The Two Arctics: Soviet Environmental Experiences and Socialist Realism in the Far North (Part II)
Norilsk, a major city found in the Siberian Arctic, is a true example of an economically profitable monocity, and has continued to be an industrial powerhouse in the decades following the collapse of the USSR, contributing about two percent to the Russian GDP each year. Photo: Ninara
There were multiple Soviet Arctic realities, as the state built various northern cities to serve various purposes. In the case of Pyramiden, on the Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard, the coal industry there was barely profitable and the town came to serve a largely political purpose in the latter half of the 20th century. Meanwhile, Norilsk, found in the Siberian Arctic, is a true example of an economically profitable monocity, and has continued to be an industrial powerhouse in the decades following the collapse of the USSR. The second part of this two-part series explores the example of Norilsk in further detail to examine the varying Soviet Arctic experiences.
Norilsk and the Arctic reality
On June 23, 1935, the Council of People’s Commissars of the USSR ordered a combine to be built in Norilsk “for the successful development of the Norilsk nickel and coal deposits and the construction of a plant with a design capacity of 10,000 tons of nickel per year with its launch in 1938.”1) To realize their dream, the leadership of the Soviet Union provisioned for the creation of a “special camp” (meaning forced labor camp) in Norilsk, the construction of which was to be overseen by the People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs, and ordered for drilling machines, pipes and other supplies, as well as qualified technicians to be sent to Arkhangelsk and Murmansk before making their way to Norilsk.2) The order also called for the allocation of steamers to carry the cargo along the Northern Sea Route, and the construction of roads around the Norilsk area, including between the port city of Dudinka to Norilsk, for the transportation of goods and people. It called for the design of the plant to be completed by August 1, 1935, and for the Soviet secret police, the NKVD, to begin work at the Norilsk site on January 1 1936, and allocated 10 million rubles “from the reserve funds of the Council of People’s Commissars of the USSR to the People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs for work, design and purchase of equipment and materials in 1935.” The order further called for the construction of a smelting facility by 1938 which would be used to process “10 thousand tons of nickel per year and the corresponding amount of copper, cobalt, platinum and palladium.”3)
Historian Simon Ertz notes that the minerals available in the Norilsk area were “significant for Soviet industry” as they were used to produce high-quality stainless steel which was needed by the military. According to Ertz, the Norilsk region sits on more than one third of the world’s nickel reserves, “and 40 percent of the world’s reserves of platinum.”4) Norilsk was also a favorable location for mining and metals processing due to the large concentrations of coal found in the area, which could be used for smelting and transporting materials.5) “Thus, the enormous economic and military significance of Norilsk was well established at the start of the second half of the 1930s when responsibility for exploiting these riches was placed squarely on the shoulders of the Gulag,” Ertz wrote, emphasizing the importance of the project, which was reflected in the speed with which the work orders were fulfilled.6) Between 1935 and 1956, more than half a million Gulag prisoners were sent to the Norillag camp at Norilsk to build the mining facilities, extract these minerals, and help process them.7)
While Norillag housed 500,000 prisoners, there was no mention of the camp in official newspaper and magazine reporting of the time, which was censored and controlled by the state. After the death of Joseph Stalin in 1953, the camps were gradually liberalized, but it took nearly half a century before the Gulag was openly discussed in Soviet society. As with the case of Pyramiden, any downsides about the monocity were swept under the rug and until the 1980s, the media portrayed a mythologized version of Norilsk and its industry.
In the half century between the 1930s and the early 1980s, industry was lauded as the catalyst for socialist progress in the media, and cities like Norilsk were praised for providing goods and development to the Soviet people. Articles from major Soviet papers never mention the Gulag, and human health is discussed in the context of “ecological hygiene” and “human ecology,” so there is no discussion of pollution or environmental harm. Yet by the late 1980s, archival papers tell a starkly different story, as articles criticizing industrial works for their exorbitant pollution start to appear. This eco-glasnost (meaning “openness”) is likely a result of Mikhail Gorbachev’s policies of perestroika, which pushed for reform and transparency among the Soviet apparat, but ultimately contributed to the downfall of the entire system. Another motivating factor for the deluge of environmentally-minded articles could be the Chernobyl explosion of 1986, which demonstrated to Soviet cadres and citizens alike that there was a greater need for transparency, and discussion of the Soviet Union’s countless environmental woes.
