Doctoral Thesis in History of Science, Technology, and Environment

Reassembling the Environmental Archives of the Cold WarPerspectives from the Russian North

DMITRY V. ARZYUTOV

Stockholm, Sweden 2021www.kth.se

ISBN 978-91-7873-931-8 TRITA-ABE-DLT-2127

KTH ROYAL INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY

DMITRY V. ARZYUTOV

Reassembling the Environm

ental Archives of the Cold War

KTH

2021

Reassembling the Environmental Archives of the Cold WarPerspectives from the Russian North

DMITRY V. ARZYUTOV

Doctoral Thesis in History of Science, Technology, and EnvironmentKTH Royal Institute of TechnologyStockholm, Sweden 2021

Academic Dissertation which, with due permission of the KTH Royal Institute of Technology, is submitted for public defence for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy on on Friday the 20th August 2021, at 4:00 p.m. through video conferencing.

© Dmitry V. Arzyutov ISBN 978-91-7873-931-8 TRITA-ABE-DLT-2127 Printed by: Universitetsservice US-AB, Sweden 2021

Моей семье с любовью Alla mia famiglia con amore

Acknowledgments

Producing texts always means producing relations. The present dissertation is

not an exception. Its initial idea emerged when I was in the field in Yamal with my

Nenets family of Okotetto and Yaungad. It crystallized over the conversations with

my supervisors Peder Roberts, Per Högselius and Julia Lajus, and with my

colleagues and friends at the Division of History of Science, Technology and

Environment at KTH Royal Institute of Technology. And it ultimately has come to its

material form in my home with my Russian-Italian family.

The multi-sited life of the text intertwines with life histories of a great number

of people whose names I am hardly able to mention here but whose voices,

knowledge, and emotions are in this work.

The field and archival researches sit at the core of my research. My

ethnographic and archival life in Yamal between 2009 and 2018 would be simply

unthinkable without the open hearts and warm care of Khadri, Khadri’ nyísya, Gena’

nyebya, Artur nyinyeka, Arsen, Alik, Anisii, dyadya Fedya, Egor Vengo, Roman and

Vera Okotetto, Pasha and Kostya Yaptik, tetya Lena Zastavnaya, Stas and Irina

Okotteto and many other nomadic friends of mine. They opened to me their Nenets

planet that is in continuous movement and I am still orbiting it. My Nenets life has

also included the travels to the Kolguev island where I met the wonderful

Varnitsyns, Pyrerko, Evsiugins families whose “life on the island” turned my

perception of the Arctic upside down and sparked my interest in insularity.

During long-term archival and museum journeys in Russia and worldwide I

encountered many wonderful people who were ready to help me an infinite number

of times: Elena Gruzdeva, Irina Tarakanova, Lyudmila Lipatova, Nailya Galeeva,

Aleksei Tikhonov and many others. My Moscow archival research would be a lot

worse without the hospitality of my life-long friends Yulya and Max Mokshins.

Coming back to my office, I always met a great interest and intellectual support

from my colleagues. The GRETPOL (the ERC-funded project “Greening the Poles:

Science, the Environment, and the Creation of the Modern Arctic and Antarctic”)

team led by Peder with our regular meetings and letter and message exchanges

became a homely space for developing the ideas and discussing the research results. I

am very grateful to Peder who was able to create that atmosphere and solicitously

supervised and assisted me over my ventures. Thank you, Lize-Marié van der Watt,

Kati Lindström, Justiina Dahl, Tayana Arakchaa and Roman Khandozhko!

The Division provided its doctoral students with a truly unique vibe, an

atmosphere of intellectual democracy and “undisciplined” humanities. My

conversations with Sverker Sörlin on the Arctic environmental history and history of

science, Sabine Höhler on conservation politics and STS, Marco Armiero on political

ecology and oral history, Anna Storm on landscape scars, Dag Avango on Svalbard

and ANT methodologies, Jacob von Heland on visual anthropology and history are

certainly imprinted on my memory and dissertation. The discussions, lectures and

seminars with Arne Kaijser, Nina Wormbs, Cecilia Åsberg, Annika Nilsson,

Ethemcan Turhan and occasional conversations with Linus Salö, Katarina Larsen,

Eric Paglia and David Nilsson were of great importance to me for shaping the text

and developing new and revisiting classic ideas. Our seminar rooms and the

Division kitchen were the “contact zones” where PhD students spontaneously

discussed their ideas which could not but enrich all our texts including the present

dissertation. I am grateful to all of you: Jean-Sébastien Boutet, Daniele Valisena and

Ilenia Iengo, Irma Allen, Jesse Peterson, Hanna Vikström, Johan Gärdebo, Corinna

Röver, Camilla Winqvist, Anne Gough, Ulrika Bjare, Achim Klüppelberg, Siegfried

Evens, Gloria Samosir, Thomas Schrøder, Erik Isberg, Jasmin Höglund Hellgren,

Araujo Domingos and many others who visited the Division at that time. I am also

very grateful to Roberta Biasillo and Otso Kortekangas for our discussions and

collaborations. My special thanks go out to my office-mates Anna Svenson and her

flowers and Tae Hoon Kim and his sense of humor. All this would be just nothing

without the help and support of Sofia Jonsson, Emilia Rolander, Miia Jylkkä and also

Emma Conradsson and Martin Skoglund who made my life as a doctoral student

comfortable and easier.

The REXSAC project gifted me not only wonderful study trips to various parts

of European Arctic but also the encounters with such wonderful people as Élise Lépy,

Jón Haukur, Joan Nymand Larsen Christian Fohringer, Anna-Maria Fjellström,

Sandra Fischer, and Jasmiini Fransala (Pylkkänen).

I am very grateful to Eglė Rindzevičiūtė and Andy Bruno who agreed to review

my texts and to help me strengthening the argument and Katarina Larsen who so

tactfully orchestrated our Higher Seminars and always asked deep questions.

My Helsinki period of life was illumed by the light of my dearest colleague and

neighbour Hanna Snellman, spontaneous travels and catch-ups with Alla and Marta

Bolotovs, the best ever BBQs and long philosophical conversations with Noora and

Jokke Pyyry, the Indigenous studies discussions with Pirjo Virtanen and friendly

joyful chats with Ivan Matošić Baguc, incredibly deep Nenets folklore and history

conversations with Karina Lukin, microhistorically feministic vision of the past with

Josephine Hoegaerts, language, power and anthropology conversations with Elina

Hartikainen and Andy Graan, a new discovery of the GULAG history with Mikhail

Nakonechnyi and many other great friends and colleagues.

Finalizing the papers in Oulu was really joyful thanks to my friends and

colleagues: Roger Norum, Vesa-Pekka Herva, Tuuli Matila, Mathilde van den Berg,

Hannu Heikkinen, Ferhat Kaya and Anna Heumann.

