Assessing senses of place, mobility and viability in industrial northern communities (MOVE-INNOCOM)

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Funded by the Academy of Finland
PI Dr Florian Stammler, Senior Researcher Social Anthropology,
Arctic Centre, University of Laplad, Rovaniemi, Finland

This research proposes a comparative analysis of mobility and settlement in and around communities of industrial workers in Northwest Russia/Siberia. 15 years after the fall of the Soviet Union, Russia’s major northern industrial regions have experienced substantial restructuring, in most cases resulting in depopulation, which is connected to industrial contraction and relocation politics of the Russian government and the World Bank. The research project analyses the determinants of northerners’ resilience, investigating which factors let residents of northern industrial towns – mostly non-indigenous incomers– retain intimate relationships to their northern towns under these conditions, withstanding incentives for relocation to the south that are supported by the Russian government. Underlying is the main question of the conditions of sustainability and viability of northern communities, a topic that has gained recent academic and political attention.

By contributing ethnographic analyses of movement and settlement histories of individuals and families including life histories, this project contributes grounded basic data for theoretical research on ‘senses of place’ and the ‘social fabric of communities’ within BOREAS MOVE. Situating in depth ethnographic data within the broader context of policy and economy analysis, we aim for a northern contribution to a general theory of viable communities. The main attention is devoted to assessing community resilience, i.e. under which circumstances members of northern communities stay connected and strive to persist, in other words, display collective agency. On the other hand, this research will reveal, which factors lead to disintegration and outmigration of their residents. The third strand will investigate those factors that lead to a commuting context, where northern inhabitants move back and forth between their northern and southern home.

Using extensive ethnographic fieldwork with participant observation and assisted by a structured survey, the project aims to Identify and analyse the main factors for social cohesion of multinational northern communities. Assess the viability of communities after the loss of a common industrialising vision in the Soviet Union, focusing on possible common perspectives of northerners for post-Soviet city development. Analyse the implications of successful and failed economic diversification of cities for settlement and movement decisions of their inhabitants.

Explore the theoretical implications of community viability research in the North for general understandings of sustainable communities, the socio-cultural impacts of industrial contraction and non-economic determinants of decisions to stay or move.

Case studies:
Fieldwork will be conducted in two different regions in the Russian North with different characteristics, Murmansk and Tyumen’. Their diversity opens challenging avenues for comparison.
Murmansk Oblast as the oldest Russian northern industrial region, experienced substantial industrial downscaling, after the main markets for its products collapsed and economic profitability became the mayor determinant for town development. This led to considerable outmigration of those industrial settlers that were once attracted by high state subsidies in the Soviet Union. Tentatively, the double-town of Apatity and Monchegorsk were selected as field site, supplemented by shorter visits to Kovdor – a border town to Finland, and the regional centre Murmansk.

Tyumen’ Oblast fuelled the Soviet economy with its giant oil and gas resources, which after restructuring continue to be the main source of hard currency influx to the post-Soviet Russian economy. The population in its northern industrial towns did not decrease, but some communities are considered to have adapted better to post-Soviet economic conditions than others. Tentatively, two neighbouring towns of Surgut and Kogalym were selected as field site, both of which once started as mono-industrial towns in the petroleum economy.

Comparing the sense of place among inhabitants in towns of both regions promises to reveal cultural, social and economic determinants of identification with northern towns built by incomers. Ethnographic in-depth analysis will cover several groups of residents. Shared experiences will form the basis for grouping the research partners / informants. In the research we will explore the collective agencies of those following groups:

• Industrial workers that recently came to work in the North Non-indigenous inhabitants of the first generation, who contributed to building the towns Indigenous town-dwellers who themselves or their ancestors earlier were nomadic hunter-gatherers or reindeer herders “commuters” who both physically and mentally are connected to their places of birth in the south and their places of work and home in the North Decision-makers in the town.
• Comparing the life histories, experiences, and visions of the future of representatives of these groups in both case study regions will enable us to understand the determinants of community viability in the Russian North. While at first glance it seems that the West-Siberian cases are more “successful” in creating a common northern vision for their lives in town, we are also prepared to explore and consider a possibly particularly strong collective spirit among those who remained in towns in the Murmansk region that experienced considerable outmigration.

