Lessons from Continuity and Change in the Fourth International Polar Year

March 4 - 7, 2009

University of Alaska Fairbanks

State induced resettlement policies intertwine political macro processes, local communities, and various forms of belonging in the uprooted landscape of relocation. This paper reflects on a case study of forced relocation, which occurred in several villages around Chukotka’s East Cape, in Northeastern Russia. From the 1930s to the 1960s the inhabitants of mainly native coastal villages have been subjected to a relocalization policy by the Soviet state that left dozens of settlements and hunting bases deserted. For ostensible military and/or economic reasons, flourishing native communities were closed and the inhabitants were forcibly relocated to larger villages. These forced relocations were part of a process of state making during the Cold War, at a time when the Soviet Union consolidated its northeastern border with the United States. Coastal villagers, especially of Eskimo origin, were seen as potential “imperialist spies” due to their proximity and kinship relationships with Alaskan Yupik Eskimos across the Bering Strait. The politically forced resettlements in this coastal border zone can be seen as centripetal forces that pull unbound elements towards the center of the state, politically as well as economically. The collapse of the Soviet Union destroyed these bonds and left the uprooted people behind.
 
This paper explores local reactions to translocal forces through time (i.e., Sovietization of the High North, the Cold War, and collapse of the Soviet Union). Focusing on individual strategies of place making amidst a relocated population, the paper addresses the central role of memory and nostalgia in relation to border landscapes and state policies. Space and place making as significant elements of landscape inhabitation have been thoroughly acknowledged. But what becomes of a place when it has been abandoned? What of the attachment to and the sense of place when one is forcibly removed from the dwelling? 

As a social history of ghost towns, this paper tracks the life histories of its former inhabitants through the landscape of forced relocation at the high point of the Sovietization of the Russian North. At the same time, contemporary strategies of past inhabitants to make sense and use of the abandoned village sites are considered. The ruins of former settlements are not only places of the past, but also play a role in present-day lives as some individuals have moved back into formerly abandoned village sites or have reestablished hunting bases in the vicinity of old settlements. Thus the paper explores notions of abandonment and nostalgia in relation to space and examines stories and strategies of how coastal people in Chukotka come to terms with the ruins of a volatile past.