My special gratitude goes to my long-term colleague and friend David

Anderson whose advice, provocative questions and irony helped me a lot

throughout my research. Discussions with Carlo Ginzburg significantly affected my

perception and knowledge of micro- and ethnohistory. Serguei Oushakine was

friendly provocative with challenging my texts and helping to improve them. Sergei

Kan and Regna Darnell helped me with access to the Franz Boas Papers. I am

grateful for the help in my field research and intellectually stimulating discussions to

Rob Losey, Tanya Nomokonova and Masha Amelina. I also would like to thank Vladi

Vladimirova for her interest in my research and friendly conversations in Stockholm

and Uppsala. I am grateful to my colleagues and friends in different institutions who

helped me with their advice, access to rare publications and archival documents:

Sergei Alymov, Roald Berg, Petr Boyarskiy, Volodia Davydov, Dima Doronin, Natalya

Fedorova, Marie-Theres Fojuth, Valentin Gusev, Sasha Kasatkina, Katya Kapustina,

Natasha Komelina, Galina Orlova, Marina Lyublinskaiya, Elena Miklashevich,

Masha Momzikova, Sveta Podrezova, Maria Pupynina, Misha Solonenko, Igor Stas’,

Viktor Tolkachev, Lena Volzhanina, and Zhenia Zakharova.

My research also included papers at seminars and conferences. I am thankful to

Mikko Saikku, Viktor Pál, Dolly Jørgensen, Pirjo Virtanen, Nikolai Ssorin-Chaikov,

Irina Sandomirskaja, Myram Adjam, and Vladi Vladimirova for inviting me to

discuss the results of my research with their colleagues and to get a valuable

feedback. I am very grateful to Amber Lincoln, Peter Loovers, Lotten Gustafsson

Reinius, and Martin Schultz for giving me an opportunity to contribute to their

wonderful Arctic museum exhibitions and for consulting me with a number of

questions about material culture of Arctic Indigenous peoples.

This work would never been finished without constant support, love and help

of my dearest wife Laura, who was ready to listen to my stories from the field and

archives, discuss the fragments of in-progress papers always being patient with my

impatient thoughts. The support of my parents Irina and Vladimir and my famiglia –

Miretta, Giuseppe, Elena, Alessandro and our wonderful Agata meant more than

love to me. I cordially dedicate my dissertation to you all!

* * *

All Russian words and titles in all five papers are transliterated with ALA-LC

(Library of Congress) Romanization with Diacritics, while Nenets words are

transliterated according to the system of Tapani Salminen.

Summary and keywords (English)

To what extent the environmental history of the Arctic can move beyond the

divide between Indigenous peoples and newcomers or vernacular and academic

ways of knowing? The present dissertation answers this question by developing the

notion of an environmental archive. Such an archive does not have particular reference

to a given place but rather it refers to the complex network that marks the relations

between paper documents and human and non-human agencies as they are able to

work together and stabilise the conceptualisation of a variety of environmental

objects. The author thus argues that the environment does not only contain

information about the past but just like any paper (or audio and video) archive is

able to produce it through the relational nature of human-environment interactions.

Through the analysis of five case studies from the Russian North, the reader is

invited to go through various forms of environmental archives which in turn

embrace histories of a number of disciplines such as palaeontology, biology,

anthropology, and medicine. Every case or a “layer” is presented here as a contact

zone where Indigenous and academic forms of knowledge are not opposed to each

other but, on the contrary, are able to interact and consequently affect the global

discussions about the Russian Arctic. This transnational context is pivotal for all the

cases discussed in the dissertation. Moreover, by putting the Cold War with its

tensions between two superpowers at the chronological center of the present work,

the author aims to reveal the multidimensionality of in situ interactions with, for

instance, the paleontological remains or the traces of all-terrain vehicles and their

involvement into broader science transnational cooperations and competitions. As a

result, the heterogeneous archives allow us to reconsider the environmental history

of the Russian North and the wider Arctic and open a new avenue for future research

transcending the geopolitical and epistemic borders of knowledge production.

Environmental Archive, Russian Arctic, Encounters, Cold War, Indigenous and Academic Ways of Knowing

Sammanfattning och nyckelord (Swedish)

I vilken grad kan en miljhöhistorisk analys av Arktis undvika klyftan mellan

ursprungsfolk och nykomlingar, samt mellan folkliga och akademiska form för

vetenskap? Avhandlingen svarar på denna fråga genom att utveckla begreppet ”

miljöarkiv.” Ett sådant arkiv hänvisar inte till en särskild plats, men heller till et

komplex nätverk som samlar ihop förhållande mellan dokument i papper och båda

mänskliga och icke-mänskliga aktörskap. Tillsammans stabiliserar och

konceptualiserer de ett antal miljöobjekten. Författaren argumenterar därför att miljö

omfattar inte bara information om förtiden men liksom andra form för arkiv

(antingen papper-baserat eller elektronisk) kan reproducera förtiden genom att

belysa interaktioner mellan människor och natur. Genom fem case studier från det

nordliga Ryssland bjudas läsaren på en tur av fem olika miljöarkiv som omfattar

olika disciplinära traditioner, t. ex. paleontologi, biolog, antropologi, och medicin.

Varje case eller ”lager” presenteras här som kontaktzon var ursprungliga och

akademiska form för vetenskap inte nödvändigtvis står i opposition, men tvärtom

påverkar varandra, och därmed får inflytelse över diskussioner om det ryska Arktis

även på global nivå. Denna transnationella kontext är avgörande för alla cases i

avhandlingen. Genom att sätta det kalla kriget i analysens centrum (kronologisk

sett), med fokus på spänningarna mellan stormakterna, hoppas författaren att belysa

de flerdimensionella interaktionerna mellan t. ex. paleontologiska fynd och spår från

bandfordon och hur dessa interaktioner var kopplad till bredare frågor kring

multinationella samarbete och konkurrens. En så heterogen uppfattning av arkivet

öppnar för nye perspektiv på miljöhistorien av båda det ryska Arktis och Arktis set i

sin helhet, samt öppna för nya forskningsfrågor som överskrider nuvarande

geopolitiske och epistemologiska gränser innanför kunskapsproduktion.

Miljöarkiv, ryska Arktis, möten, det kalla kriget, ursprungliga och akademiska kunskapssystem.

Translated by Peder Roberts and Per Högselius

Резюме и ключевые слова (Russian)

Может ли экологическая история Арктики быть написана без разделений

на народные и академические знания, коренное и некоренное население?

Настоящее исследование отвечает на этот вопрос, предлагая смотреть на

историю арктической окружающей среды через понятие экологического архива.

Такой архив не связан с конкретным местом на карте, а относится к сложной

сети, связывающей бумажные документы, человеческие и нечеловеческими

существа, которые не только могут работать вместе, но и позволяют

стабилизировать наши знания о разного рода экологических объектах. Таким

образом, автор диссертации утверждает, что окружающая среда не только

содержит информацию о прошлом, но также как бумажный или любой иной

электронный архив может (вос)производить прошлое ее через реляционную

природу взаимодействий человека и окружающей среды. Представленные в

диссертации, пять кейсов с Российского Севера позволяют читателю увидеть

различные формы экологических архивов, которые, в свою очередь,

охватывают истории ряда дисциплин, таких как палеонтология, биология,

антропология и медицина . Каждый кейс , который можно также

визуализировать также как слой представлен здесь как зона контакта, где

коренные и академические формы знания не противопоставляются друг другу,

а, напротив, могут взаимодействовать и даже влиять на глобальные дискуссии о

Российской Арктике. Этот транснациональный контекст является ключевым

для всех кейсов, обсуждаемых в диссертации. Более того, ставя холодную война

с борьбой между двумя сверхдержавами, в хронологический центр настоящей

работы, автор стремится выявить многомерность взаимодействия человека,

например, с палеонтологическими останками или следами вездеходов, которые

оказали воздействие на более широкое научное транснациональное

сотрудничество и соревнования. В результате разнородные архивы позволяют

нам пересмотреть экологическую историю Российского Севера и Арктики в

целом и открыть новый путь для будущих исследований, выходящих за

пределы геополитических и эпистемологических границ производства знаний.

