Arctic regions are central to Russian ideas of state sovereignty and military power; empire and resource ownerships; and heroic conquest. Images of intrepid explorers bringing knowledge, enlightenment, and security to the tundra cover newspapers, adorn postage stamps, and fill museums and libraries.

From the 1920s, with Lenin’s direct support, the Bolsheviks sent scientists northward to query the frigid landscape. Stalin forced the pace of settling, research and exploitation of Far North in part with Gulag prisoners. And in the postwar years, Soviet leaders expanded their control of the Arctic, establishing petrochemical and other extractive industries. They finished the process of subjugating indigenous people, many of them reindeer herders, and their lands, to state economic plans, built cities dedicated to resource extraction, and in process they destroyed local cultures and the environment. The Russian state also brought the peaceful and military atom northward, accelerating the “nuclearization” of the region.

The economic and military presence of the Russia state in the Arctic was threatened by the collapse of the USSR and persistent economic and political crises in the 1990s. Under Vladimir Putin the polar north has again assumed mythic meaning for Russia. Russian leaders recognize the Arctic as site of huge natural gas and oil reserves; of wealthy deposits of platinum, copper, and nickel; and for its central place in planning for conventional and nuclear war against imagined enemies.

This lecture will explore the surprising continuities in Arctic imaginaries and realities in the Soviet and post-Soviet periods that have forced Russia to commit to an unsustainable and destabilizing Arctic policy.