Russian expansion east from the late sixteenth century imposed fur tribute, settlement, and Orthodox missions. Baptism was often a formality attached to tax relief, and indigenous practice generally continued underneath it; parallel pressure came from Tibetan Buddhism spreading north into Buryatia and Tuva from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, which in places absorbed local spirits and specialists rather than displacing them.
Soviet policy was categorically harsher. From the late 1920s ritual was attacked as backwardness and fraud; drums and costumes were seized, some ending up in museums, practitioners were denounced, taxed as exploiters, arrested, exiled and in numbers killed. Children were removed to boarding schools where indigenous language and practice were suppressed, and state medicine was promoted as the replacement. By the 1960s open practice had largely ceased across much of Siberia. It did not disappear: work in remote herding camps and within families continued quietly, and knowledge passed in private.
After 1991 the revival was rapid and public. Registered shamanic organisations were founded in Tuva, Buryatia and the Sakha Republic, some with premises, fee schedules and formal certification of practitioners. Public rituals resumed at sacred sites, and regional governments have in places supported them as heritage and as a marker of national identity. Overlap with Buddhism and with Tengrism is common, and some practitioners hold both affiliations without difficulty.
How continuous any of this is remains genuinely disputed. Some practitioners trace unbroken family transmission; some reconstruct from published ethnography, which is to say from the writings of the people who suppressed the practice; and Western neo-shamanic material has fed back into the region. Commercial practice for urban Russian and foreign clients is now substantial, and tourism has shaped what is performed in public.
Two things follow. The revival is real and is not the same thing as the tradition recorded a century ago. And the people involved are the ones with standing to decide what counts, which is an argument still going on among them.