экологический архив, Российская Арктика, встречи, холодная война, индигенные и академические формы знания

Тюку манзаяʼ няамна ӈэдаˮ вадаˮ, Таранаˮ вадаˮ (Tundra Nenets)

Арктикамʼ нюбета ӈэрм яʼ сямян нинанда таняна ӈамгэнда илеˮмяˮ,

ненэцие тикаӈана ямидхэхэд иленахаˮ няби хэвняд товэхэˮ тярпувдавэйˮ, ты

пэртиˮ ӈыхы похот тевʼ тенандˮ теневанаˮ ӈамгэхэˮ няби едэйвана ученойˮ

таславы, ховыˮ серкˮ тэрабавдавэйˮ пада пиртакыˮ? Тюку манзая тикы

юнрабцоʼ хамедидмʼ, Ӈэрм яʼ илеˮмявна, ненэциета тадтикахад тикахана илена

ӈавота ӈудоˮмаˮна, сямян янʼ ниня манорˮ таняна ӈамгэвна хомбида. Тарця

илаʼ саирˮ нямна ӈэда серˮ ненандори яʼ падаркана таняна яхат, мякат,

хардахат ниˮ переˮ. Падартʼ таславыˮ ӈамгэˮ, ямидхэхэд тикана илена ненэциеˮ

ӈыхы похот тевʼ тенандˮ теневанаˮ сероˮ хараˮ, тикы яʼ сярʼ ниня таняна

ӈавоˮмана тасламбадаˮ, хамедамбадаˮ ӈамгэˮ - ӈобанзерʼ нядаӈго, едэй иʼ ӈудо

хомба, ӈыхы ӈаво ӈобтʼ тасламба тара пирˮӈадоʼ. Сямян ӈамгэ: яʼ хораʼ лыˮ, выʼ

яʼ хоба, хусувэй ниня манорˮ танянаˮ ӈамгэˮ - хартоʼ илеˮмидоʼ нянаˮ вадець

пирˮӈаˮдоʼ. Тиканда тюку манзаямʼ падвы хибя таремʼ тасламбида - ненэцямʼ

сюрте танянаˮ ӈамгэхэт, яʼ хобахад, хусувэй ниня манорˮ ӈамгэхэд - падаркад,

едэй электронной мутрахад толабаладаревʼ, невхы" илеˮмиˮ хараˮ тикы яʼ сярʼ

ниня илена ненэцие ханзерˮ сиддоʼ сюрте таняна ӈаво маниевавнандоʼ,

хамедамбавнандоʼ вэрдамбададревˮ тасламба пиˮрыдˮ. Манзаямʼ падвы нянаˮ

Россия яʼ Ӈэрмʼ няна самляӈг тохоламбавы, тасламбавы манзаянда серʼ, тюку

падвымʼ толабада хибя таремʼ вэрдавы, ховы ӈаво, хуркариʼ невхыˮ тикыʼ хавна

тенкы сероˮ нямна ӈэда сероˮ хари тасла пирта . Тикыˮ ӈамгэˮ

палеонтологияхад, биологияхад, антропологияхад тадтикахад лекаратаӈгова

серкат переˮ. Нянаˮ хусувэй тохоламбавы, тасламбавы манзаянда серʼ сямян

серˮ хараʼ ӈобкад перевадоʼ тасла пиˮры. Ты пэртиˮ ямидхэхэд теневана ӈамгэˮ,

едэйвана ученойˮ таславы серˮ тодоʼ яхаˮ тярпувдавэйˮ нидоʼ нядаба, нидоʼ

сахамлаба ӈобтʼ тюку манзаяхана тодоʼ харахаˮ нютвасипойʼ пойравыˮ. Тарцьˮ

харахаˮнаˮ тамна савовна Россия яʼ Ӈэрмʼ няӈымʼ тохоламбава серкана

тараӈгуˮ. Тодо ё" тер" сероˮ хари ӈобтʼ тасламбава тюку манзаяʼ паӈгаданда

таславы ӈэӈгу, тикыʼ хавна сайнороˮма пуй поʼ нямна, СССР тахараˮмаˮ пират

ӈэда Россия яʼ Ӈэрмʼ няӈы яʼ илеˮмяʼ нямна ӈэӈгу. Тамаляӈгана тодоʼ ёˮ

параӈодаˮ помнандоʼ тасалко поёмбавандоʼ хавна, ӈэрмʼ няӈыˮ яхаˮнаˮ

хуркариˮ ӈаркаˮ илекаˮ серˮ ӈобтаремʼ ӈадибермыˮ. Ти тиканда тикыˮ

похоˮнаˮ выӈгана хаюрмыˮ машинʼ сехэрыˮ яʼ хобаʼ сярˮ ниймʼ, иланда харамʼ

яӈгамдамбавамʼ тикарихина савовна тасламба пявэдоʼ. Яʼ ӈылад ӈадимыˮ яʼ

хораˮ лыˮ сиˮив яʼ тиӈгэвна ӈэдалёлавандоʼ серˮ, Ӈэрмʼ яʼ илеˮмямʼ едэйвана

тодоʼ ёˮ терˮ ненэцяӈгˮ манэˮлабтамба пявэдоʼ. Ти тиканда тюку падармʼ падвы

няваˮ манзаянда самляӈг таркамʼ ӈобтʼ манэсарць, таремʼ тасламбида:

Арктикамʼ нюбета Ӈэрмʼ яʼ илеˮмя, ненэциета, таняна иленаˮ ӈавота невхыˮ

илеˮмиˮ харидоʼ, хуркариˮ хэкородоʼ едэйвана пада, тохола, тасла пиˮрыд". Ты

пэртиˮ ӈавхыˮ похот тевʼ тенандˮ теневана ӈамгэˮ, едэйвана ученойˮ таславы

серˮ тодоʼ яхаˮ тярпувдавэйˮ, лаха манэсармадавэйˮ ӈобанзерˮ тараӈгуˮ, едэйˮ

яӈганяˮ иˮ ядэрабцохоˮ ненэцие тэврамбаӈгудоʼ.

