcher of moral and family physical education, compared the hapsagay wrestling with the Eastern martial art of aikido. We cannot but agree with his opinion, as compared with almost all kinds of combat sports in hapsagay a fight ends when one of the wrestlers touches the ground with any part of his body other than feet. It has no submission holds, no keeping the opponent in the par terre position and the prone position for a long time. Hardly any aggression is shown in this kind of martial art, and the fight itself looks more like a game of two partners competing in agility and speed [22].

The thesis of Ya.S. Syrovatsky is of particular interest in the context of the values of the Yakut national wrestling hapsagay accumulated by the people of the Republic of Sakha [20]. Along with a retrospective analysis of the emergence of hapsagay it is also devoted to the study of the great spiritual masterpiece of the Yakut people – the heroic epos “Olonkho” that can be placed in line with such works of the world epos as the Greek “The Iliad” and “The Odyssey”, Russian byliny, Kyrgyz “Manas”, Karelian and Finnish “The Kalevala”, Armenian “Daredevils of Sassoun”. Studying the stories of the heroic exploits of the ancient heroes of “Olonkho”, Ya.S. Syrovatsky proves based on analytical and inductive generalization [1-6, 8-9, 11-13, 15, 17, 19] that this kind of martial arts emerged and developed in the harsh conditions of the north-eastern region of the Eurasian continent. The author of hapsagay – the people of Sakha – presented the world with an original, distinctive, unique culture of a combat sport that reflects the entire palette of national values and traditions formed over many thousands of years of living in constant touch with the extreme environmental factors.  

The golden age of the hapsagay wrestling, its recognition as a combat sport both in the Soviet Union and abroad are related to the name of D.P. Korkin, an outstanding trainer who brought fame to the Republic of Sakha not only within the country, but also worldwide. In the 70s of the XX century the world sports elite came to know the famous school of Korkin under which such renowned freestyle wrestlers as Roman Dmitriev, Pavel Pinigin, Alexander Ivanov, Vyacheslav Karpov, Nikolai Zakharov were raised. D.P. Korkin achieved outstanding results widely using fighting techniques of the hapsagay wrestling in training of the Yakut freestyle wrestlers, competently including its tactical approaches into the system of their sports training. According to A.I., Honored Master of Sports, World Champion and Olympic Champion, he managed “… to restore the former interest to folk tradition and build a bridge from it to the modern sport” [16]. He imparted the warmth of his heart to thousands of boys, and his mind whetted their appetite for combat sports. Hundreds of them became masters of sports, tens won the titles of youth, junior and senior national champions.

An immeasurable achievement of D.P. Korkin is not only in the wrestling school for gifted children from all over Yakutia he opened, but also that he managed to make great fighters out of these boys, with their own unique wrestling style. Being fearless of challenging obstacles and difficulties, scrupulously proving his grounds, he boldly took up expanding into the unknown paths that lead to the disclosure of secrets of the national tricks of the hapsagay wrestling. His innovations with the technical and tactical techniques of this kind of martial arts provided such a powerful impulse to the formation of the training system of wrestlers of various styles and role specializations that the entire sports world learnt about the small Yakut village of Churapcha [16].

Unfortunately, after D.P. Korkin passed away in 1984, the research work on the study of the essence, technique, tactics, psychology and other components of the hapsagay wrestling narrowed down to the study of the heritage of this remarkable expert [16, 18, 21]. An exception is the scientific research of V.T. Nikolaev (1945 – 2010), an enthusiast and promoter of hapsagay, a well-known public and political figure of the Republic of Sakha, who published a fundamental work in 2010 which is an attempt to systematize the philosophy and internal content of this kind of national wrestling. The book is based mainly on essays and stories about the history and the best hapsagay wrestlers of different times. For the first time it introduces sequences of frames of some hapsagay techniques performed by the author together with V. Struchkov-Abyi Baasaka, one of the masters of the Yakut wrestling, and an attempt is made to describe some of them [14].

Unfortunately, the author’s terminology used in the description of the techniques is quite difficult for experts not only because it is presented in the Yakut language, but also from the standpoint of the difficulty of perception of the translated text. The meaning of the Russian translation of the terms does not fully convey the detailed performance of one or another technique. Besides, it is not always possible to grasp the subtle kinesiological implication of the sequence of frames of a technique that has no step-by-step textual interpretation of the wrestler’s motor actions. However, a significant contribution of this work to the promotion of hapsagay in the Republic of Sakha should be noted, and its future translations into Russian and English will enable experts and trainers of different trends in the art of wrestling, national and internationally accepted kinds of combat sports to continue exploring its subtle mechanisms. The same overview can be given to the book of G.G. Androsov “The Yakut wrestling hapsagay” [1], published in the Yakut language 50 years ago.

Conclusion. The Yakut national wrestling hapsagay has a deep ethnic background. Currently, it is one of the most popular sports, which involves thousands of boys from the regions and cities of the Republic of Sakha. Since 1932 this type of martial arts is included in the All-Union, and then in the All-Russian sports classification. Hundreds of masters of sports, tens of thousands of athletes of different ranking have been trained during the existence of this kind of martial arts. Sports trainers in this sport are being trained in North-Eastern Federal University. At the same time, studies of the content and technology of the Yakut national wrestling hapsagay were suspended in the Republic of Sakha, resulting in the shortage of educational, methodological and theoretical literature, revealing the specific features of training of hapsagay wrestlers of different levels. Currently, the basic techniques of this kind of martial arts are described fragmentarily and based on the research material of D.P. Korkin, Honored Coach of the USSR, obtained by him over 40 years ago. He described the characteristics of just the main groups of techniques and actions that do not help understand the depth and subtlety of each technique, its kinesiological essence, and the underlying mechanisms of deceptive movements, tricks and feints. In addition, the tools of a trainer working with either a junior hapsagay wrestler or an elite fighter, are based only on his own experience that he gained during his personal sports career. While in other kinds of wrestling there can be found textbooks presenting a particular algorithm of the step-by-step training of wrestlers, describing fighting techniques and introducing them as sequences of frames, teaching materials on the hapsagay wrestling to help the trainer carry out a targeted process of training hapsagay wrestlers are actually lacking.

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Corresponding author: alexagorr@yandex.ru