In an immediate comparative perspective, the results of this research will provide the western Russian component within MOVE, while the Chukotka and Magadan project provides the eastern Russian component. Both cases will then be related to the broader circumpolar context, where the focus is the comparative analysis of relocation experiences in northern communities. With its expressed focus on communities that started as industrial outposts in the North, this research bears also relevance for our broader understanding of the impacts of industrial downscaling for people’s senses of place, and connected to that of their own identity. As in many northern industrial towns the question of a postindustrial future is of great relevance, this research will also relate to the comparative experience of postindustrial transition in more temperate regions. This topic has been explored in particular in the Fennoscandian North, the Ruhrgebiet Region of Germany and industrial towns in Wales.

Relating the material from extended fieldwork visits in the two case study regions within the Russian context provides a politically highly relevant insight from the ground in Russia’s richest resource periphery and at the EU’s northeastern border. The insights also promise to contribute to reshape our understanding of northern settlement, population movement, and individual senses of place in their relevance for northern identity conceptions.

For website, BOREAS NRWS, project MOVE-INNOCOM
Fieldwork 2007, short overview,
West Siberia case site:

Relocation histories and attachment to place in Russia’s gas capital

Field impressions by Florian Stammler, Novyi Urengoi, 2007

Florian Stammler went to fieldwork for the West Siberian case study within the MOVE-INNOCOM project in 2007. As a first case site, the world’s gas capital of Novyi Urengoi was chosen. Novyi Urengoi is situated in the Yamal-Nenets Autonomous Okrug, just south of the Arctic Circle, at 66:05 degrees northern latitude, and 76:40 degrees eastern longitude.
Stammler was lucky to have recruited senior researcher Lyudmila Lipatova as a research partner. Lipatova is from the Salekhard Museum for regional history, (YNAO, West Siberia) and has worked for many years on biographies of Russian incomers in the North and their descendants. Through her contacts, we could establish a very fruitful partnership with the Novyi Urengoi Museum and its director Marchenko, who served as a base for our little research team, a cosy place for having talks with city dwellers, and as an expert advisor on our topic. Also very helpful was the vice maire of Novyi Urengoi Vladimir Nyuikin and his deputy for public relations Natalya Livkutnaia. Interesting talks, materials and assistance we also got from the Urengoigasprom museum called “muzei slava truda”, “museum for the glory of labour” and its director Sycheva.
The city of Novyi Urengoi was founded on a place that the local indigenous reindeer herders refer to as “gibloe mesto”, meaning “god-forsaken place”. There had been no indigenous settlement there before, as the place is rather boggy, and very much exposed to the ice-cold northern winds. But it happened so that in 1964-65, a team of seismic explorers discovered a big gas-like formation on that place in about 1 km depth. A year later a team of geologists got stuck in the bogs on their way with their tractors in June, and since they could not move any further, they decided to drill an exploratory well there. June 6th therefore became the famous day when the first well called R-2 released a fountain of 7 million cubic metres gas per day. The headquarters in Nadym and Moscow did not want to believe that, and thought may be the geologists suffered from the heat and hardships in the bogs and therefore went crazy. However, this marked the date of the then world’s biggest gas deposit discovery. It took some years to tackle the challenges of building up industry on this “god-forsaken place”, but in December 1973 S. Orudzhev, then minister of gas industry of the USSR, flew in by helicopter and said, just having landed in the middle of nowhere “here a city will be established”. That’s how several informants remembered the beginning of Novyi Urengoi. The official history of the place does not tell us about the exact how’s and why’s of choosing this place for drilling the first well.
Today Novyi Urengoi is a city of around 115 000 inhabitants, and an exemplar for Soviet model construction of an efficient industrial city. The city is a classical mono-industrial space, where still everything is connected to the gas industry. That raised the question of planning to resettle part of the population, as the giant Urengoi gas deposit is beyond the peak of its production. However, it was decided that the city will become the base for opening up new deposits to the North. Novyi Urengoi therefore indeed became the ‘base-camp’ for developing the Yamburg and Zapolyarnye gas deposits, which count together with Urengoi for most of the Russian gas production today.
Like in many place world-wide, companies in Urengoi try to implement modern ideas of efficiency, ‘lean management’ and ‘outsourcing’. For Novyi Urengoi that has the consequence of many social services being transferred from gas-company ownership to municipality. Employees of kindergartens, schools and houses of cultures have started to feel how privileged they were when they were on the payrolls of Urengoigasprom, the company that established the city. Now their salaries and social services resemble those of any other employees of the municipality.
From that one might assume that there would be a kind of two-class society in Novyi Urengoi, the population employed by the gas industry and the rest. Although this might be true in terms of the standard of social services, fieldwork impressions suggest that there is still a strong sense of social cohesion. It seems to live of the experience of resettlement from the south to this place, and of the experienced hardships, when people lived for years together in tents, then wooden self-constructed barracks, and round barrel-like containers (bochki), before the first concrete apartment blocks were built in the late 1970s, in a quarter that is today still called “dvoryanskoe gnezdo”, the “nest of the nobility”. Interview-partners stress that the early Novyi Urengoi society was not stratified at all, however. The gas company boss could stop on the road and take along hitchhiking schoolchildren. This is different today, where gas company officials are hardly accessible, and there is also a caste of rich perestroika-winners, who made a lot of money with some clever business ideas, finding a niche in this northern market.
During this first field period, we really wanted to find out first what life is like in the city, and the first things that we noticed was