Экологический архив; Россияʼ яʼ ӈэрмʼ тиӈгыˮ яˮ; Лахарёˮ; Сайнороˮмаʼ пуйˮ СССРʼ тахараˮмаʼ ӈэсондʼ ӈэвыˮ поˮ; Ты пэртиˮ ямидхэхэд теневана ӈамгэˮ, едэйвана ученойˮ таславы серˮ

Translated by Khadri Okotetto

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments 4 Summary and keywords (English) 8 Sammanfattning och nyckelord (Swedish) 9 Резюме и ключевые слова (Russian) 10

Тюку манзаяʼ няамна ӈэдаˮ вадаˮ, Таранаˮ вадаˮ (Tundra Nenets) 11 Preface 14 Research Questions 16 Environmental Archive: Theoretical Frame 17 From Environmental Encounters to Environmental Archives 19 Environmental Archive: The Structure(s) of The Dissertation 21 Methods and Sources 22 Research Ethics 26 Paper Summaries 29

Paper 1: Indigenous Narratives as an Archive 29

Paper 2: The Archipelago of Novaya Zemlya as an Archive 29

Paper 3: The Tundra as an Archive 30

Paper 4: The Human Body as an Archive 31

Paper 5: The Extinct/Extant Animal as an Archive 32

Bibliography 32

...The thing invisibly, so it is true, that it once existed on the ground, and the more it – everywhere.

Joseph Brodsky, Roman Elegies, 1981

Preface

In the springtime of 2015, my host Nenets family – an Indigenous nomadic

group in the Russian North – and I left our place where we had spent more than a

month. The lichen surrounding our camp had been eaten up and the reindeer herd

was spurring us on moving forward. On an early morning, all reindeer sledges were

packed and we were about to set out. Some minutes before we left the place, I found

myself staying in front of a mark of greyish snow on the ground that was left behind

our camp (Nenets myadirma, Local Russian chumovishche) (Pic. 1). Looking at these

marks, I could tell where the oven, the entrance, my sleeping place used to be.... As

we left, new snowflakes slowly covered the mark. I vividly recall to what degree this

picture reminded me of those feelings I experienced while reading the famous novel

Smilla's Sense of Snow by Peter Høeg. As I stood there silently, my host approached

me, gently touched my fur coat and mentioned that we were about to move. He also

told me that they would easily tell where this spot was located and how everything

was organised here in the winter when crossing it in the summer. They would also

check if they had left any garbage. His remarks helped me understand to what extent

nomadic dwellers in the tundra are able to read traces left on the ground and the

activities that these hint at. Not only they could tell whether people had live in one

place or not, but also whether they used it to for their tent, to let the reindeer pasture,

or other activities linked to living and engaging with this northern territory. I wrote

all that down in my field diary and upon my return home I put it along with other

diaries on the shelf. The spring snow, the words of my friends, my observations

became the material notebook which I would re-read again and again before writing

about it and before setting out to a new field trip to the North.

Pic. 1. It is what left behind our nomadic dwelling. Northern Yamal, 2015.

With this work, I want to invite my colleagues from the humanities and social

sciences to revise the reading of the documents in the archives with their invisible

networks and potential references to multiple lived experiences in such a way as they

would understand the complexities involved in reading the traces on the snow.

Given that my current work is placed in the circumpolar region, where I bring

scholars, Indigenous people, and local dwellers into dialogue, this initial vignette is a

concrete opening in that direction. The blurred lines on the paper and the snowed

delineation of our everyday practices over more than five weeks spent in one spot in

the tundra were equally hard to read and required special knowledge to evoke the

past. Both “readings” require the help of facilitators, of people who know and are

“well-read” in the art of explaining what these traces may indicate. If the former

“reading” is often articulated and presented to academic audiences in the work of

anthropologists, who rely on their field co-operators and their own observations and

often put the Indigenous/local ways of knowing in a wider context; the latter

“reading” resorts to the work of historians, who aim to add a diachronic dimension

to social practices and ideologies. As a scholar, who can identify himself with both

areas of expertise, my aim with the present dissertation is to intersect these two

paths, ways of reading multiple traces and makes sense of them, through work in the

archive and fieldwork in the tundra alike.

Research Questions

As I show throughout my research, the history of the (Russian) Arctic, is

inseparable from the histories of Indigenous/local peoples, the environment and the

history of Arctic social and natural sciences. This suggests that the encounters not

only of Indigenous and academic knowledge about various material environmental

objects but also their wider transnational contexts which gained momentum during

the Cold War cannot be separated, but rather need to be studied together. To describe

those encounters I have coined the term environmental archive, which shapes the

whole dissertation both in theoretical terms and in its structure.

Before I move forward, I would like to formulate the research questions of the

present work. Given its situatedness between the history of science, environmental

history and historical anthropology, the present dissertation aims to reveal the

diachronic development of human-environment relations in such a way that includes

also Indigenous ideas and concepts of both the past and the environment. This is

especially important since the dissertation historizes the co-production of knowledge

in a variety of disciplines from palaeontology to anthropology. By revealing the

Indigenous voices, I aim to contest the colonial disparities in the production of

historical knowledge and open the avenue for further reflections on non-Western or

non-urban ways of knowing as equal parts in narrating the history.

This research question leads me to the next one which deals with the extent to

which such a hybrid Indigenous and scientific ways of knowing are able to come to a

certain stabilisation in perceiving and analysing the woolly mammoth, tundra, or

human bodies. I am asking, how such objects of Arctic environmental knowledge

have been co-produced and to what degree they embraced the written, oral and

practical forms which feature the environmental archive?

And the final question lifts me up to the transnational level of history. Why and

how the products of Indigenous and scientific co-operations were able not only to

circulate across the borders but also had the capacity to assist scholars in lifting some

of the folds of the heavy Iron Curtain.

Environmental Archive: Theoretical Frame

Can the environment and archive coalesce in one notion? This dissertation

embraces such a challenge by bringing together two concepts, which are frequently

regarded as incompatible, given that the recurrent assumption is that one is based on

a fluid and relational foundation (environment) and the other on a bounded and

closed frame (archive).

The theory of the archive is rooted in the histories of bureaucracy and deals

with the various forms of writing (Friedrich 2018). As Michael Foucault famously

asserted, the archive is the crucial part of what he called power/knowledge relations,

which primarily deals with the “documents of exclusion” (Foucault 2002). Years later,

Achille Mbembe added to that picture one more stroke, saying that, “the archive has

neither status nor power without an architectural dimension” (Mbembe 2002, 19). All

those important theoretical interventions are still deeply situated within urban

settings. Moreover, as Jacques Derrida reminds us that “there is no political power

without control of the archive, if not of memory” (Derrida 1996, 4). But what if the

archive is not a closed building and/or deals with not only written documents?

Where is the place for Indigenous peoples there? Antoinette Burton challenged such

a perspective and indicated that it would be incomplete without the historical

understanding that the archives are “by no means limited to official spaces or state

repositories. They have been housed in a variety of unofficial sites since time

immemorial” (Burton 2005, 3). Such a theoretical extension of the archive has much

in common with what Marisol de la Cadena describes in her recent book. She brings

a beautiful example of an Indigenous archive in Peru (Cadena 2015, 117–51; see also

Povinelli 2011; Montgomery and Fowles 2020). But even her “bottom-up” perspective

taken from the stories of her Quechua-speaking interlocutors leaves us with the

question about the environmental histories of the place and to what degree the life

histories of those people are connected to the histories of the land they live in and

also to the histories of research projects conducted in the same territory. This gap is of

importance for my research.

