Going into Felix Frey’s talk on “Industrial Centers in the Arctic: Why Soviet Planners Located Cities and Industry in Hostile Environments,” I was expecting to struggle with understanding the material since I have no background knowledge on the subject matter.  However, Mr. Frey successfully drew me into a surprisingly fascinating topic.  These industrial cities located in the far north of the Soviet Arctic are homes to extremely unique communities and their reasons for coming to and staying in these hostile environments are very interesting.

These cities originally drew people to the far north with the promise of a job, a home, and company-paid utilities.  The Soviet Union had a goal to utilize all of its natural resources, and since these hostile environments held profitable resources, they needed a way to attract workers.  The promise of a paying job and provided utilities was enough to draw people up north, and often enough to make people stay.  Once a community had been established, families for generations stayed in these northern industrial cities.  They had built a life there and grown accustomed to an extreme climate lifestyle.

These industrial centers in the Soviet Arctic thus drew people away from home into extreme climates with a vastly different lifestyle, and all for the operation of factories.  This ability of the demand for manual labor to completely change people’s lives reminded me of Lewis Mumford’s considerations in Technics and Civilization.  Had there been the technology to automatize the extraction of natural resources, so many people would not have been displaced.  However, on the flip side, the automatization of the industry would have taken away the opportunity for all of these people to earn a living.  By introducing machines and automatizing labor, we make life easier and more convenient, but we also take away jobs from people who need them.  As we keep automatizing, more and more people lose their jobs and less and less jobs become available.

What will happen to these people who have built their lives working in industrial cities in the Soviet Arctic when the factories shut down or come to rely completely on machines?  What will happen to everyday people across the world as they are replaced by machines?  Especially in regard to the communities in the Soviet Arctic, these people do not know another life than the one they have built in these extreme climates.  They are accustomed to a very specific lifestyle and to suddenly have to move away from home and into a completely different city with no job and no familiarity would be extremely difficult.

Although these communities of people living in the harsh conditions of the Soviet Arctic must have struggled to adapt and continue to struggle with the climate, they have built a life in these places where they earn a good living and have a set routine.  To replace these people with machines or to close the factories all together and leave them without jobs would be to destroy the life they have worked so hard to maintain and the communities they have become a part of.