Abstract

“… Let the climate here be determined by the warm Gulf Stream of the European process and not by the Polar chill of accumulated suspicions and prejudices. Let us prevent the North of the planet from ever again becoming an arena of war, by forming there a genuine zone of peace and fruitful cooperation.” (Mikhail Gorbachev’s “Murmansk speech”, October 1987)

From the 1920s to the 1980s, anthropology and related social science in the Russian and non-Russian Arctic developed in separate worlds, pursuing quite different theoretical questions and ideological agendas. Siberia was virtually closed to non-Soviet researchers, and Soviet researchers very rarely reached other parts of the Arctic.

Gorbachev’s astounding opening up of the Soviet Union suddenly made the obscure detective work of Western Kremlinologists obsolete and uninteresting. Political science careers based on grimness were washed away in a wave of hope. Now the grimness is back, but the detective work is more nuanced. For nearly forty years, foreign researchers and residents of the Russian Arctic have shared lives and projects, stayed in each other’s homes and mingled with each other’s families, reaching to the furthest, most closed regions of Russia as never before.

I shall explore the unique international role played in this process by Cambridge researchers, largely through long-term ethnographic fieldwork; the impact of the new ice curtain which descended in February 2022; and possible futures as we wait for the next (possible) thaw.