Thus, I argue, the environment does not only contains information about the

past but just like any paper (or audio and video) archive is able to produce it through

the relational nature of human-environment interactions (Ingold 2011, 13–26). This

differs from the thing-in-itself approach to the environmental objects we, for

example, know from dendrochronology (see Trouet 2020) or palynology (see

Shumilovskikh et al. 2016) which aim to extract the historical data from the

“talkative” tree rings or pollen (see also Sandweiss and Kelley 2012; Fordham et al.

2020). It is of great importance for reconstructing the histories but leaves a free space

for the relationality in the production of historical “facts”.

My project means to come closer to the ground-breaking reflections of Dipesh

Chakrabarty (Chakrabarty 2009) about the inseparability of environmental history

from the history of human beings. The Arctic, which lies at the core of this

dissertation, and more concretely the non-urban ways of living there challenge the

more traditional and recurrent optics on what an archive is just as it occurred to me

while standing in front of the traces of a Nenets camp in the tundra in 2015. In other

words, the documents about the life of Arctic environments and the Arctic

environment itself coalesce in one notion, the environmental archive that opens up a

new venue to describe different narratives and practices of human-landscape

relations across a range of communities that also affect the environment in which we

live. Thus, the archive does not have particular reference to a given place but rather it

refers to the complex network that mark the relations between paper documents and

human and non-human agencies as they are able to work together and stabilise the

conceptualisation of a variety of environmental objects (cf. Turkel 2007). Like traces

on the snow, which continuously interact with the surrounding milieu remaining,

however, readable even after the winter is gone, the environment in its cultural and

social understanding is intertwined with the archive of human documents. In other

words, it is shaping and living in an entanglement of human and non-human/more-

than-human activities and ideologies (O’Gorman and Gaynor 2020). Five stories,

which are presented in my dissertation, show to what extent the academic

knowledge about the Arctic was actually a product that emerged out of relations with

the environment and local people who in turn encountered the projects of Moscow

and Leningrad-based scholars and engineers. Such a network of encounters of

peoples, ideas and material objects is what I eventually call the environmental

archive. A careful reading of Soviet academic texts that I actually do in my research,

gives a glimpse of that underappreciated context of knowledge production in the

high North (see Bruno 2019). Moreover, as I show in my case studies, the

environmental archive as a relational field does not rely on linear timelines with their

sequence of events (cf. the idea of palimpsest in human geography and archaeology

taken from the manuscript studies: (Bailey 2007)) but rather brings us back to the

very nature of the archive as heterogeneous, “fragmented” and of a never completed

field (Foucault 2002; see also Mills 2013, 703–4).

As it is shown in the dissertation articles, the palaeontological finds and human

bodies, for instance, are situated in one social and temporal context and play an

equally important role in producing the knowledge about the North.

Although my dissertation is focused on the long 20th century and some episodes

even go deeper to the 19th century, it is centralised around the Cold War. It is worth

mentioning, that the context of the Cold War became of great importance for my

research. Despite the fact that the very notion of Cold War was of American epistemic

descent and was used only as a Russian-language calque from English (Kholodnai͡ a

voĭna) during the Soviet times, its intellectual milieu and geopolitical tensions

significantly affected not only our understanding of the archive but also the

environment. I am in particular referring to the Cold-War obsession with “secret

files”, records and archiving, as well as its tremendous impact on the environment

(Warde, Robin, and Sörlin 2018). This reference to the Cold War emerge in all of the

five articles my dissertation consists of. All the stories I tell below have a Cold-War

lining either as a political rivalry or a hidden common language in transnational

dialogues and collaborations of scholars.

From Environmental Encounters to Environmental Archives

The environmental archives assemble out of the encounters. The term encounter

appears in the pages of my dissertation quite frequently. It is also supplemented by

similar notions such as a “contact zone” (see Pratt 1992). The notion of encounter

helps us to describe the contacts at their ground level which means not only the

meetings with other humans and other cultures but also with other non-human

beings and the environment. Having taken this path, I offer to look at the

environment not as a whole but through its partiality (Haraway 1988; Strathern 2004)

which means the ability of parts to intersect with others and shape a decentred

kaleidoscopic images of the environment. Moreover, such a perspective brings

colonisers and colonised together and consequently opens a new venue for

reflections on the entanglements of Indigenous and academic ways of knowing.

Mary Pratt writes about the promise of the notion of “contact zones” saying that it

“refers to the space of colonial encounters, the space in which peoples geographically

and historically separated come into contact with each other and establish ongoing

relations, usually involving conditions of coercion, radical inequality, and intractable

conflict” (Pratt 1992, 6; see an Indigenous application of the concept Clifford 1997).

As I show in my article about Novaya Zemlya, this also includes the environment

which is actively involved in the production of those relationships (see also Isaacs

and Otruba 2019). Moreover, the visuality and palpability of the encounters might

affect not only the environmental discourses but also became an active subject in

communication between various parties, as I show in the article about tundra and the

mechanical traces on its “skin” (a term taken from an interview with a Nenets herder

reproduced in (Vasil’ev and Geĭdenreĭkh 1977)).

Technically, in my doctoral project, I have chosen to focus on these encounters,

which allow me to tell the histories of the Arctic environment as relations between

Indigenous peoples and scholars in the field and which played an important role

during the Cold War. All those narratives balance between the “big events” and the

everyday life of people on the ground (see Fogelson 1989). The forced relocation of

Nenets to/from Novaya Zemlya and their links to the H-Bomb testing present not as

two different classes of the events but as complex interconnected actions. It may

remind what Eric Wolf once wrote, “the more ethnohistory we know, the more

clearly ‘their’ history and ‘our’ history emerge as part of the same history” (Wolf

1982, 19). That “sameness” becomes more visible at a micro level of historical

research at which I operate in all my texts. The encounters produce the moments of

knowledge stabilisation (Jasanoff 1998) or even “islands of stability” (Pickering 2017)

through which the historians are able to see and analyse the connections between

written documents and oral accounts and the human or technological traces on the

ground. Thus, the archive in its classic written sense meets the environment out of

which the environmental archive emerges.

Ascending from these encounters, I also aim to situate the cases in larger

pictures of social, cultural and political lives. Those zooming in/out exercises help

me to recognise the local voices even at the most higher level as it was with my

research on the mammoth or on the concept of the tundra (see also Sandwell 2008).

Environmental Archive: The Structure(s) of The Dissertation

Designed as an archive, the thesis is organized according to two lines:

“geological” and “theoretical”. In the geological design, every “layer” of the

dissertation in the form of an article speaks to the history of one of the disciplines

from palaeontology to medicine. All those cases show, on the one hand, to what

extent Indigenous ideologies and practices and academic theories are historically

intertwined and how they may challenge the colonial assumptions metaphorically

voiced “Science for the West and Myth for the Rest” (Scott 2011). On the other hand,

the emerged multilayered field cannot but remind us of the written archives that,

however, questions its own colonial/bureaucratic nature due to the encounters with

the vibrant environment. As a result, we enter the space where the history of human-

environment practices and human ideologies of the environment are tangled and

situated beyond the dualities of practice/representation, academic/indigenous and

others.

