“Home is Closer”: Development of Transport Infrastructure and Keeping Residents in the Russian Arctic

Abstract (English)

In the 20th century, one of the vectors of the Soviet state was industrialization and "exploration" of the Arctic, which required human resources. The mobility of people grew significantly as the state promoted it, citizens moved to emerging cities from other parts of the country, villages. One of the problems for the Soviet authorities was the issue of settleability — staff turnover reduced the economic efficiency of enterprises, and it was necessary to understand how to keep people in a new place (Zayonchkovskaya 1972). The life strategies of migrants to the Arctic included a multilayered interweaving of ideologies about "conquering" the North and nature, building communism and a “bright future,” and the practical creation of extractive infrastructure and the building of cities for people to serve that infrastructure. At the same time, working and living in the North was often seen as a temporary project to make money and then return home or retire to more climatically favorable places. Many did so. But to this day there are still people in the Russian Arctic who moved to the North and stayed there until their late ages. Having spent most of their lives in the North and at some point planning to leave, people stay. Moreover, the North is still a place of attraction for new workers from all over Russia and the nearest foreign countries.
The annual cycle of people from the North usually includes a visit to the sending community, the "homeland". In the paper, I will examine how the development of infrastructural opportunities helps to keep in touch with the sending community, to make visits home regular, quicker, and less costly, and affects the settling-in process, the "retention" of people in new places, and the motivations to stay in the Arctic of longtime old-timers in contemporary Russia.
The paper is based on the author's fieldwork in the northern regions of Russia in 2020-2025.