a) that there is still very much a kind of “frontier atmosphere” in town, one of eternal work, movement, and also somehow unrest.
b) that there is a very active policy by the municipality of creating a sense of place and social cohesion. Nowhere else in the Russian North had we seen so many huge posters and actions in this direction. Both the municipality and companies fund gatherings of the city-population, foster civil society associations and actions, establish memorials and monuments about city history, and advertise city-identity everywhere on posters, saying things like: Urengoi, my homeland, happy birthday my dear hometown and other texts. We also saw a lot of effort by the administration to keep the place clean, to create space for social contacts, and to turn the city into a colourful vibrant space where life is enjoyable.

These first visual impressions were confirmed when we accompanied firstcomers for walks through their city, where they introduced us to places meaningful for city history as well as for their own biography there. We have gathered a good base of life-histories from Novyi Urengoi now, mainly in the form of in-depth unstructured interviews, photography of the first days from personal archives of our partners, combined with contemporary photography, and video-interviews of firstcomers where they comment the development of the city and places of significance for their attachment. Together with locally published literature

Some of the interviews we have managed to transcribe word by word, and they will be used by Lipatova for her weekly radio-programme on Yamal Okrug regional radio.
In 2008, some of this material will possibly find its way into an exhibition about Novyi Urengoi in its partner-city Kassel, the German gas capital. The main task, however, is to compare this material with the field data from Murmansk region, and relate this to the available academic literature on sense of place and relocation, in order to find out how movement and places influence identities and biographies in general.

Links for this case site:
city of Novyi Urengoi: http://www.newurengoy.ru/
Urengoigazprom: http://www.ugp.ru/
Yamburggazdobycha: http://www.yagd.ru/
Regional Studies Museum, Salekhard, YNAO (institute of colleague Lipatova): www.mvk-yamal.ru

Senses of Place, Mobility and Viability in Industrial Northern Communities:
the Murmansk Region Case Study
fieldwork by Alla Bolotova, 2007.

This study is based on qualitative life-history research in the Murmansk region, for which the process of becoming psychologically attached to the North, following physical migration, is analysed. A two-weeks pilot research was conducted in November-December 2006. At that time main attention was paid to the analysis of the state resettlement program, for that Bolotova interviewed people who were involved in this program and also local experts working on the program. Fieldwork in 2007 was conducted during 3 months (May and September-October) in three industrial towns in the Murmansk region: Apatity, Kirovsk and Kovdor. All together 70 interviews were conducted, plus participant observation by living in those cities in private apartments. Numerous local contacts were established both within the academic community and with local inhabitants. Very important support came from local civil society organizations: the human rights NGO “Memorial” in Kirovsk and Apatity, pensioners clubs in all cities, and other organizations developing cultural activities (like choirs and film-making clubs). Fieldwork also included participant observation at several celebrations in these towns for different occasions, both organized by the local authorities and informal gatherings of local inhabitants.
Another aspect of the Murmansk 2007 fieldwork was the literature review, which included mainly the soviet literature about settlement politics, approaches and experience in the North of the country for their industrial development. Another body of literature deals with the question of to re-settling people from the north and reduce population there. A large amount of local history literature about Murmansk region was collected both published in soviet times and modern. Films about the towns made by local inhabitants turned out to be a valuable source about the immigration history of northern cities and their inhabitant’s attachment to place, as well as old photographs made by informants showing local history.
A short tentative research was done in Bugry – a settlement in Leningrad region where a significant part of the population consists of people resettled from northern regions, mostly from Kirovsk, one of the three case study sites in the project. One of the main findings there was that mostly young people tend to move to flats there, instead of retired people who were the original main target group of the resettlement programs. Many retired people stay in the North or commute between their northern and southern residences, while they tend to give their right to acquire housing in the south to their children. This is an unintended result of the state resettlement programmes from the Russian North.