While writing my dissertation, I was not only recalling the Nenets tundras but

also applied a number of theoretical ideas. As a result, all the articles/layers have

their own theoretical design. The notions of environmental encounters, contact zones,

traces not only support some cases but also represent a specific angle, which

problematizes in more depth the notion of environmental archive. Moreover, every

“layer” deals with the history of one specific discipline in the Arctic: palaeontology,

anthropology, botany, and medicine. The case on Novaya Zemlya is focused on the

intersections of various disciplines and political strategies that aimed to convert the

archipelago either to a resource or military site.

At a first glance, the proposed research could be read as an Anthropocene

pyramid, where humans are found on the top – but in a geological and symbolic

sense (see the historian's critique LeCain 2015). In fact, the scope of this work is the

opposite, as it means to level humans with non-humans. And thus, the “geological”

and “symbolic” layers may even turn vertically.

The offered theoretical design of the dissertation aims to reshuffle the geological

order of layers. It invites us to ascend not from the “deep time” to the “thin” present

but along the line of the encounters with the variety of human and non-human

agencies. In this context the layers turn out the emerged archives which

volumetrically embrace the variety of human and non-human agencies.

Such an imagination opens the possibility to start reading the dissertation from

any of the articles and reassemble a multi-faceted understanding of the Soviet Arctic

environmental history.

Methods and Sources

Methodologically I intersect the following four fields: environmental history,

social anthropology, history of science and Indigenous studies. All of these directions

shape the newly founded concept of environmental humanities as a broad approach,

which proceeds from a non-dualistic view on nature/culture.

Layer 1 The layer of the mammoths Paper No. 5

Layer 2 The layer of Indigenous narrative creatures Paper No. 1

Layer 3 The layer of tundra Paper No. 3

Layer 4 The layer of human bodies Paper No. 4

Palimpsest The archipelago of layers: Novaya Zemlya Paper No. 2

Archive 1 Indigenous narratives as an archive Paper No. 1

Archive 2 The archipelago of Novaya Zemlya as an archive Paper No. 2

Archive 3 The tundra as an archive Paper No. 3

Archive 4 The human body as an archive Paper No. 4

Archive 5 The extinct animal as an archive Paper No. 5

As I have indicated above, I have intertwined global and local narratives related

to the environmental protection and indigenous people in the Russian Arctic. This

ambitious project has been realised through various methodical tools.

Following human and non-human objects. The methodologies of anthropology

(Appadurai 1988) and science and technology studies (Latour 1987; Daston 2000)

allow us to trace the life histories of both human and non-human beings as well as

objects. Such a well-developed biographical strategy helps scholars to embrace the

changes the selected figure goes through its life. The narratives of all the articles in

this doctoral project are built around such figures – the mammoth, the narratives

about the dwarfs, the tundra, the human bodies under the acclimatisation

experiments and finally the life of the archipelago of Novaya Zemlya. The mentioned

above classic books show the extent to which the life of objects are dependent on the

life of humans, and vice versa. In that regard, in all the articles I tend to include the

life histories of people, from scholars, engineers to Indigenous people from the

tundra. The intersections of the two make the research more accurate to the details

and the interactions between humans and non-humans in the histories of Arctic

environments.

Intersections. All the five cases reveal the encounters of local and academic

knowledge, which had not only local or national implications but also changed or

affected the relations between the Soviet Union and the other world. Lifting up the

intersections, I aim to reveal the Arctic environmental “objects” in the history of Cold

War.

These two research approaches to the materials came from the primary data I

work with. In my “historical” part of the research, I focused on various documents,

such as official reports, correspondence, personal and field diaries, museum artefacts

and visual documents.

The Russian archival system is fourfold and inherits the Soviet archival system

which was built in the 1920-1930s. The first group of archives is the Moscow and

Saint Petersburg-based archives, or so-called central archives (t͡͡ sentral'nye arkhivy)

which hold documents of Soviet/Russian state agencies. Their collections may

include also the personal archival collections of scholars or managers. The

documents from those depositaries (GARF, RGAĖ, RGASPI, T͡SAMO RF) – official

reports and letters – I mostly used for the reconstructing the relations between local

institutions and the state throughout the development of the Soviet North.

The second group of archives (vedomstvennye arkhivy) belongs to the various

institutes of Russian Academy of Sciences, museums, libraries and other bodies at

national and regional levels (AIĖA RAN, AMAE RAN, AOĖS MAĖ, ARAN, I͡AGOM,

I͡͡ANOVK, MAĖ, NASO RAN, NA RGO, OR RNB, ORKP NB TGU, RNB). Their

collections contain different kinds of sources: from field reports, notes and personal

letters to the official documents which meant to be sent to the official authorities. The

documents from this archives were of the most importance for my research.

Moreover, they contain also photographs and even material artifacts (if it comes to

museums) which allowed me to significantly enrich the historical analysis.

The third group of archives is the so-called regional ones (regional'nye arkhivy)

(GAAO, GAI͡ANAO, GANAO, GANO, GATO, NGA, TA) which always surprise the

scholars by unpredictable collections of documents and/or artefacts. My research

enormously benefited from the documents from those intuitions. There were some

local official documents, correspondence, photographs, etc. Those documents are

probably one of the closest to what we call today local and Indigenous voices. For

example, I was able to retrieve a number of documents related to environmental

pollution of the Soviet Arctic in the 1960-70s written by “ordinary people”. They gave

an important insight to the history of discussions surrounded the environmental

degradation of the tundra.

The last group of archives is personal (lichnye) archives and the archives which

have been formed during the research projects (OP, PAEAM). This collections were

especially important for me while working on the some episodes from life-histories

of scholars. Thus, some details about the history of Novaya Zemlya and the history

of the Indigenous ethnogenesis theory were learnt from those two archives.

Apart from the Russian archives, I have been extensively working in a number

of archives in the USA (AMNH, APS, ASCCL UAA, MIT IASC, PMA, SCRC UCL,

UIA), Sweden (RA), Poland (BN PAU i PAN), and also Germany (BA). Their

documentary collections helped me to reconstruct the transnational contexts of my

research. Thus, one of the most meticulous analysis I have been done through the

American archives was about the transnational history of the concept of Siberian

Indigenous ethnogenesis.

