Abstract
The Soviet Union was the resource state par excellence. From the days of its founding under Vladimir Lenin, Communist Party officials, economic planners, and scientists and engineers engaged a series of projects intended to tame nature, overcome the forces of national self-determination, and incorporate the periphery of the vast multi-national nation into a powerful empire. This empire would be able to withstand what came to be called “hostile capitalist encirclement,” but only if its vast open spaces of land—that the urban leaders saw as empty of people—was settled by like-minded workers and party members. They promoted a series of large-scale nature transformation, construction, transportation infrastructure, resource extraction, and other industrial efforts that would simultaneously fill empty spaces on the periphery and the interior with devoted newcomers, and remake local people and indigenes into conscious, modern Soviet citizens.
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Notes
Among the scores of studies on waterways and potential improvements to encourage settlement in thinly-populated regions and in Central Asia, see for example: Levakovskii, I.F. (1890) The Waters of Russia in Relation to Its Population, Kharkiv: Univ. Tip. [in Russian]; Masal’skii, V.I. (1913) Turkestan Krai, St. Petersburg: A.F. Devrien [in Russian].
On halting, and frequently stumbling efforts to build irrigation canals in the Hungry Steppe southwest of Tashkent in the late 19th and early 20th century, see Pierce, R. (1960) Russian Central Asia, 1867–1917: A Study in Colonial Rule, Berkeley: University of California Press, pp. 175–177.
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Yuri Slezkine explored the relationship between the indigenous people of the USSR northern regions and the colonialist modernizers in Arctic Mirrors. By mirrors he meant deforming mirrors that the colonialists held up to the minority peoples with images that oscillated between the extremes of “backwardness-as-beastliness and backwardness-as-innocence.”
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While the Gulag was established, it was claimed not only to punish but reeducate or to “reforge” people, it was primarily and always a brutal economic tool. And if historians still debate the gulag’s function in redemption of prisoners from their political and ideological failings, then its rapid transformation into a construction organization reveals that its primary function was grist for the mills of Stalinist industry. For discussion of the re-educational aspects of the gulag, see “Death and Redemption,” Russian History Blog, May 2012, at http://russianhistoryblog.org/category/blog-conversations/death-and-redemption/
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See for example for BAM, Seleznev, E.S. (2009) Production activities of correctional labor camps GULZhDS NKVD/MVD on the western section of the BAM: 1937–1953, Candidate’s (History) Dissertation, Irkutsk State Pedagogical University [in Russian]. In the middle of 1935, there were 170 000 people in BAMlag and 200 000 in May 1938—of a total of 1.8 million in the entire Gulag. On BAM, see Ward, C. (2009) Brezhnev’s Folly: The Building of BAM, Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press.
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In her thesis, A.A. Tsyganova writes about the importance of heritage of Turner’s work on the history of American progress. See Tsyganova, A.A. (2012) The creative legacy of F.J. Turner in the history of American progressives, Candidate’s (History) Dissertation, Moscow, Moscow Pedagogical University [in Russian].
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Pozdnyakov, A.F. (2010) Maritime Navigation in the North of the Soviet Far East in the 1920s–1950s, Candidate’s (History) Dissertation, Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk: Sakhalin State University [in Russian]. See also Vorob’eva, T.V. (2012) Eastern Frontier of Russia, Vestnik KraUNTs. Gumanitarnye Nauki, No. 1, pp. 5–14, in which the author compares briefly the colonization of the Far East of Russia with the United States and considers the theory of the frontier.
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Paul Josephson, Ph. D. (Polit.), is a Faculty Emeritus (Retired) at Colby College.
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Josephson, P.R. Empire Building and Frontier in Siberia and the Far North. Her. Russ. Acad. Sci. 92 (Suppl 10), S947–S954 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1134/S1019331622160067
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1134/S1019331622160067