Thoughts on Bruno
February 22, 2012 by michrinm
After reading Industrial Life in a Limiting Landscape: An Environmental Interpretation of Stalinist Social Conditions in the Far North by Andy Bruno, I have a thoughts on some of what Bruno says and how some of the themes he touches upon may relate to our course as a whole. First of all, the fact that the Soviets even moved their richer, probably more skilled farmers to Northern mining towns raises some questions concerning the sustainability of the worker relocation program. By forcing many its farmers to abandon farming, the Soviet Union decreased the security of its food supply. While any negative circumstances might not have been felt immediately, they did become very apparent during the famine of 1932-33 (victims of which are pictured below). Though Bruno doesn’t spend a lot of time on the causes of the famine directly, it would be logical to say that if more people were farming, food might not have been a problem, especially since many of the deported farmers clearly were skilled in agriculture. Since I don’t know much about the famine however, it’s hard to tell whether the famine was caused by mistakes by the farmers or by natural factors like the weather.
http://www.moonbattery.com/archives/stalin_famine_victims.jpg
The second topic that I’d like to discuss from Bruno is the idea inherent to Stalinism (and most other political ideologies on all sides of the political spectrum) that the environment is something that can and should be conquered. We’ve talked about this in class previously, so I won’t go over the concept, but I found it particularly interesting that in the case of the relocated farmers, the environment proved to be a hard beast to tame. The farmers, who were from the southern, more mild part of the U.S.S.R., found it difficult to survive in the far north of the country, which undermined their assumed duty to exploit nature that came with their membership in the human race. Further hurting their cause was the unpredictable and harsh weather, along with a high prevalence of diseases like measles and tuberculosis and the scarcity of wood to be used as fuel. These conditions combined to make the experiment of forced labor in the Khibiny Mountains as startling failure. It showed Soviet leaders that they couldn’t necessarily always control nature and bend it to their every whim. This went entirely against the ideologies prevalent in the country at the time and seemed to show an inherent flaw in the Soviet (and thus Marxist) worldview.
I would like to briefly comment on the second part of the author’s blog post.
While Bruno talks about the lack of barriers to establishing a productive industrial town in the Khibiny Mountains, there are cases of successful cities that were established in remote regions. Take for example the city of Norilsk. It is the world’s northermost city in Siberia and acccording to to the Blacksmith Institute, one of the world’s ten most polluted cities (1). Even though it was thousands of miles of away from any major Soviet City (e.g. Vladivostok) and the climate is brutal – a successful nickel mining industry was established in the region. Maybe these two regions are slightly different, but it appears that that the Soviets were able to subdue (for lack of a better term) the earth successfully in Norilsk.
For a more in-depth article from the NY Times: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/12/world/europe/12norilsk.html?ref=world
(1) http://www.blacksmithinstitute.org/the-2007-top-ten-of-worst-polluted-places.html
I could not agree more with this entire blog post but I want to focus on the second topic. I found it incredibly disturbing that the living standards of the migrants who were forced to move to the Khibiny region did not go unnoticed, and with this, nothing was fixed. As stated in the reading, “the regional inspector of housing and communal sanitation, I.A. Tikhomirov, claimed that the large portion of the current housing stock that ‘consists of shalmanov, mud huts, and tents, which act as surrogates of housing, is unacceptable for the conditions of the polar winter.’” Then, Tikhomirov proceeded to announce that the housing conditions were extremely unfavorable. Many parts of this reading irked me but this particular statement definitely irked me the most!
I think that assuming that the main intention of the Soviets was to tame nature, and charge the deported kulaks with increasing production in the North is a bit one-dimensional. With an unwanted population, and an inhospitable region I don’t think it’s particularly surprising that no support was given to the migrants. If they managed (as in the case of Norilsk) to be productive, then so much the better. I just think it’s a mistake to frame this topic as the attempt of the Soviets to gain something as opposed to an attempt to remove something unwanted. As a removal of a section of society this experiment was a success. As an attempt to exploit nature, less so.
Just a quick note on Norilsk: there’s a fundamental difference between this special settlement in the Khibiny region and the city of Norilsk. Norilsk began as a Gulag camp, not a special settlement. It was also a high priority camp, due to the value of the nickel deposits. Both Norilsk and the Khibiny settlement had an element of forced relocation; the removal of unwanted individuals; an inhospitable climate; and forced labor for resource extraction. But as a camp, the state was expected to provide infrastructure that the settlers had to create for themselves. Norilsk was also an economic priority in a way that the special settlements never were (even amongst Gulag camps, for example, Norilsk continued to receive able-bodied prisoners throughout World War II, a time when many camps received prisoners who were already unfit for labor due to malnourishment).
ProfBell: I did not know that – thank you for the clarification and extra info!