Articles of the pre-glasnost period are unsurprisingly positive and heroic. They tend to focus on the happiness of monocity residents, the productivity of mighty factories, and the monocity’s role as a provider of goods and services to residents in remote and inhospitable areas.8) In 1954, an issue of the popular Soviet magazine Ogoniek (meaning “light” or “spark”), which featured a full-page spread of Joseph Stalin on the third page, exclaimed that Norilsk was the “wonder of Taimyr” and unsurprisingly failed to mention the city’s Gulag origins, instead stating that the city was built through “work, work, work, work,” and a “battle with nature,” echoing the heroic sentiments used to describe the Soviet colonization of the Arctic and Siberia. “With the help of the whole country there grew on Taimyr a large and well-built city of Norilsk,” says Leonid Vasilievich Antonov, the general secretary of the Norilsk municipal Communist Party in the article, remarking that the city residents give all they have to benefit the Soviet system.9)
A 1957 article in Pravda (which ironically means “truth” in Russian), the Communist Party’s official newspaper which had a circulation of over 11 million people, paints a picturesque image of an Arctic city surrounded by pristine tundra and lakes teeming with fish, where “Arctic treasures” are mined against the backdrop of the northern lights to provide for the prosperity of the Soviet state.10) Other articles of the 1950s describe Norilsk as a rapidly growing Arctic metropolis and a land of opportunity.11) Even the Soviet satirical magazine Krokodil wrote of Norilsk in positive terms in 1966. The issue had several articles about the city, and while one of them poked fun at a car shortage in the Soviet Union and alluded to shortages in Norilsk, another also praised the city for being one of the most important across the Union, calling it a “center rather than a krai.”12) This wording merits some explanation, as it is a clever play on words involving the name of the region Krasnoyarsk Krai. In Russian, the word “krai” is used to denote a region, but also translates to “edge,” implying that Siberian regions are at the edge of the Russian/Soviet state or empire. In this case, the author is arguing that while Norilsk may be geographically located at the edge, or in the Soviet periphery, its contributions to the building of socialism make it a vital center of socialist development.
Articles from the 1970s and early 1980s, written in the twilight of the Soviet age, continue this rhetoric, lauding industrial cities for building socialism and describing city development in heroic terms. A 1971 article in Ogoniek called the Taimyr region where Norilsk is situated the “land of luck,” echoing slogans of the North American goldrush of the mid-seventeenth century.13) A 1970 article from Pravda described Norilsk as a city built around the kombinat (combine), where the kombinat is boss, and has grown into a supergiant that employs tens of thousands of people. Environmental concerns are of course not discussed.14) A 1979 article in Sovetskaya cul’tura, the Soviet art and culture newspaper, triumphantly declared that Norilsk’s existence answers the question of whether we ought to build cities in extreme climates, calling the city a wonder of the 20th century and an oasis of civilization, and exclaimed that in Norilsk, conditions are excellent, and 200,000 people live happily.15)
In 1980 and 1982, the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR, one of the state’s highest governing bodies, awarded distinguishments to the workers of the Norilsk industrial facilities, “for the successes achieved in the construction of the Nadezhda Metallurgical Plant, mining and processing and other facilities of the Norilsk Mining and Metallurgical Plant.”16) Dozens of people were awarded with medals and orders associated with valor and labor in 1980, followed by several hundred workers in 1982, some of whom were given the highly coveted Order of Lenin, the highest civilian award given by the Soviet state.17) Both times, the decrees were reported in the newspaper Izvestia, which was the official paper of the Soviet government.
One of the few mentions of the ecological problem in Norilsk is an extremely vague discussion of pollution in a 1975 article in Sovetskoe Zdravookhranenie (meaning “Soviet health and safety”) which looks at worker health and pollution, but seems to blame the issue on worker conduct and plant managers, failing to discuss the root cause of environmental problems in Norilsk. Furthermore, the word “environment” or “ecology” are nowhere to be found in the text, and the article speaks purely of health and “hygiene,” and references the need for better worker protection and filtration, once again failing to state exactly what they need protection from and filtration for.18)
Yet what the papers neglected to report about the environmental issues was documented in personal accounts of Norilsk residents:
“I had a chance to visit Norilsk several times on business trips, as well as, as a guest, to the jubilee celebrations of the 25th and 30th anniversary of the Combine. When I arrived, each time I discovered how quickly the city of Norilsk was growing, and how sharply the ecological situation was deteriorating. The city is suffocated by sulfurous and other gases. You can’t walk along Sevastopolskaya Street, where the house in which I lived is now, especially on days when the wind blows from the industrial site. The tundra surrounding the city, where we went to shoot white partridges, became a dead zone,” wrote Alexander Gaevsky, a former Norillag labor camp inmate, about the city in the 1960s.19)
Less than a decade later, articles in the late 1980s and 1990s provide a starkly different picture. A 1988 Pravda article asks, “whose fault is it that people in Norilsk breathe pollution?”20) It is incredibly surprising that the official paper of the Soviet Communist Party would be able to publish such a critique, and points to the remarkable conditions of perestroika which opened the door for such commentary from official sources. Two years later, a 1990 article states that Norilsk has been topping charts as one of Russia’s dirtiest cities for decades, entirely contradicting the rhetoric of the prior fifty years.21) While newspaper database searches for the words “Norilsk” and “ecology” returned scant results in the pre-1985 period, the subsequent 15 years revealed hundreds of environmentally-focused articles. In the post-glasnost period, the exalted narratives about Norilsk as a catalyst for building Soviet socialism and modernity are nowhere to be seen.The sudden outspokenness can likely be credited to Gorbachev’s policies of reform and openness. But civic participation in environmental movements ought to be recognized too. Environmental historians of the Soviet period argue that the fledgling Soviet environmentalist movement, which started picking up steam in the 1980s due to outrage stemming from the pollution of the national natural treasure Lake Baikal, turned into a full-blown roar by the 1990s, spurred on by the Chernobyl disaster and the newfound freedom of speech. “In the end, not endangered wildlife, besieged zapovedniki [Russian nature preserves], or flooded sixteenth-century monasteries lit the fires of righteous civic indignation among the Soviet Union’s general working populace, but the life-and-death issues of unbreathable air and undrinkable water,” Douglas Weiner wrote in his book A Little Corner of Freedom.22)
The critical articles about Norilsk point to a fundamental shift in the Soviet psyche, and demonstrate yet another departure from the Soviet Arctic dream. No longer was the Arctic idealized. If deindustrialization killed the Soviet Arctic myth on Svalbard, then eco-glasnost killed the valorization of Soviet industry in the north, as figures emerged about the extent of pollution in Norilsk and elsewhere. In the post-Soviet period, during the turbulent years of the 1990s and early 2000s, before the autocracy that characterizes Russia today emerged, groups that had previously been silenced, such as Indigenous activists, revealed that Norilsk and the factories there, owned by company Norilsk Nickel had a terrible record of human rights abuses.
