A Different North

Chukotka is Russia’s most distant and most isolated territory. Separated from Moscow by nine time zones, it lies 4,000 kilometres north of the Pacific railhead at Vladivostok. This was the last fragment of eastern Asia to be added to the Russian empire, and only during the 1950s were the Soviets able to effectively colonize the territory and collectivize its hunters, trappers and herders. Until that time Chukotka was occupied primarily by Chukchi, a people who obtained their livelihood from immense herds of reindeer that they shepherded across the Arctic tundra. A scatter of coastal Eskimo villages provided access to the marine resources of the Bering Sea, and to trade connections with their Alaskan relatives across the narrow channel of the Bering Strait. Until separated by the Cold War, Chukotka was more closely linked to Alaska than to the rest of Russia. Half the size of Alaska, Chukotka is an environmental reflection of its eastern neighbour, a land of Arctic tundra rolling inland from icy coasts to the northern edge of the great Siberian forests.

This isolated region (an autonomous okrug in Russian administrative terminology, a district with limited self-governing powers somewhat like those of Canada’s northern territories) is the setting for Niobe Thompson’s study. Thompson is an anthropologist with previous experience in Arctic Canada, who was invited to Chukotka through a chance meeting with a Cambridge friend who had joined the entourage of the newly elected governor of the district. Between 2002 and 2007 he was in a unique position to witness the wholly unexpected transformation of the nation’s poorest and most distressed region into a showpiece of the New Russia. Settlers on the Edge: Identity and Modernization on Russia’s Arctic Frontier is a description of the political, social and psychological factors that accompanied this revolution. It is also a fascinating historical account of Soviet society, and of the chaos of the 1990s resulting from the collapse of Soviet power, as seen from the most remote region of the Soviet Union.

Anthropology is distinguished from the other social sciences by its emphasis on “participant observation.” Rather than study documents and statistics based on polls and formal interviews, the anthropologist tries to live in the society being studied and gather information by observing daily life or by asking questions of friends and acquaintances. This type of work is particularly appropriate to research on small-scale societies, and has traditionally been associated with the study of “aboriginal” peoples. I have argued elsewhere that the discipline of anthropology is largely responsible for defining aboriginal peoples and their cultures as patently different from those of other human societies. (1) I see this false dichotomy as the direct intellectual progeny of the Victorians’ primitive man, a theory that developed in its turn from earlier notions of the noble savage. In my view, the adoption of this concept by the social and political ideologies of the past century can be blamed for many of the problems encountered by Canada’s First Peoples and similar indigenous societies in other colonial nations.

Although there is no scarcity of anthropological research on the way in which the Chukchi, Eskimos and other indigenous inhabitants have adapted to changes brought by the past decades, anthropologists up to now have ignored the ethnic Russians who comprise more than half the population of Chukotka. Russian settlers form their own small-scale society, identify themselves as Chukotkans or northerners as well as (or in some cases rather than) Russians, and were forced to develop their own distinctive means of adaptation and survival following the collapse of the Soviet state. This book focuses on the Chukotkan Russians, how they met the storms of social and economic change that swept the region over the past 20 years and how the vision of their own identity shifted in response to adaptive necessity.

The intensive settlement of Chukotka by Russian immigrants began during the 1950s, when Stalin’s strategy of northern development through prison labour gave way to a policy of attracting willing workers from central Russia. Good jobs at high wages brought a stream of southerners to the mines, smelters and seaports opening across the North, just as they did in northern Canada during the same period. Although Thompson occasionally notes comparisons between northern development in Russia and Canada, he does not explore the striking temporal parallels. The surge of northern development during the 1950s suggests that differences between the social and economic theory of Soviet and Canadian governments was less important than was the availability of technology developed during the Second World War. Efficient radio equipment revolutionized both communication and transportation in the North, while the most successful bush planes ever built, the Antonov AN-2 and Canadian de Havilland’s Beaver and Otter, all came off the assembly lines between 1947 and 1951.

