Course description
The Arctic is often imagined as a remote, timeless space inhabited primarily by Indigenous peoples living in extreme climatic conditions or, conversely, as a depopulated industrial resource frontier. This course challenges such representations by approaching the Russian Arctic as a densely inhabited, politically shaped, and constantly transforming region, where multiple social groups, infrastructures, and environments coexist and interact. The course explores how political projects, economic systems, and forms of knowledge have actively reshaped Arctic environments – and how, in turn, Arctic climatic and environmental conditions have shaped patterns of settlement, mobility, labor, and everyday life.
Combining historical and anthropological approaches, the course traces major transformations in the Russian North – from early imperial expansion, through Soviet industrialization and urbanization, to post-Soviet restructuring and contemporary extractive economies. Special attention is paid to how state policies and political ideologies have intervened in Arctic environments through relocation campaigns, collectivization and sedentarization of Indigenous populations, large-scale industrial projects, and the construction of transportation infrastructures.
The course is organized around different Arctic lifeways, including rural settlements, industrial towns, and shift-work regimes. It highlights the coexistence of diverse social groups in the Russian North and examines how people inhabit, navigate, and adapt to environmentally and infrastructurally shaped landscapes. By focusing on everyday practices, social networks, and modes of living, the course dismantles simplified narratives of the North. Throughout the course, students critically engage with popular imaginaries of the Arctic and examine how these representations shape policy, scientific knowledge, and public debates.

Learning outcomes
By the end of the course, students will:
_Acquire knowledge of the historical and contemporary social and environmental transformations of the Russian Arctic and Siberia;
_Critically examine the role of state policies, industrial projects, and infrastructure in shaping everyday life in the Arctic;
_Become familiar with key debates in anthropology concerning the Arctic;
_Critically evaluate popular imaginaries of the Arctic region, and assess their political, scientific, and social implications;
_Develop skills in academic writing and oral presentations.

Teaching and evaluation methods
Attendance and active participation in discussions – 30 %;
The reading responses – 20 %;
The final paper – 30 %;
Oral presentations – 20 %.

Each week focuses on a single thematic topic. The first class is organized as a lecture introducing key concepts, historical context, and analytical frameworks. The second class takes the form of a seminar, in which students analyze and discuss an academic text, a literary work, a film, or a case study related to the weekly topic. For some seminars, students are expected to prepare a short written response reflecting on the reading or viewing assignment.
For the final paper, each student selects a book, film, blog, or digital ethnography project related to the Russian Arctic and analyzes it in relation to the themes covered throughout the course, demonstrating critical engagement with course concepts and readings. Students are expected to present their work in the final class. The paper (approx. 2,500 words) must be discussed with the professor by Week 7, submitted by Week 10, and presented in Week 12.
Papers marked with * are non-obligatory for reading.

Syllabus

Week 1. Introduction. What is the Arctic? Geography, climate, and definitions. Representations of the Arctic. The Russian Arctic in a global context
In this opening session we will outline the geographical scope of the Arctic, focusing on the Russian Arctic and Siberia while situating them within wider circumpolar contexts. We will discuss how different definitions of the Arctic (geophysical, climatic, political, cultural) shape the way the region is imagined and governed. We will raise the question: what makes the Arctic and Siberia distinctive, and how are they connected socially and economically both to the rest of Russia and to the wider world? During the seminar, students discuss contemporary journalistic portrayals of the Russian North and reflect on how everyday realities complicate familiar Arctic stereotypes.
Readings
* Dodds, Klaus, and Mark Nuttall. 2019. The Arctic: What Everyone Needs to Know. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
* Larsen, Joan Nymand, and Gail Fondahl, eds. 2015. Arctic Human Development Report: Regional Processes and Global Linkages. Copenhagen: Nordic Council of Ministers.

Week 2. “Siberia and Russia”: natural resources, relocations, transportation infrastructure (17th - 19th centuries)
This session examines the expansion of the Russian Empire into Siberia and the Arctic between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries. We discuss fur extraction, exile, transportation routes, and the role of scientific exploration in integrating Siberia into imperial governance. Special attention is paid to the ways Siberia becomes imagined simultaneously as a frontier of punishment, opportunity, and natural wealth. During the seminar, students discuss Anton Chekhov’s “Sakhalin island” and analyze the relationship between empire, punishment, infrastructure, and knowledge production.
Readings
Chekhov, Anton. 2018. Sakhalin Island. London: Alma Books.
* Slezkine, Yuri. 1994. Arctic Mirrors: Russia and the Small Peoples of the North. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

Week 3. Indigenous peoples of the Arctic: lifeways, migrations, engagement with the environment
This week focuses on the Indigenous peoples of the Russian Arctic and Siberia and the diversity of northern subsistence systems, including reindeer herding, fishing, hunting, and marine mammal harvesting. The lecture emphasizes mobility as a key principle of northern life and examines how Indigenous communities adapt to changing ecological and political conditions. Particular attention is paid to migration histories, environmental knowledge, and the relationship between landscape and social organization. During the seminar, students discuss the film “Northern Wind Can Be Warm” and reflect on human-animal relations, environmental adaptation, and everyday life in the Arctic.
Readings
* Krupnik, Igor. 2002. Arctic Adaptations: Native Whalers and Reindeer Herders of Northern Eurasia. Hanover, NH: Dartmouth College Press.
* Slezkine, Yuri. 1994. Arctic Mirrors: Russia and the Small Peoples of the North. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

Week 4. Arctic encounters: coexistence of Indigenous and settler worlds
This session explores relations between Indigenous populations and newcomers in the Russian North. We discuss how different forms of Arctic expansion reshape northern territories and systems of mobility, focusing on three major modes of encounter: transportation infrastructure, geological survey, and Arctic exploration. During the seminar, students discuss Bathsheba Demuth’s “Floating Coast” and analyze how interactions between Indigenous communities, states, and environments shape the history of the Bering Strait region.
Readings
Demuth, Bathsheba. 2019. Floating Coast: An Environmental History of the Bering Strait. New York: W. W. Norton & Company.
* Arsenyev, Vladimir. 1996. Dersu Uzala. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press.
* Davydov, Vladimir N. 2014. People on the Move: Development Projects and the Use of Space by Northern Baikal Reindeer Herders, Hunters and Fishermen. PhD diss., University of Aberdeen.

Week 5. The city in the North. Soviet industrialization
This lecture examines Soviet industrialization and the creation of Arctic cities. We discuss how the logics of northern development change across different Soviet periods, from the reliance on Gulag labor and coercive settlement to later policies based on wage incentives, northern bonuses, and the promotion of long-term urban residence. During the seminar, students discuss selected stories from Varlam Shalamov’s “Kolyma Tales” and analyze literary representations of Soviet industrialization, labor, and everyday life in Kolyma.
Readings
Shalamov, Varlam. 1994. Kolyma Tales. London: Penguin UK.
* Bruno, Andy, and Ekaterina Kalemeneva. 2023. “Creating the Soviet Arctic, 1917–1991.” In The Cambridge History of the Polar Regions, edited by Adrian Howkins and Klaus Dodds, 462–486. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Week 6. Soviet politics of collectivization and sedentarization
In this session we discuss how the Soviet state reorganizes mobility, labor, education, and settlement through collective farms, cultural bases, boarding schools, and administrative centralization. Particular attention is paid to the relationship between collectivization and sedentarization, the changing forms of northern labor organization from kolkhozy to sovkhozy, and the transformation of mobility into what Soviet authorities described as “productive nomadism.” The lecture also examines the contradictory character of Soviet modernization at different stages, which simultaneously expands educational opportunities, supports Indigenous languages and cadre formation, and undermines many local forms of autonomy and systems of knowledge transmission. During the seminar, students discuss the film "Seven Songs from the Tundra" and analyze representations of boarding schools, family separation, and Soviet transformation in Yamal.
Readings
* Bartels, Dennis A., and Alice L. Bartels. 1995. When the North Was Red: Aboriginal Education in Soviet Siberia. Montreal & Kingston: McGill–Queen’s University Press.
* Habeck, Joachim Otto. 2013. “Learning to Be Seated: Sedentarization in the Soviet Far North as a Spatial and Cognitive Enclosure.” In Nomadic and Indigenous Spaces: Productions and Cognitions, edited by Judith Miggelbrink, Joachim Otto Habeck, Nuccio Mazzullo, and Peter Koch, 155–180. Farnham: Ashgate.

