In shrinking Soviet towns, Northern Sea Route promise is keeping hope alive | Polarjournal
A sea port in Tiksi photographed in 2019, when Olga Povoroznyuk visited the remote Siberian town. Photo: Olga Povoroznyuk
A sea port in Tiksi photographed in 2019, when Olga Povoroznyuk visited the remote Siberian town. Photo: Olga Povoroznyuk

A research project at the University of Vienna is attempting an, at the moment, difficult task: to conduct anthropological research on the Russian Arctic. Preliminary results show that dreams of the Northern Sea Route are still vivid in the region, even though less than nothing has happened in reality.

The town of Tiksi in the northern part of Russia’s Republic of Sakha (Yakutiya) is home to around 4,000 people. It was established in 1934 during the process of Soviet exploration of the Arctic and had its glory days in the late 1980s when more than 11,000 people lived there. To this day, in spite of the rapid population decline, no settlement lying this far north (71°39′N) has more people living in it.

But because of the harsh climate and a lack of maintenance, its infrastructure and buildings are worn-down and the town itself appears ‘semi-abandoned’.

So, naturally, the people who are left long for the Soviet days when ships from around the world would deliver food and delicacies not available anywhere else in the country; the days when government investments were higher and the means of making a living better.

In the past decade, though, something new has appeared in Tiksi: a hope for the future.

Because, as a consequence of climate change, the promise of the Northern Sea Route connecting Europe with Asia through the Arctic Ocean has arisen. The Russian government plans to use this sea route to reinvigorate its Arctic communities, and these plans have been heard in Tiksi.

“For the last ten years, the Russian government has hyped up the Northern Sea Route and given promises that Tiksi might become an important hub once again. This has led to hopes of revitalisation and a stabilization of the population that are still living there,” said Olga Povoroznyuk, postdoctoral researcher at the University of Vienna, the research coordinator and the Russian study region lead in the research project InfraNorth, which focuses on the role transport infrastructures play in sustaining communities in the Arctic.

A painted history of the Northern Sea Route, photographed in Tiksi in 2019. Photo: Olga Povoroznyuk
A painted history of the Northern Sea Route, photographed in Tiksi in 2019. Photo: Olga Povoroznyuk

A more urbanized Arctic

The InfraNorth project, led by Peter Schweitzer, is divided into three study regions: the North American Arctic, the European Arctic, and the Russian Arctic. As part of the project’s North American study region, the PhD student Katrin Schmid is looking into the role of Nunavut’s transport infrastructure in territorial food sovereignty. Schmid recently talked to Polar Journal AG about the effect of Amazon deliveries in food-insecure communities in Nunavut.

In all three parts of the project, the goal is to understand the effects of large-scale infrastructure projects on the well-being of local communities. But in the Russian part of the project, which Povoroznyuk is heading, one thing is different from the others.

 “The Russian part of the Arctic has been industrialized and urbanized much more and much sooner than the rest of the Arctic, going back to early Soviet times. This changes some of the dynamics there,” she said.

Olga Povoroznyuk is from the northern part of Siberia herself, and started her career there as an ethnologist and, later, an anthropologist connected to the Russian Academy of Sciences. In 2014, with colleagues from the University of Vienna she conceptualized a research project focused on the Baikal-Amur Mainline, a railroad which transformed communities in East Siberia.

In 2015, this project brought her to Vienna, and since then she has been working on projects related to the Arctic and to infrastructure.

“In Tiksi, there is a strong nostalgic memory of the Soviet era with its periods of socio-economic stability and booming infrastructural development. That’s why I believe it’s important to consider infrastructural legacies and path-dependences of the past, in order to better understand the present-day town and its people,” she told Polar Journal AG.

Map showing the InfraNorth study region in the Russian Arctic all the way from Kirkenes in the West and Nome so far East that it's west again. Photo: Alexis Sancho-Reinoso
Map showing the InfraNorth study region in the Russian Arctic all the way from Kirkenes in the west and Nome so far east that it’s west again. Map: Alexis Sancho-Reinoso

After February 2022

The statement above, and most of Olga Povoroznyuk’s knowledge about the sentiments of Tiksi’s inhabitants, is based on previous long-term field work in different parts of the Russian Arctic and Siberia.

In 2019, she had done ‘pre-field work’ on northern Sakha (Yakutiya) and was ready to start the InfraNorth project proper in 2020. Unfortunately, that was halted by the Covid-19 pandemic, and eventually postponed until 2022. But in February of that year, as a consequence of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, it became almost impossible for Western-based researchers to work in Russia, and further fieldwork had to be suspended until further notice.

This forced Povoroznyuk and her colleagues in the InfraNorth project to be creative. Originally, they had planned to conduct field work in eight different communities along the Northern Sea Route, but this now had to be reworked.

In the end, Povoroznyuk as an individual researcher decided to maintain her focus on the Arctic maritime infrastructure, seaport expansion projects and the role of the Northern Sea Route. But now she also included her new field materials (such as observations, focus groups, and interviews with residents and experts) from Kirkenes, Norway, and Nome, Alaska – two coastal communities that have been affected by the recent geopolitical changes. She combines these new ethnographic data with her earlier research findings from Tiksi, with analysis of media reports, policy documents, and discussions with colleagues who are still able to be on the ground in Russia.

“My interest has remained more or less the same throughout the life of the InfraNorth project, although the topic has been reformulated and the geographical scope of my research expanded to include non-Russian field sites,” she said.

Ship breaking yard in Tiksi photographed in 2019. Photo: Olga Povoroznyuk
Ship breaking yard in Tiksi photographed in 2019. Photo: Olga Povoroznyuk

Important for social relations

In Tiksi, Povoroznyuk made an important observation, and one that she believes is consistent throughout the Russian Arctic and even in Nome and Kirkenes: That there this a discrepancy between the expectations for the future and the reality of the present.

 “The promise of infrastructure is important for social relations too,” she said.

“In Nome, for instance, there are mobilizations of protests against the new construction, while in Kirkenes, they have to completely reconsider their plans for the future, as they were previously closely connected to transportation of oil and gas from West Siberia,” she said.

“And in Tiksi, everyone hopes that the Northern Sea Route will bring the same type of development as in the era of Soviet prosperity. So far, this hasn’t been happening, though, and it probably won’t be happening in the near future,” she said.

A passenger sea port in Tiksi photographed in 2019. Photo: ©Olga Povoroznyuk
A passenger sea port in Tiksi photographed in 2019. Photo: ©Olga Povoroznyuk

Difficult without access to the field

In fact, in some ways, developments in Tiksi have gone backwards and not forwards, since its residents first started hearing about modernization of the Northern Sea Route more than ten years ago.

Aside from the military base and its accompanying personnel, which is still well supplied, the population of Tiksi has been steadily declining, Povoroznyuk explained. Shrinking local economy and withdrawal of state subsidies in supply of northern remote communities, has led to increasingly fewer deliveries of goods via the Northern Sea Route.

This, in turn, means that most goods have to be delivered through other means. During the summer months, this happens by river barges, but in winter only the unreliable ‘winter roads’ allows Tiksi (and most of Russia’s other Arctic communities) a steady supply of goods.

“In Tiksi, the promises of modernization have remained primarily on paper. There have been no physical changes in seaport infrastructure, nor in urban infrastructure,” Olga Povoroznyuk said.

“We are now trying to find out how this lack of infrastructural development, and the changed reality after February 2022, affects people’s visions on the future. But it is difficult to do without access to the field. As anthropologists, we need to talk to people and to understand their perspectives,” Olga Povoroznyuk said.

Ole Ellekrog, Polar Journal AG

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