The research for this essay was funded by Közép-Európai Egyetem (KEE) and German Research Foundation (DFG, Project number 552244184). The ideas explained herein are the author’s, and do not necessarily reflect the opinion of KEE and DFG.
James Forsyth, History of the Peoples of Siberia: Russia’s North Asian Colony 1581-1990 (Cambridge University Press, 1990; repr., 2008), 390.
On trans-regional labor migration to Western Siberia, see: Alexander Etkind et al., “Ukrainian Labour and Siberian Oil in the Late Soviet Empire,” Journal of Soviet and Post-Soviet Politics and Society 6, no. 2 (2020): 241–80; Rasa Čepaitienė and Vera Kliueva “Lithuanian Labor Migrants and the Construction of the Western Siberian Oil-Gas Complex in the Late USSR,” Journal of Baltic Studies 52, no. 3, (2021): 327–56; and Dunja Krempin, “Heroic Black Gold? Working for Oil and Gas in the Western Siberian Oil and Gas Complex of the 1960-1970s,” in Working for Oil: Comparative Social Histories of Labor in the Global Oil Industry, ed. T. Atabaki et al. (Cham, Switzerland: Springer, 2018), 285–310. For insights into the motivations and discourses surrounding Soviet workers’ relocation to the North, see Alla Bolotova, “Conquering Nature and Engaging with the Environment in the Russian Industrialised North” (PhD diss., University of Lapland, 2014), 18, 105.
Lyudmila Salnikova,“Parallelnaya Zhizn,” Ogonek 42 (1991): 11–15; Aileen Espiritu, “Aboriginal Nations: Natives in Northwest Siberia and Northern Alberta,” in Contested Arctic: Indigenous Peoples, Industrial States, and the Circumpolar Environment, ed. Eric Alden Smith and Joan McCarter (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1997), 48, 53, 71.
Moya sudba v istorii Yugry: Istoriya razvitiya Khanty-Mansiyskogo avtonomnogo okruga – Yugry v vospominaniyakh ego zhiteley, 1930–2005 gg.: Sbornik dokumentov (Tyumen: Administration for Archival Affairs of the Khanty-Mansi Autonomous Okrug – Yugra and State Archive of the Khanty-Mansi Autonomous Okrug – Yugra, 2005), 33–34, 66–67, 87, 363.
This pattern is also evident in twentieth-century Australian, Alaskan, and South African extractive projects. On the entanglement of architecture for extraction and acclimatization research see: Daniel James Ryan, Settling the Thermal Frontier: The Tropical House in Northern Queensland from Federation to the Second World War (PhD diss., University of Sydney, 2017); Lasse Rau, “Sweating and Dousing: Designing Climate-Humanist Architecture and the Arctic Worker,” Thresholds, no. 51 (2023): 116–30; and Megan Eardley, “‘Terrestrial Not by Nature and Essence’: The Acclimatization Chamber as Surface Technology in South Africa, ca. 1958,” Grey Room, no. 84 (2021): 64–85.
Igor Boyechin, “V Blochnom Ispolnenii,” Tekhnika – Molodezhi 6 (1979): 31.
Yu. I. Ermilov et al., Mobilnye zhilishcha dlya Severa: Iz legkikh splavov i sintet. materialov (Leningrad: Stroyizdat, 1976), 89–90.
P. I. Zimin and V. G. Lazareva, Vakhtennye zhilye kompleksy dlya severa (Leningrad: Stroyizdat, Leningradskoye otdeleniye, 1978), 3–4. On the institutional history of LenZNIIEP, see Ekaterina Kalemeneva, “From New Socialist Cities to Thaw Experimentation in Arctic Townscapes: Leningrad Architects Attempt to Modernise the Soviet North,” Europe-Asia Studies 71, no. 3 (2019): 436–40.
“Nad chem rabotayut zonalnye instituty,” Arkhitektura SSSR 6 (1964), 3–8.
A. Karagin and A. Antonov, “Kraynemu Severu – progressivnye resheniya,” Arkhitektura SSSR 2 (1975): 32–39. See more on the environmental factors in Soviet industrialisation in Pey-Yi Chu, The Life of Permafrost: A History of Frozen Earth in Russian and Soviet Science (University of Toronto Press, 2021); and Andy Bruno, The Nature of Soviet Power: An Arctic Environmental History (Cambridge University Press, 2016).
Ermilov et al., Mobilnye zhilishcha dlya Severa, 76.
Ermilov et al., Mobilnye zhilishcha dlya Severa, 79–80.
A. Karagin and A. Antonov,“Kraynemu Severu,” 38.
It is important to note that although it was no longer the dominant workforce, prison labor from the Omsk penal colony was involved in the construction of certain infrastructure projects in Western Siberia. On the formulation of the “livable North” principles in the Khrushchev period, see: Ekaterina Kalemeneva, “From New Socialist Cities to Thaw Experimentation in Arctic Townscapes: Leningrad Architects Attempt to Modernise the Soviet North,” Europe-Asia Studies 71, no. 3, (2019): 426–49; and Krempin, “Heroic Black Gold?” 286.
