On Monday October 2nd, the STS department was joined by Ph.D.  Student Felix Frey from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology. In his presentation, Mr. Frey discussed his work around Industrial Centers in the Arctic, and how he answers the question why soviet planners located cities and industry in hostile environments. The Russian arctic is surprisingly, very densely populated, and a fair amount of research has looked into this question of why. Frey furthers this research by looking into the USSR’s original attempts to tame the hostile environment in addition to other considerations the Soviet Union had for why the north: space, strategic argument, and ideology.

Considering the first factor, space, Frey argues that it had always been an issue for the Russian economy simply due to the vast size of the country. To put this in perspective, Russia is almost two times the size of the United States, so this makes transporting costs rather high to get from point a to point b. As a result, these northern cities responsible for extracting the resources began to develop in a way to decrease the amount of space, to and from the North, that raw materials had to travel. Evolving these cities to have the means to refine ores directly decreases transaction costs from the original thousand tons of nickel ore to a few tons of the refined nickel.

The second reason Frey discussed as a driver for the establishment of these northern cities was the country’s strategic argument and readiness for war. In 1928, the key sites for fuel extraction were all located very close to the boarder. In case of an invasion into the country, the USSR wanted to avoid a total shut down of the production and resulting collapse of the economy, so they looked for new locations where they could mine materials farther from the boarder. As a result, by 1941 sites were formed in the arctic, and just in time. The lower regions of Russia, exactly where the original plants were, found themselves occupied by germans in WWII and production halted completely. Luckily, these supplies from the new northern sites were able to keep supply of oil and coal moving to a substantial amount of the country.

The third consideration drew our attention to the ideology that “should never be underestimated in Soviet politics.” Frey described this as an Anti-Imperialist Impetus. By creating these cities in the arctic, planners were aiming to avoid ties between the outer cities and the industrial centers that mirrored colonial relationships. The goal was to ensure that these cities were not limited to their primary role of sending resources to the industrial centers.

Frey wrapped up his discussion with a quick look into the Post-Soviet situation and how a substantial number have left these arctic cities. Today, answering this question of why the arctic for these cities has transitioned to whether or not individuals should remain there interestingly enough. Now the incentives are not pushing individuals away from the boarders, as they were before WWII, but instead herding them down from the North to the warmth.