Here is the list of archives I employ in my research:

AIĖA RAN – Archive of the Institute of Ethnology and Anthropology of Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow, Russia

AMAE RAN – Archive of Peter the Great Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography (Kunstkamera) of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Saint Petersburg, Russia

AMNH – American Museum of Natural History, Washington, USA. AOĖS MAĖ – Archive of the Department of Siberian Ethnography of Peter the Great

Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography (Kunstkamera) of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Saint Petersburg, Russia

APS – American Philosophical Society, Philadelphia, USA ARAN – Archive of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow, Russia. ASCCL UAA – Archives and Special Collections, Consortium Library, University of

Alaska Anchorage, USA BA – The German Federal Archives, Koblenz, Germany BN PAU i PAN – Scientific Library of the Polish Academy of Skills and the Polish

Academy of Sciences, Kraków, Poland GAAO – State Archive of Archangelsk Region, Archangelsk, Russia GAI͡ANAO – State Archive of Yamal-Nenets Autonomous Region, Salekhard, Russia GANAO – State Archive of Nenets Autonomous Region, Naryan-Mar, Russia GANO – State Archive of Novosibirsk Region, Russia GARF – The State Archive of Russian Federation, Moscow, Russia GATO – State Archive of Tyumen Region, Russia I͡͡AGOM – Emelian I͡Aroslavskiĭ I͡Akutsk State United Museum of History and

Culture of the Peoples of the North, I͡Akutsk, Russia. I͡͡ANOVK - I͡Amal-Nenets Regional Exhibition Complex Named after Irinarkh

Shemanovskiĭ, Salekhard, Russia MAĖ – [Numbered Collections of] Peter the Great Museum of Anthropology and

Ethnography of Russian Academy of Sciences, Saint Petersburg, Russia. MIT IASC – Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Institute Archives and Special

Collections, Cambridge, USA. NA RGO – Scientific Archive of the Russian Geographical Society, Saint Petersburg,

Russia NASO RAN – Scientific Archive of the Siberian Branch of Russian Academy of

Sciences [at State Public Scientific and Technological Library of the Siberian Division of the Russian Academy of Sciences], Novosibirsk, Russia

NGA – Norilsk City Archive, Russia NGONB – Novosibirsk State Regional Science Library, Russia OP – The Archive of Obnisk Project OR RNB – The Department of Manuscripts at the Russian National Library, Saint

Petersburg ORKP NB TGU – Department of Rare and Unique Books of the Scientific Library at

Tomsk State University, Russia, Tomsk. PAEAM – Personal Archive of Elena A. Miklashevich, Kemerovo, Russia. PMA – Penn Museum Archives, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, USA RA – The National Archives of Sweden, Stockholm, Sweden RGAĖ – Russian State Archive of Economy, Moscow, Russia

RGASPI – Russian State Archive of Social and Political History, Moscow, Russia. SCRC UCL – Special Collections Research Center, University of Chicago Library, USA SPF ARAN – Saint Petersburg Branch of the Archive of Russian Academy of Sciences,

Saint Petersburg, Russia. TA – Taymyr Archive, Dudinka, Russia T͡͡SAMO RF – Central Archive of Ministry of Defence of Russian Federation, Moscow,

Russia T͡͡SGANTD SPb – Central State Archive of Science and Technological Documentation

of Saint Petersburg, Russia UIA – University of Illinois Archives, Urbana, USA ZIN RAN – Zoological Museum of Russian Academy of Sciences, St Petersburg,

Russia

As an anthropologist working with local communities, I am always curious

about the biographies of people, their narratives and practices. It has some

similarities to the historians of science who know about their protagonists more than

about their own relatives. For this project, I have conducted field research among

Yamal (2009, 2013, 2015, 2018) and Kolguev Nenets (2018) both along and with

colleagues (Canadian archaeologists – Robert Losey and Tatiana Nomokonova and

linguist from Moscow – Maria Amelina) (see Losey et al. 2021; Nomokonova et al.

2021). In my field research, I combined participant observation (DeWalt and DeWalt

2011) with the methodologies of collaborative ethnography (Lassiter 2005). Even

though anthropologists still discuss what “participant observation” is and what kind

of information this method provides. In spite of this, “participant observation” still

sits in the core of the methods of social sciences allowing researchers to take a

“native’s point of view”. In my project, “participant observation” was an addition to

deep archival research. I have spent some time with Nenets in Kolguev island and

Yamal peninsula trying to understand how their narratives of the past affect their

modern life, how their ideas of the environment have been changing over time. This

anthropological data provides an anthropological extension to history analysis.

Moreover, in possession of scanned copies of the archival documents, historical

photographs and films, I have conducted a collaborative ethnography exploration of

the environments on Kolguev island as a place where most of Novaya Zemlya

Nenets were forcedly relocated to.

Research Ethics

Taking a bottom-up perspective, I aim to be open towards the communities I

work with and to be responsible to the past I reveal by being either alone in an

archive’s reading room or with people in the field. That intersection of a historical

sense of time and anthropological sense of social fabric underlays the ethical code of

my research. From the beginning, my personal epistemic in-betweenness pushed me

towards building the bridges between “us” and “them” through the common threads

of narratives, visual representations and the mutuality of material being. All that has

allowed me to bring the knowledge of the past back to the Arctic and in turn the

Arctic knowledge closer to the urban settings of Academia. As a certain result, I have

formulated my ethical code around three main lines. These are:…

Be responsible. Responsibility has occupied one of the dominant themes in social

sciences. Trying to avoid the epistemic dichotomies, I tried to uncover hardly heard

voices of Indigenous guides or just herders whose opinion insensibly affected if not

undermined the logical constructions of scholars or tried to change national and

international political decision-making processes. The act of giving the voice is also

the act of responsibility for both the communities a social scientist works with and

for the community he/she belongs to. My entire doctoral project balances on that

rickety bridge which is one of the few ways to decolonize “our” knowledge and

bring non-western ways of knowing into the orchestra of existed concepts and ideas.

Be collaborative. Despite the well-known collaborative anthropology guidelines,

this approach always bears some hiccups, which field and archival scholars realize in

the research process. Throughout my doctoral project, I have actively collaborated

with scholars of various disciplines: archaeologists, geneticists, linguists,

anthropologists, museum scholars, and, of course, other historians. As a result, I have

co-authored a few articles and book chapters, which directly and indirectly, have

assisted me with my present research. But most importantly, my work has also

included collaborative publications with members of my Yamal Nenets family. this

has been an experience that has allowed me to build new ways to collaborate as well

as preserve and transgenerationally transmit the existent environmental knowledge.

All those collaborations significantly enrich my knowledge and made it much more

nuanced when it comes to some subtle details of disciplinary-based expertise or

Indigenous perceptions of the landscape. This could not but affect my writing which,

I hope, is equally respectful to my Nenets friends and my colleagues in Sweden, UK,

US, Canada, Finland, Russia and other countries.

Be open. The third point is about openness and transparency. It is well known

that a significant part of the research of most of the social science and humanities

scholars remain quite personal and intimate. But the results of our work on the

contrary need openness and transparency. It was a great experience for me to be part

of two wonderful exhibition projects, where I was able to present some artefacts,

which I was given in the field in the Kolguev island and the Yamal peninsula.

First, I have participated in the exhibition at Nordiska Museet entitled The

Arctic – While the Ice is Melting . My contribution was related to the analysis of 1

human-environment relations in the Asian part of the Arctic, namely the social life of

driftwood as the main source of energy for nomadic Nenets. My research on the use

of driftwood is going to become an academic peer-reviewed article. Second, I was

part of the exhibition at British Museum, Arctic: culture and climate , where I 2

distributed a number of photographs and video recording from my field. Within this

second project, one ways to be open was to publish primary sources on Nenets

reindeer herding before and right after the Soviet collectivization. The archival

anthology met a welcome perception by local Nenets scholars and people living in

villages (Arzyutov and Lyubliskaya 2018). Moreover, I have gave a number of

interviews to various local newspapers in Yamal, which publicly explained methods

of my research and some of the topics of the dissertation.

