Page 70 - Журнал Sozvezdye Review - «СОЗВЕЗДИЕ» #38
P. 70
extractive industries of the North relied on prison
labour. What Soviet historiography defined as indus-
trialization didn’t exist in the North at the time. Lat-
er, in the post-war years, when technologies started
to be used in the North on a much larger scale, Cen-
tral Russia ceased to refer to its further development
as industrialization. Hence this paradox of the North
and the Arctic falling out of the scope of Soviet in-
dustrialization studies.
There is, however, another explanation. In the
North, and especially the Arctic, any development
related to natural resource extraction risks being in-
terrupted for reasons of depletion or market con-
ditions deterioration. In conditions of economic
instability and temporality, the triumph of industri-
alization is a thing too volatile in peripheral spaces.
Can anything that gets started to be abandoned or
interrupted be even called a process?
At the same time, it was precisely the Soviet ex-
perience of mining in the North and the Arctic that
has shown the world that sustainable industrial de-
velopment is possible in these climatically and eco-
nomically disadvantaged areas. Accomplished and
enlightening as it appears, this experience gives
ground for “stretching” industrialization to encom-
pass also the Russian Arctic, and thereby erase its
narrow interpretation as a historically short period
of the 1920s–1930s. The USSR can be called the gen-
uine place of Arctic industrialization.
Phenomenon of manufacture
As the Russian Arctic was being swept by rapid
industrialization, this process developed its main fea-
tures as distinct from those marking, for example,
the more stable import substitution industrialization
of Latin America or the new industrialization of the
Asia’s tigers – South Korea, Hong Kong, Taiwan and
Singapore.
At the core of the Arctic industrialization is ex-
pansion of extractive industry into new spaces. This
expansion follows the “surge – plateauing – decline”
cycle. The challenge of resource depletion – either for
natural reasons (mineral deposit is exhausted) or due
to non-natural factors (sharp decline in global mar-
kets) – is a threat to the constructed infrastructures
that can put further deployment on hold or stop it
altogether. Therefore, the Soviet policy for the Arc-
tic industry was to quickly reach production ceiling
and to hold onto the reigns for as long as possible – my
maintaining the rigorous ‘extraction-growth’ bal-
ance planning.
But it would be wrong to reduce the Arctic in-
dustrialization solely to extractive industry. The in-
dustrialization of the Arctic is a multidimensional
industrial and social phenomenon that builds on
large-scale resource extraction, deployment of indus-
Фундаментальной trial and social infrastructures and, consequently, of
local manufactures, which sometimes even entered
особенностью арктической foreign markets (as was the case of Nokia in northern
индустриализации в целом Finland). The process of industrialization also incor-
является ее открытый porates readjusting of indigenous lifestyles that have
existed here for centuries (in the USSR, this readjust-
характер – в том смысле, что ment took the form of collectivization).
добываемые здесь природные In the European countries, industrialization built
ресурсы всегда обращены на on the domestic market needs, originating from pro-
SOZVEZDYE #38 внешние рынки to-industrial artisanal crafts and rural trades that
had gradually evolved into light urban industries. It
One fundamental feature of the relied on human resources, on learning from each
other the sought-after trades, on skills and techni-
наследие industrialization in the Arctic cal competencies that were available to medieval Eu-
legacy is its open nature – in the sense rope’s “intellectual nomads” – ore miners, printing
that the natural resources that masters, builders, and wandering artisans who could
be found in industrially developed places and were
are extracted here have always members of the urban craft guilds. Gradually, in the
been oriented towards external course of decades, the European countries’ urban in-
68 markets dustries evolved into national industries. Machining
was a novelty and took the local markets long time to