Two other factors influenced the inter-hemispheric coincidence in northern development during the 1950s. One was the Cold War, during which the Arctic region became a venue for launching and detecting nuclear strikes by intercontinental bombers, and later by missiles. The other factor was literary. In Arctic Canada, northern economic opportunity was enhanced by the romance of Arctic adventure fired by the books of Farley Mowat and other writers of the North. Sherrill Grace describes the Arctic presented in mid 20th-century Canadian novels as “a space for virile, white male adventure in a harsh but magnificent, unspoiled landscape waiting to be discovered, charted, painted, and photographed as if for the first time. It is a place of masculine romance, offering challenge and escape … to those special few who can go North … and return safely to tell the tale.” Literary historian Yuri Slezkine describes a similar Soviet literature of the time, books in which “dozens of orphaned fictional youngsters stampeded out of the soulless old capitals to a land where the snow never melted and where men kept their word.” These were the entusiasti, the young people of the 1950s and ’60s who set out to tame the northern wilderness and bring socialism to the natives of the tundra and taiga. Their offspring, together with the descendants of Stalin’s prisoners who stayed in the North, look on their parents and grandparents as the old-timer aristocracy of northern settlement.

Thompson elegantly describes the system of “managed scarcity” that was used to attract northern immigrants while the Soviet system fossilized into the disillusioned decades of Brezhnev’s leadership. Northerners not only received wages double or more than those of central Russia, but also had access to a wide range of goods and benefits not available to those who remained in the central Russian “mainland.” The doctors, teachers, miners, administrators, mechanics, technicians and operators of heavy equipment who came north during these decades formed an elite society that soon outnumbered the indigenous population and easily maintained a superior and economically privileged status. They saw themselves as representing the modern world, bringing enlightenment to the natives and dragging them into the late 20th century. Most thought of themselves as temporary northerners, staying only until they had accumulated a financial nest egg or enough to retire to the mainland with means far beyond those of their southern compatriots.

Having set the historical scene, the author introduces the first of two sudden and unexpected transformations in the Chukotkan way of life. When the Soviet Union collapsed in the early 1990s it was quickly apparent that most of the economic enterprises in Chukotka were not viable and that the central government could no longer afford to maintain the subsidies that had supported the economy of the region. Government funding transfers disappeared, paycheques stopped arriving and airline tickets suddenly became both scarce and unaffordable to most. The savings of Russian settlers vanished as inflation increased by 10,000 percent, and plans to return to Russia as wealthy citizens or secure retirees suddenly disappeared.

This was the Chukotka that I saw during the summer of 1995 when I spent several weeks on an archaeological project near the Bering Strait. The drive from the airport to the capital city of Anadyr followed the estuary of the Anadyr River, and in the rainy afternoon the shore was lined with small fishing parties netting salmon. The town itself was a grid of the ubiquitous five-storey concrete apartment blocks that housed most Soviet citizens, but there was little obvious work being done. The statue of Lenin in the main square had been splashed with red paint that nobody had bothered to remove. By 1995 many of those who remained in Anadyr continued to perform jobs that provided paycheques only occasionally if at all, but supplemented this work by fishing, hunting and gathering mushrooms and berries for food. There was deep concern that supplies of heating fuel would be inadequate to last through the coming winter, and communities in northern Canada and Alaska collected money to send food and clothing to the people of Chukotka who were facing potential starvation.

