Suburban Norilsk, one of the few cities built on permafrost (Image: Sergey Maximishin/Panos Pictures)
The Conquest of the Russian Arctic tells the tale of the country鈥檚 extreme efforts to exploit the the resources in its northern reaches
AT -15 掳C, high-carbon steel cracks. At -30掳C, pneumatic hoses split and cranes fail. At -40 掳C, compressors stop working. Ball bearings shatter. Steel structures rupture on a massive scale.
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Still Russia builds, and mines, and tries to settle its Arctic territories. President Vladimir Putin has revived the old Stalinist vision that saw slave labour assembling cities on beds of permafrost. This time around, in place of the inexhaustible human resources of the gulag, there are delays, cancellations and rather nervous foreign investors.
The Arctic contains 90 per cent of Russia鈥檚 recoverable hydrocarbons. Were the country to finally overcome its many and various technical challenges, after more than a century of trying, it would be vastly wealthy.
So the Arctic remains a burden Russia cannot bear to relinquish. This potentially great nation continues to saddle itself with the costs of transportation over great distances, of keeping warm, or just staying alive, in great cold.
Since the mid-1980s, Paul Josephson, a historian of science and technology, has charted the country鈥檚 heroic engineering projects. He has traced its gigantomanic ambitions back, more often than not, to Stalin鈥檚 Great Plan for the Transformation of Nature. Launched in 1948, it aimed to divert the flow of major waterways, industrialise Siberia, and turn the infertile steppe into a breadbasket.
The consequences for the environment have been at best ambiguous, at worst catastrophic. Natural resources had no price in Soviet economics. Since they were not owned privately, they had no value. Development had no regard for waste or loss. Little has changed under the current system of state capitalism; the Arctic鈥檚 underfunded environmental projects are smothered under state plans for 鈥渕odernisation鈥�.
Josephson is a well-travelled, well-connected and impassioned analyst. But his call for Putin鈥檚 Russia 鈥渢o move more slowly, to adopt measured policies鈥� forego impatience for circumspection鈥� is unlikely to be heeded.
After 40 years writing sober, academic accounts of the world鈥檚 most hubristic, atrocity-littered engineering projects, it may be time for Josephson to bare his teeth a little.
Harvard University Press
This article appeared in print under the headline 鈥淎rctic nightmares鈥�
