Page 71 - Журнал Sozvezdye Review - «СОЗВЕЗДИЕ» #38

test before they started using it for the manufacture
of consumer goods intended for the external mar-
kets.
But, the Arctic was a completely different story.
Here, industrialization began much later; it started
forcefully, by way of ultra-fast pushing of the eco-
nomic activities. Oriented towards external mar-
kets, it relied on large-scale labor mobilizations,
with workforce supplied from the metropolis. What
gave additional impetus to the industrialization of
the Arctic was the favorable conditions on commod-
ity markets, political independence (Greenland), de-
fense considerations (USSR – Russia) and other rea-
sons. Notably, there hadn’t been any centuries-old
premises or background for the industrialization to
start here.
The way industrialization unfolded in the Arctic
was fundamentally different from the classical path-
way it followed in the rest of the USSR. Unlike the
heavy manufacturing – which used the labor and the
money of the countryside and led to massive forma-
tion of the working class as farmers were being uni-
formly “remoulded and recast” by the emerging ma-
chine industries – the Arctic industrialization owes
its birth mainly to the urban and rural population of
Central Russia, whose prisoners were forcibly relo-
cated to the North and the Arctic to be used as work-
force for new industries.
At the same time, it would be wrong to say that
earlier Arctic communities didn’t engage in econom-
ic activities. The early precursors of the Arctic in-
dustrialization include monastic trades. For exam-
ple, the Monastery of Cyrill of White Lake owned
fishing grounds that stretched from the White Sea to
Moscow. Fishing and saltworks were the main means
of subsistence of the 16th/17th-century Solovetsky
Monastery. But, nowhere in Northern Russia did mo-
nastic trade create towns around them – this makes
it fundamentally different from the Soviet Arctic in-
dustrialization, the latter relying on urbanization
and the hundreds of small urban towns it had built.

Open nature

One fundamental feature of the industrialization
in the Arctic is its open nature – in the sense that the
natural resources that are extracted here have always
been oriented towards external markets. This was
true even when the Soviet nation remained closed to
the outside world. Taxi drivers in Naryan-Mar still
cherish the memory of the direct flights from Nary- nearly never centered around the traditional econ-
an-Mar to China, operated in Soviet times to export omy of indigenous people. Due to its radically new
the local produce to the People’s Republic of China and explosive nature, each cycle of the Arctic indus-
within the framework of bilateral USSR – PRC trade trial development is always a highly risky venture:
agreements. Sudden advance can be followed by no less sudden
The openness of the industry and of the Arctic collapse. This has been repeatedly shown even by
industrialization implies reliance on the local in- the area’s recent economic history. The author hap-
frastructure facilities. In the Arctic, such facilities pened to visit some of the abandoned single-indus-
are ports. It is ports that the Arctic industrialization try fishing and mining settlements in Magadan
owes its openness to. Unlike in Europe and the USA, Oblast and saw ample evidence of the Arctic in-
where the dependence of early industrialization on dustrialization following the life rhythm of its core
sea and river ports has been overcome, the Arctic natural resources – unlike “mainland industrializa-
industries remain strongly dependent on ports for tion”, whose progress has for decades been contin-
want of alternative transportation scenarios. There- gent on man-made, conveyor rhythms of large man-
fore, it is no coincidence that each new Arctic devel- ufacturing industries.
opment project uses as foothold a newly built port With artisanal trades as springboard to large-
or a terminal in an already operating Arctic seaport. scale manufacturing, the European industrialization SOZVEZDYE #38
It suffices here to recall the phenomenon of Sabetta soon lost its immediate connection with natural re-
port and the role it plays in exporting Novatek’s liq- sources and their rhythms to reach the ever increas-
uefied natural gas. ing returns from diverse trades including urban. In
Furthermore, the distinct role and purpose of the the case of the Arctic region, the springboard was наследие
Arctic seaports clearly manifest the type of industrial large extractive industries, meaning that the Arctic legacy
production being maintained on the nearby Arctic industrialization process is bound to remain insepa-
mainland. Port specialization and economic activity rable from the cycles and the rhythms of its natural
are closely related in the Arctic. resources, its returns diminishing as even the most
The fundamental difference between the indus- unique of the discovered fields are inevitably doomed
trialization in the Arctic and the industrialization to exhaustion.
on the mainland lies in the fact that the former is To be continued… 69