Book
New Mobilities and Social Changes in Russia’s Arctic Regions
The book provides the first in-depth, multidisciplinary study of reurbanization in Russia's Arctic regions, with a specific focus on new mobility patterns, and the resulting birth of new urban Arctic identities in which newcomers and labor migrants form a rising part. It is an invaluable reference for all those interested in current trends in circumpolar regions, showing how the Arctic is becoming more diverse culturally, but also more integrated into globalized trends in terms of economic development, urban sustainability, and migration.
The so called Russian Asian North is overviewed, comprising the Urals, Siberian, and Far eastern federal districts, and their demographic and political situation. Arctic regions offer a range of political climates , with some relatively open and competitive - in the Russian context of growing authoritarianism - and others opaque and monolithic. The local politics is key to help us move from Moscow-centered Arctic policy to everyday realities on the ground.
The article examines a crucial shift in models of domestication of the Soviet Far North during the Thaw period. The closure of the Gulag system and the social transformations of the 1950s caused changes in the social space of the Soviet North and in the role of expert knowledge in the USSR. By focusing on modernist urban projects for the Soviet Arctic, I analyse how urban specialists during the Thaw attempted to formulate a new conception of the North as a place for ‘ordinary life’ and therefore transform a peripheral region into an ‘average’ Soviet space.
Russia prefers the development of transport corridors that allow to reduce transport costs, the time of delivery of goods from production countries to markets that are thousands of kilometers away, which is beneficial both for the countries of the producers of the Asia-Pacific Region and for Russia. Such a transport corridor is the Northern Sea Route. Further development of this transport corridor, development of its infrastructure is necessary both for mastering the SMP as an internal sea route and for creating a large transport corridor capable of becoming a competitor of transport corridors passing through the Suez Canal. At the same time, how Russia and the EAEU will successfully solve such complex and truly promising infrastructure tasks, will show what place in the modern and future world order Russia and the EAEU are planning to occupy.
Industrialisation and social transformations changed the landscapes of the Soviet Arctic and stimulated discussions about the models of its domestication. Numerous industrial towns in the Soviet Far North in the 1930s were established next to Gulag labour camps. The attempt of technical, social and visual re-conceptualisation of urban space in the Soviet Arctic related to several reforms of the post-Stalin period. This chapter analyses how Leningrad architects since the 1950s used modernist urban projects for the realisation of their professional and personal ambitions trying to create a new conception of a “normal city” in extreme climate. While most were not implemented, their appearance shows the shift of the attitude toward the North in the USSR as well as the controversial changes of experts’ position.
This paper examines recent literature on achieving sustainable cities that incorporate a combined mitigation–adaptation approach towards improved urban resilience as a way of future-proofing. A multidisciplinary approach, which integrates scientific as well as ecopolitical frameworks, is found to benefit this sustainability discourse.
A joint research project carried out by an interdisciplinary group of Russian and Swedish linguists, sociologists and educators-psychologists (the Swedish Institute grant), besides solving pragmatic tasks of finding out relative quantitative-qualitative specificity of national cognitive representations of values, first of all, had methodological goals. They were to check the efficiency of the linguistic methods developed in this study (and, thus, to prove the theoretical ideas that served the basis for it) of getting factual data that allow reconstructing and comparing of the corresponding areas of cognitive representations.
The results of cross-cultural research of implicit theories of innovativeness among students and teachers, representatives of three ethnocultural groups: Russians, the people of the North Caucasus (Chechens and Ingushs) and Tuvinians (N=804) are presented. Intergroup differences in implicit theories of innovativeness are revealed: the ‘individual’ theories of innovativeness prevail among Russians and among the students, the ‘social’ theories of innovativeness are more expressed among respondents from the North Caucasus, Tuva and among the teachers. Using the structural equations modeling the universal model of values impact on implicit theories of innovativeness and attitudes towards innovations is constructed. Values of the Openness to changes and individual theories of innovativeness promote the positive relation to innovations. Results of research have shown that implicit theories of innovativeness differ in different cultures, and values make different impact on the attitudes towards innovations and innovative experience in different cultures.