In recent years, Russian newspapers such as Novaya Gazeta (which has been historically critical of the Russian state and faced significant repression by the government, including the state-sponsored murder of their journalists) have documented the extent of pollution, corruption, and cronyism in Norilsk. The leadership of Norilsk Nickel has pledged to curtail emissions on a regular basis since the fall of the Soviet Union.23) Yet nearly 30 years later, they are still as high as ever.24) The emissions have left a mark on Norilsk’s 177,500 residents, who face a life expectancy up to 10 years shorter than the national average.25) “The northern lights? I haven’t seen them. The sky is smog,” wrote famed Pussy Riot singer and Norilsk native Nadezhda Tolokonnikova in a 2019 article for Meduza.26) Numerous company accidents and fuel spills have dyed entire rivers red and caused irreversible damage to the fragile ecosystems of the region. NorNickel has effectively spent decades polluting the Arctic with impunity. In 2016, when a fuel spill poisoned an entire river, the company only paid $560 in fines,27) and in 2020, when a fuel tank ruptured and poured 21,000 tons of diesel fuel into the tundra, the city mayor was sentenced to community service and no one else from the company was charged. The company fought any fines levied against them in court for months before finally conceding and agreeing to pay, despite the fact that the company CEO, Vladimir Potanin, is one of the world’s richest billionaires.28)
According to the Bellona Foundation, an environmental think tank based in Norway, NorNickel has bribed environmental watchdogs to avoid fines.29) Evidence shows that NorNickel is responsible for frequent accidents, including wastewater spills and emissions that far exceed the permissible standards. In 2020 alone, the company had more than 2,000 environmental violations.30) Russian outlets reported that the company has spills and accidents on a near-daily basis.31) As such, Norilsk has been the subject of close media scrutiny for over 30 years, and the extent of environmental degradation and mismanagement there makes it difficult to argue for the virtues of Soviet industrial development.
Today, Russia is still wrestling with the aftermath of the Soviet environmental crisis, and limited efforts have been made at cleaning it up. The state’s dependence on natural resource extraction has exacerbated the issue – up to 69 percent of the Russian Federation’s federal budget comes from the energy sector,32) and Russia today provides the world with much of its supply of metals, minerals, and fossil fuels.33)
Conclusion
Norilsk and Pyramiden embody intrinsic parts of the Soviet Arctic experience, which is centered around industry, conquest, and myth-making. The accompanying environmental degradation, both within the Arctic and beyond, can be explained by the Soviet Union’s relentless focus on industry at the expense of the natural world.
Pyramiden was the embodiment of the Soviet Union’s focus on the Arctic as the symbolic land of the future and a place to prove its might to the rest of the world, especially when one considers its location thousands of kilometers beyond the territorial boundaries of the Soviet Union. The development of Pyramiden is intimately tied to Soviet socialist realism, utopic thinking, geopolitics, and the valorization of industry as a tool to build socialism. Norilsk is closer to the Soviet Arctic reality as it was experienced by ordinary people. Built through the use of Gulag forced labor, and plagued by environmental issues for decades, Norilsk encapsulates a more common Arctic experience in the Soviet period. Yet the city and its industries were valorized nonetheless in popular Soviet media outlets, and celebrated as major contributors to the building of socialism. Any mention of the Gulag or environmental issues were censored until the final years of the Soviet system, when the official rhetoric changed and the state opened itself to criticism in the hopes of spurring democratic reform. These changes, and their fallout as the state collapsed in the early 1990s, were intimately tied to deindustrialization, environmental degradation, and economic crisis.
Today, both locales still exist. Pyramiden is frozen in time and serves as a tourist attraction where visitors can see a relic of the Soviet Union, representing a frozen or abandoned Soviet dream of the Arctic. Norilsk serves as a major regional center where mining, metals processing, smelting, and pollution are continued unabashedly, although recent media scrutiny has led the company to make pledges to change in the last decade, demonstrating that the legacy of Soviet obsession with industry and reliance on natural resources lives on through its new host, the Russian Federation.
Part I, and the case of Pyramiden, Svalbard, can be read here.
References