Displacement on Kola: an extreme and unique case?

I will answer this question straight away: the Kola Peninsula is an extreme but not a unique case. Starting from the premise that common patterns are crystallised through extreme cases (see section 3.1., Generalisation and theorisation from qualitative data), the Kola Peninsula is an especially valuable case epistemologically.

I have already provided some evidence in the section above that the Kola Peninsula is one of the Arctic regions – if not the Arctic region – where Soviet social engineering has been most thoroughly implemented. However, many other regions have gone through similar developments. This section has two aims: firstly, I undertake to show how extreme the Kola Peninsula is as a Soviet Arctic social engineering case by bringing together numbers and other information scattered in a wide range of literature; secondly, I seek to pre-empt what I have called above the uniqueness bias (see section 1.3., General quality criteria and pitfalls), that is, to avoid the risk whereby using extreme accounts or figures may make me feel that ‘my’ field site is something unique. Many texts about the Kola Peninsula fail to establish a link to similar developments elsewhere. I will illustrate such links here and thus show how an extreme case can help us to better see and understand phenomena that may be less visible yet widespread elsewhere (see section 3.1., Generalisation and theorisation from qualitative data).

The Kola Peninsula has in many respects been justifiably depicted as an extreme case of Russian imperial colonisation and Soviet osvoenie. In many ways, this is due to its relative geographical closeness to central Russia compared with all the other Arctic regions of the country. By the end of the Soviet period, the Murmansk Region was the most industrialised, most militarised and most populated area in the entire Arctic (Josephson 2014; Hønneland 2013; Overland and Berg-Nordlie 2012;

Fedorov 2009; Hønneland and Jørgensen 1999; Luzin, Pretes, and Vasiliev 1994;

Doiban, Pretes, and Sekarev 1992). It is for these reasons that indigenous territorial autonomy and identification of settlers with the local indigenous culture has been less pronounced throughout the entire past century on the Kola Peninsula than in indigenous territories elsewhere in Russia. Moreover, today the Murmansk Region continues to show a particularly weak tradition of indigenous minority policy and representation (Berg-Nordlie 2015).

To a large extent, this has to do with simple demographics. The incoming population of the Murmansk Region has grown exponentially in the last 100 years or so, as shown in the following overview (Shavrov 1898; “Vsesoiuznaia perepis’ naseleniia 1926 goda” n.d.; “Vsesoiuznaia perepis’ naseleniia 1939 goda” n.d.; “Vsesoiuznaia perepis’ naseleniia 1959 goda” n.d.; “Vsesoiuznaia perepis’ naseleniia 1979 goda”

n.d.; “Vsesoiuznaia perepis’ naseleniia 1989 goda” n.d.; “Itogi Vserossiiskoi perepisi naseleniia 2010 goda.” 2010a):

Table 2: Population dynamics in the Murmansk Region, 1897-2010

Year Overall population Saami population Percentage

1895 8,690 1,940 22.3%

1926 23,006 1,708 7.4%

1939 291,178 1755 0.6%

1959 567,672 1687 0.3%

1989 1,146,589 1615 0.15%

2010 795,409 1599 0.2%

Additionally, the all-Soviet censuses show that throughout the Soviet period the non-indigenous population in the Murmansk Region grew faster than in any other Arctic region. At the peak of Soviet settlement in the North, in 1989, all Arctic regions together had about 184,000 indigenous and more than nine million non-indigenous inhabitants (Bogoyavlensky 1996, 35). While this is per se an impressive number, the non-indigenous population in the Murmansk Region at that point was proportionately about ten times smaller than that in, and the smallest among, all Soviet Arctic regions. These numerical realities explain the persistently small political weight of indigenous interests and their weak presence in the region’s identity. This in turn is crucial for understanding the above-average power of Soviet social engineering on the Kola Peninsula.

Consequently, the indigenous population of the Kola Peninsula was in above-average ways impacted by different forms of displacement. In terms of punitive displacement during Stalin’s times (imprisonment and executions), arrest and death rates among the Saami populations were much higher than the overall average, but on a level similar to that among other Soviet transnational minorities (Article 1).

Due to its proximity to the national border, the Kola Peninsula has in several respects been an extreme case but not a unique one. Even in the non-punitive variations of displacement, the proximity of a national border arguably played a role. The coastal Saami were especially hard hit by the relocations. At one time around 40 per cent of the Kola Saami lived on the coast (Kal’te 2003, quoted in Afanasyeva 2013, 20), and none of these communities exist anymore. There are estimates that 70 to 80 per cent of all Saami adults living in the Soviet Union were relocated (Bogdanov 2000).

Being relocated in one’s life more than once was not uncommon, as the biographical interviews as a whole collected in this research show. The only region with a similarly high share of relocated indigenous people is found at the other end of the country, in Chukotka. Krupnik and Chlenov (2007, 74) estimate that two-thirds of the Yupik were relocated, and many families had to change their place of residence three or four times. Comparing Chukotka with other locations in the Arctic, the authors conclude that only the Caribou Inuit of the Canadian Keewatin Region were subject to relocation on a similar scale.

That relocations happened to such an extreme extent at the Soviet Union’s westernmost and easternmost borders may have two explanations: firstly, the country wanted to use its areas bordering the capitalist world and the transnational minorities living there to showcase its ‘exemplary’ and breakneck implementation of revolutionary ideals; secondly, in the Cold War confrontation, these were the regions where the coastline was subject to an above-average militarisation and had to be cleared of civilians. The first reason will remain pure speculation here, due a lack of empirical evidence in my research materials. The only hint in the materials I have may be the picture of a Norwegian Saami delegation invited in 1961 to visit Lovozero and its local boarding school (see Illustration 13), an event about which unfortunately I could not find more information. The second reason will be discussed in more detail in section 8.3., Legibility: mono-settlement and mono-industry.

Despite the Kola Peninsula being an extreme case, there is plenty of research documenting the implementation of similar policies in other regions. Displacement of native people took place across the entire Soviet North, with heavily traumatic consequences everywhere. Importantly, relocation and urbanisation of Arctic indigenous populations has been a common policy among all modern Arctic nation states, North America and the Nordic countries thus being no exceptions, and with strikingly similar social consequences everywhere (see section 1.4., Literature review and gap analysis). This means no less than contextualising Kola relocations within global tendencies of urbanisation and industrial rationalisation: on the one hand,

“more people were involuntarily displaced in the twentieth century than in any other in recorded history” (Oliver-Smith 2009b, 3); on the other hand, urbanisation

“was also a process of increasing access to new career paths, as well as marriage possibilities offered by the rapidly emerging towns” (Konstantinov 2015, 167).

At any rate, displacement policies almost never played out as originally intended, having consequences that were beyond the imagination of both the relocated people and the social engineers. Between 1960 and 1980, after the bulk of Soviet social engineering had been implemented, life expectancy among all northern indigenous people dropped by about twenty years on average, to about 45 for men and 55 for women (Slezkine 1994a, 375).

Being aware of all these instances of social engineering, which feature similar motives, implementation and outcomes, helps to avoid a uniqueness bias towards one’s own research site.