Igor Stas, “Urbanizatsiya Samostroya: Trushchoby v Neftedobyvayushchikh Rayonakh Sovetskoy Sibiri (1960-1980-e gg.),” Sibirskiye istoricheskiye issledovaniya 2 (2017): 86.
N .Vasilyeva,“Mobilnye doma,” Leningradskaya pravda, March 18, 1981, no. 67 (20109): 4.
“Sezam dlya Sibiryakov,” Sotsialisticheskaya industriya, October 27, 1981.
A. Karagin and A. Antonov, “Kraynemu Severu,” 39.
Ermilov et al., Mobilnye zhilishcha dlya Severa, 76, 78.
Temporary residence, with strict health measures, was advised for the third zone, while only the fourth zone, the middle taiga, was deemed suitable for permanent settlement. Central State Archive of Scientific Technical Documentation in Saint Petersburg, R-29, op. 2-1, d. 8 Metodicheskiye ukazaniya po gradostroitelnomu osvoyeniyu severnykh rayonov Zapadnoy Sibiri (rasseleniye, planirovka, inzhenernoye oborudovaniye naselennykh mest), tom 1 (zavershayushchy etap), 1975 g., p. 21.
Since at least the end of WWII, interdisciplinary Soviet medical science—spanning physiologists, psychologists, microbiologists, bioclimatologists, and other experts—developed scientific frameworks, medical protocols, and practical recommendations to aid human “acclimatization” in the North. Paul R. Josephson, The Conquest of the Russian Arctic (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014), p. 206–08.
Josephson, The Conquest of the Russian Arctic, 207–08, 360.
Dmitry V. Arzyutov, “The Making of the Homo Polaris: Human Acclimatization to the Arctic Environment and Soviet Ideologies in Northern Medical Institutions’, Settler Colonial Studies 14, no. 2 (2023): 180–203.
These ethnonyms originated from Soviet nationality policies. Natalya Novikova noted that place-based identity often took precedence over Soviet-designated nationalities, with Indigenous self-identification typically focused on connections to specific river territories and land stewardship, though they also engaged with fixed “ethnic identities.” See N. I. Novikova, Okhotniki i neftyaniki. Issledvoaniye po Yuridichesky Antropologii (Moscow: Nauka, (2014), 388.
Joachim Otto Habeck, “Learning to Be Seated: Sedentarization in the Soviet Far North as a Spatial and Cognitive Enclosure” in Nomadic and Indigenous Spaces. Productions and Cognitions, ed. Judith Miggelbrink et al., (Farnham, UK: Ashgate Publishing, 2013), 159, 161–63.
By the time extractive activities intensified in the 1960s, some patrimonial land had already been expropriated, and much of what remained in use by Indigenous communities had to be “donated” to the state. Marjorie Mandelstam Balzer, “Ethnicity Without Power: The Siberian Khanty in Soviet Society,” Slavic Review 42, no. 4, (1983): 637–38.
Novikova, Okhotniki i neftyaniki, 7–8.
V. Pestov, et al., “Zhiloy dom dlya selskikh poselkov Kraynego Severa,” Arkhitektura SSSR 4 (1973): 49.
Marjorie Mandelstam Balzer, The Tenacity of Ethnicity: A Siberian Saga in Global Perspective (Princeton University Press, 1999), 137. Mandelstam Balzer, “Ethnicity Without Power,” 637–38.
Joachim Otto Habeck, “Learning to Be Seated,” 161–63.
Central State Archive of Scientific Technical Documentation in Saint Petersburg, R-17, op. 2-6, d. 1193 Razrabotka tekhnologii izgotovleniya peredvizhnykh domov (iz plastmass) dlya vremennykh poselkov olenevodov, okhotnikov i rybakov Kraynego Severa, 1970 g., p. 6.
While nomadic dwellings were often cited as examples of mastering foundational principles of mobile architecture for their simplicity and transportability, including for mobile architecture and FIFO settlements, Soviet theorists of mobile architecture, such as Dzangar Purveev, believed that nomadism itself was on the path to disappear due to expected technical advancements. D. Pyurveyev, “Mobilnoye zhilishche dlya Severa i Yuga,” Arkhitektura 23 (1980): 4–5. On Purveev, see also: Ksenia Litvinenko, “Unsettled Modernization: Soviet Historiography on the Mongolian Ger, 1935-1980,” ABE Journal: Architecture Beyond Europe, 07 October 2024, ➝.
Ibid.
Lybov Nenyang, “Pyatna v geografii,” Pravda, May 19, 1988; А. Gamov, “Arkticheskii konsilium,” Sovetskaya Rossiya, September 22, 1988.
Email consultation with the anthropologist Zoltán Nagy, February 8, 2025.
Aleksandr Pika and Boris Prokhorov, “Bol’shye problem malykh narodov,” Kommunist 16 (1988): 76–83.