Thompson describes, and illustrates with specific case histories, the variety of means by which Russian settlers attempted to deal with the situation of sudden economic collapse. For the governing class of administrators with responsibility for state property, asset stripping provided the quickest and surest route to personal wealth and a secure future on the Russian mainland. The system of patronage and corruption that developed around the governor’s office became the focus of social and economic organization. The new atmosphere of free enterprise encouraged local entrepreneurs, ranging from the man who established a greenhouse to produce local vegetables to the much more common businesses of bootlegging and distilling semi-toxic vodka. Thompson describes a family that developed a forest fire fighting contract into the economic and political control of a small interior settlement, and another Russian who joined a Chukchi partner as a commercial hunter selling meat and other products of the tundra. In 1995 there were rumours of small private gold mines operating with slave labour. Among the more fortunate settlers were those who had married into or formed other alliances with native families. Although the breakdown of the state fur and reindeer farms caused considerable distress to native communities, the knowledge of local resources gave rural inhabitants more options in dealing with economic collapse.

Thompson describes how Russians who remained in Chukotka found it increasingly difficult to see themselves as “modernizers” bringing a superior way of life to the natives, and self-image began to shift toward that of the “northerner” or the native. My memory of a berry-picking expedition on a brilliant August day tends to support his analysis. The warm tundra was a garden of blueberries, crowberries, bearberries, bake apples and mushrooms nestled among the soft knee-high forest. To my Russian companions tundra was personified as a form of gigantic being, generous but also potentially dangerous, an entity that required and deserved a sprinkled libation of food and vodka before we ate and drank. Chukchi stories of the giant who created the local landscape, and whose hat formed the single island in Anadyr Bay, had been transformed into Russian folk tales.

Thompson’s own experience was of a very different Chukotka, one that originated in 2000 with the election of Roman Abramovich as governor of the district. Abramovich, who resigned from the governorship only a few months ago, is one of the youngest of the oligarchs whose wealth was originally based on obtaining control of state enterprises during the privatization of industry in the Yeltsin years of the early 1990s. Abramovich’s motives in choosing to serve as governor are still unclear. Thompson notes the tax advantages that accrued to his oil empire and the political security gained by remaining far from Moscow, but it still seems incongruous that the man who owns Chelsea FC and several Mediterranean super-yachts was also a public servant in Russia’s most distant and isolated territory. Whatever his reasons, in 2000 Abramovich brought shiploads of food supplies from Seattle and flew thousands of Chukotkan children for their first holidays at Black Sea resorts. Thompson reports that since then he has invested the equivalent of more than US$2 billion in Chukotka. Anadyr now has a shopping mall, cinema complex, casino, hockey rink, fitness centre, even brew pubs and a massive log cathedral. Canadian construction teams have rebuilt isolated villages using the house plans and building techniques used in Canadian Arctic communities.

What interests Thompson the anthropologist is the effect of this transformation on the society and the self-image of the settlers who survived the 1990s in Chukotka. The people who once saw themselves as bringing Soviet modernity to the Arctic are now faced with a small army of new modernizers wearing jeans and designer stubble, their mobile phones in continual contact with Moscow and abroad, forever travelling to and from the airport, and more than willing to put in long days to complete a project. To these newcomers, the old settlers are frozen relics of a bygone age, incapable of understanding either the technology or the work ethic of the new century. Their sentimental attachment to obsolete methods and the remnants of the Soviet era is an affront to modernity.

In 1995 a young Russian woman told me with great pride how the House of Culture in Anadyr had been built by volunteers. Each evening after a full day on the job, her mother and other entusiasti of the 1950s had gathered to work long into the cold night, mixing concrete by hand and laying blocks so that the town would have a library and a concert hall. When Thompson reports that the recent decision to demolish the building was met with local resistance, I have little difficulty imagining the depth of feeling involved. The Soviet settlers, who once saw themselves as the vanguard of the modern world, look on the new modernizers with incomprehension and take refuge in a self-image that is increasingly rooted in local knowledge of the environment and culture of the Arctic.

Thompson writes clearly and well. His occasional brief excursions into social science theory betray the academic origins of the book, but are merely annoying interruptions in a compelling narrative. This is an important story telling how a contemporary people dealt with events beyond their experience and control, and it gives us reason to consider how we would behave in similar circumstances.

Notes