New Publication on Resettlement Policy in the Russian North

19.8.2011 10:56
A new Arctic Centre research publication by political anthropologist Elena Nuykina shows that resettlement policy in the Russian North has been a top-down process, leaving limited space for regional interference. Russian northern relocation projects stand for a policy which considers population groups as passive elements "moved by the state" due to economic, military and geopolitical interests. However, the study shows that proactive northern residents have their own strategies to seek better living conditions for themselves and their families, using creatively the state’s relocation programmes for their own interests.

As a part of the Arctic Centre's anthropology research team project MOVE-INNOCOM, the research focuses on administrative migration assistance programs and their implementation results on two northern regions, Murmansk Oblast and Yamal-Nenets Autonomous Okrug (YNAO). Both programmes concentrate on residents of closing settlements, disabled, pensioners and non-working citizens, those who 'create a burden on northern budgets'. At the current stage, the resettlement process is carried out through a housing certificate scheme that allows people to choose a place of destination and type of housing.

"The important question arising from the regulatory perspective on demographic changes is: What population is 'welcome' to reside in the North and who should leave? The Russian government makes this distinction clear: those who cannot contribute to economic growth should be encouraged to move", Elena Nuykina says in the study.

The attempts of the state to artificially 'engineer' the social structure did not meet its objective and caused an insignificant impact on either population change or northern development in general. The northern resettlement policy has not worked as it was initially aimed.

"Northerners rely on the state in helping them to resettle since it was the state that brought them to the North in the first place. However, when they get migration assistance in many cases beneficiaries use the subsidies for a different purpose. In practice, the decision to migrate is not simply planned in accordance with the logic of neo-classical economics. It includes determinants poorly considered by policy planners, such as accumulated social capital, personal experiences, and memories attaching people to the place."

Nuykina says that one option of bringing programmes closer to the target population would be through delegating the decisive power to the regions, allowing them to determine how the programme should function in their territory and adjusting relocation schemes according to the local context.

According to senior researcher Florian Stammler, coordinator of the Arctic Anthropology Research team at the Arctic Centre, the study can be interpreted in the larger context:

"This work speaks to the inherent tension between laws that claim to be standardised throughout the whole country and valid for all citizens, and human practice on the ground, which has a sheer endless diversity to respond to such standardised models of development."

Background of the research
Elena Nuykina's study is part of the research project Assessing senses of place, mobility and viability in industrial northern communities (2006–2010, BOREAS MOVE-INNOCOM), funded by the Academy of Finland. The project focused on processes of mobility and locality as induced by the Soviet and Russian State in the two northern Russian regions. The main focus was on life histories of non-native northerners living in industrial cities, their sense of place and their movement and settlement decisions.

The North was one of the main priorities of the Soviet state’s development policy from 1930 to 1980. The strategy of northern development was built upon the centralized redistribution of both human and financial resources to the northern territories, aimed at the industrial development of the North and exploitation of mineral wealth to bear export revenues for the national budget.

Liberalisation of the economic and political spheres in the early 1990s significantly transformed the state’s approach to its northern periphery. Permanently inhabited northern cities retain their importance as a fortress of state power in the Arctic region and centres of further exploitation of northern mineral wealth. On the other hand, previous state-planning and extensive subsidising changed to a development strategy that relied on profit-oriented cost-cutting measures, including restructuring northern industries, downsizing northern settlements, eliminating 'unpromising communities', and facilitating out-migration.

Publication:
Elena Nuykina (2011): Resettlement from the Russian North: An Analysis of State-Induced Relocation Policy. Guest edited and with a preface by Florian Stammler. Arctic Centre Reports 55.

Printed copy orders or electronic version:
www.arcticcentre.org/anthropology

For more information, please contact:
Senior researcher Florian Stammler, tel. +358 400 138 807, florian.stammler(at)ulapland.fi