Week 7. Modern Arctic city: environment and infrastructure
This session focuses on post-Soviet Arctic cities and the role of infrastructure in organizing urban life in extreme environments. We discuss how Soviet urban forms and infrastructures continue to shape life in the contemporary North under very different political and economic conditions. Particular attention is paid to post-Soviet crisis, depopulation, infrastructural fragility, and debates about contraction and resettlement, as well as to the ways residents develop attachment to industrial northern cities and surrounding landscapes. During the seminar, students discuss Asya Karaseva’s article “Shattering Event” and analyze how infrastructure breakdowns reveal the social and political vulnerabilities of the post-Soviet northern city.
Readings
Karaseva, Asya. 2025. “Shattering Event: The Sensory Mechanics of Infrastructural Breakdown in Kolyma, Russia.” History and Anthropology 36(4): 721–740.
* Bolotova, Alla. 2011. “Engaging with the Environment in the Industrialized Russian North.” Suomen Antropologi: Journal of the Finnish Anthropological Society 36(2): 28–36.
* Humphrey, Caroline. 2020. “Rethinking Infrastructure: Siberian Cities and the Great Freeze of January 2001.” In Wounded Cities: Destruction and Reconstruction in a Globalized World, edited by Jane Schneider and Ida Susser, 91–107. London: Routledge.

Week 8. Contemporary extraction industries in the Arctic: between Soviet heritage and international practices
This week examines post-Soviet extraction industries and the growing role of rotational shift labor in the Russian Arctic. We discuss how the collapse of the Soviet system reshapes extraction through privatization, corporate consolidation, changing labor regimes, and new relations between industrial companies, local communities, and the state. During the seminar, students analyze the corporate film “The Battle for the Internet” commissioned by Nornickel and discuss how extraction companies represent infrastructure, modernity, and the social role of industry in the contemporary Arctic.
Readings
* Gavrilova, Kseniia. 2023. “Arctic LNG Production and the State: The Case of Yamal Peninsula.” In The Siberian World, edited by Marjorie Mandelstam Balzer, 273–284. London: Routledge.
* Saxinger, Gertrude. 2021. “Rootedness along the Way: Meaningful Sociality in Petroleum and Mining Mobile Worker Camps.” Mobilities 16(2): 194–211.

Week 9. Rural communities of the contemporary Arctic
This session explores the restructuring of rural Arctic life after the collapse of the Soviet Union. We discuss the crisis of collective farms, the weakening of Soviet systems of provisioning and transport, and the emergence of mixed livelihood economies based on hunting, fishing, pensions, public-sector employment, household mobility, and informal exchange. During the seminar, students discuss the documentary "Happy People: A Year in the Taiga" and analyze seasonal rhythms, subsistence practices, mobility, and relations between infrastructure and environment in northern rural communities.
Readings
* Thompson, Niobe. 2009. Settlers on the Edge: Identity and Modernization on Russia’s Arctic Frontier. Vancouver: UBC Press.
* Wilson, Emma. 2002. “Est’ zakon, est’ i svoi zakony: Legal and Moral Entitlements to the Fish Resources of Nyski Bay, North-Eastern Sakhalin.” In People and the Land: Pathways to Reform in Post-Soviet Siberia, edited by Erich Kasten, 149–168. Berlin: Dietrich Reimer Verlag.

Week 10. Migration, social networks and coping with resource challenges in the Russian North
This lecture examines mobility as a central condition of life in the Russian North. We discuss migration between northern and southern regions of Russia, educational and medical mobility, northern vacations, and the role of kinship and social networks in obtaining goods, services, and support. Particular attention is paid to migration as a family and network project, the formation of stable “paired regions,” and the ways people compensate for infrastructural deficits through mobility and informal exchange. During the seminar, students work with ethnographic cases and analyze migration trajectories, family networks, and forms of support that make northern mobility possible.
Readings
* Lee, Molly. 2002. “The Cooler Ring: Urban Alaska Native Women and the Subsistence Debate.” Arctic Anthropology 39(1–2): 3–9.
* Liarskaya, Elena. 2017. “‘Where Do You Get Fish?’: Practices of Individual Supplies in Yamal as an Indicator of Social Processes.” Sibirica 16(3): 124–149.

Week 11. Lifestyles in the Russian North
The final thematic session synthesizes the course through the concept of lifestyle. We discuss how diverse population groups coexist within the contemporary Russian Arctic. The lecture emphasizes that the North cannot be reduced to a single social model and instead consists of multiple intersecting forms of mobility, settlement, infrastructure, and environmental engagement. During the seminar, students discuss Masha Shaw’s chapter from “Lifestyle in Siberia and the Russian North” and reflect on how different northern lifestyles are shaped by mobility, choice, adaptation, and attachment to place.
Readings
Habeck, Joachim Otto, ed. 2019. Lifestyle in Siberia and the Russian North. Cambridge: Open Book Publishers.

Week 12. Final presentations
Students present their course papers (15 minutes each), followed by discussion.

Course duration: 40 hours of tuition
Credits equivalence: 6 ECTS

Last updated: June 11, 2026