At a technical level, my research ethics was based on the following codes. For

my field research, I follow the codes of American Anthropological Association, which

is the most developed statement for field workers and anthropological research in

general. Being part of ERC project, I take into account the ERC guidance related to

ethics. The codes of UNESCO (Social Sciences Code) and IASSA are employed in my

research as well. Based on my cases and research data, I will discuss all potential

ethic issues with my supervisors, field work co-operators, and the relatives (if it is

possible) of people of the past, whom I am going to write about. When it came to the

oral history interviews, I followed the published guidelines that were based on

https://www.nordiskamuseet.se/en/exhibitions/arctic-while-the-ice-is-melting 1

https://www.britishmuseum.org/exhibitions/arctic-culture-and-climate 2

“Principles for Oral History and Best Practices for Oral History” (2009, http://

www.oralhistory.org/about/principles-and-practices/).

Paper Summaries

Paper 1: Indigenous Narratives as an Archive

I start this paper with the question, “To what extent can indigenous narratives

from Siberia move beyond the borders of national anthropology and engage in a

more transnational conversation?”. To answer this question, I use archival, published

and ethnographic data from various parts of the Arctic and I show how an odd

indigenous (Nenets) narrative recorded by the imperial naturalists was able to affect

the development of Arctic anthropology and consequently the academic diplomacy

before and during the Cold War. Tracing the narrative about mysterious dwarfs, I

analyse how the archive of human and environmental history has been shaped and

how the narratives which underlay it have become “material” and “real” to be fully

integrated into the academic (metropolitan) epistemologies.

Key words: Underground world, Nenets, transnational history of anthropology,

Indigenous origin

Paper 2: The Archipelago of Novaya Zemlya as an Archive

In what ways do indigenous knowledge, scientific experiments, and military

tests intertwine in one particular place? To answer to this question, this paper

suggests to look at the histories of the enigmatic Arctic archipelago of Novaya

Zemlya. Tracing the environmental history of this archipelago from the competitive

European-Russian colonisation to the testing of the “Tsar Bomba” and the modern

project of environmental protection and industrial development, I argue that this

geographically remote place has often been a place of encounter, where different

ways of being and dwelling convened. This is what I refer to as “contact zone.” I

adopt this concept from literary and museum studies and show how interactions and

ideologies between human, non-human beings and the landscape have shaped the

modern Novaya Zemlya and how they have built together novozemalian identities,

bringing together indigenous Nenets and Pomor people and the military. The article

is based on archival research and ethnographic fieldwork on Kolguev island,

Naryan-Mar and Archangelsk among families, which were forcedly relocated from

Novaya Zemlya.

The analysis of all the “layers” of such a contact zone is could be analysed as a

palimpsest or environmental archive taken in one particular place. This paper aims to

conclude the dissertation showing how all the previous “layers” may be

superimposed.

Key words: Soviet Arctic, Cold War, Novaya Zemlya, Contact Zone

Paper 3: The Tundra as an Archive

The tundra covers 10% of Earth’s surface. Despite being a home to

Indigenous populations and a site for industrial development, to a significant

degree tundra remains associated to the public with wilderness and emptiness

and fragility. What are the genealogies of such perceptions? And how do they

correspond to the histories of human-environment interactions in the high

Arctic, including in the age of large-scale extractive industry? To answer this, the

paper focuses on the relations between industrial and conservation projects in

the Soviet Arctic tundra. Following the mechanical traces – in a strict sense and

as a metaphor – left behind from the military and the industrial developers of

the region, the article examines three main interlinked “layers” of tundra

histories in the 20th century: links between the tundra and the Other, the

emergence of tundra as a fragile surface under the wheels of industrial all-

terrain vehicles, and the complex history of one of the first tundra nature

reserves (zapovednik) which coincided with the rise of the international discourse

of biosphere. Thus the paper aims to overcome the marginal place the tundra

occupies in much environmental history and move it closer to such prominent

environmental objects as forest, mountains, seas, and others.

In the context of the thesis, I aim to show the tundra as a meeting point of

various political and engineering agencies which, on the one hand, “wrote” on

the tundra surfaces their histories, and on the other, the tundra was able to

respond and shape its own environmental archive, which encompasses not only

the political decisions but also human voices and practices on the ground.

Key words: tundra conservation, industrial development, mechanical traces, Arctic,

Indigenous peoples

Paper 4: The Human Body as an Archive

This paper deals with the human acclimatization project that run between

the 1930s and the 1980s in the Soviet North and has received relatively little

attention from historians and social science scholars. Drawing on the laboratory

experiments of Grigoriĭ M. Danishevskiĭ (1890-1971) and Vlail’ P. Kaznacheev

(1924-2014), the author traces the notion of human acclimatisation/adaptation

through the dynamic medical discourses and practices of human-environment

interactions in the circumpolar region. The author argues that the project

epistemically relied upon Pavlov’s physiology and the ideas of “inheritance of

acquired characteristics”. In the context of industrial development of the North,

the project was turned into a two-way road where the “Russian” settler

colonizers were meant to inherit new corporeal characteristics through the

adjustment to the Arctic climate and environments and the Indigenous peoples

were forcedly converted to the Soviet ways of living through the transformation

of their habits. They both meant to become the Homo Polaris as go-betweens

constantly attuning to changing environmental, social, scientific and political

requests. The article is based on the detailed analysis of published and

unpublished works of medical and social scholars, who worked in the Soviet

Arctic at that time.

Among other things, the encounters of Soviet and Indigenous ways of

living led to new understanding the relations between the environment and

human bodies, which could be read as an environmental archive.

Key words: Human acclimatization, Soviet Arctic, Industrialization, Indigenous

Peoples

Paper 5: The Extinct/Extant Animal as an Archive

The article investigates how in the Soviet Arctic researchers and indigenous

communities searched and understood the mammoth before and during the Cold

War. Based on a vast number of published and unpublished sources as well as

interviews with scholars and reindeer herders, this article demonstrates that the

mammoth as a paleontological find fusing together features of extinct and extant

species, plays an in-between role among various environmental epistemologies. The

author refers to moments of interactions among these different actors as

“environmental encounters,” which comprise and engagement with the physical,

political, social and cultural environments of the Arctic. These encounters shape the

temporal stabilisations of knowledge which enable the mammoth to live its post-

extinct life. The article combines approaches from environmental history and

anthropology, history of science and Indigenous studies showing the social vitality of

a “fossil object”.

Concerning the notion of environmental archive, the article shows how an

paleontological “object” encompasses various ideas of the past and is able to govern

them though its own partiality and uncanny. The environmental archive here is not

only the mammoth remains but also the wider environment it shapes.

Key words: Mammoth; Environmental encounters; Extinct/extant; In-betweenness;

Soviet Arctic

Arzyutov, Dmitry V. 2019. “Environmental Encounters: Woolly Mammoth,

Indigenous Communities and Metropolitan Scientists in the Soviet Arctic.”

Polar Record 55 (3): 142–153. doi:10.1017/S0032247419000299.

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