I got interested in Russia as a teenager. I studied Russian language at school and before the matriculation exam I decided to visit Russia to strengthen my language skills. That was a cultural shock for me, even though I had visited the Black Sea coast during the Soviet era as a child. In spite of the shock, something happened during that short language course and I fell in love with the decadence romantics of St. Petersburg and more broadly speaking, with the Russian way of life.

After language studies in the Polytechnic University I entered the Department of Slavistics in the University of Helsinki. During my studies I attended courses of Russian literature, poetry, Czech and Croatian languages, even Church Slavonic, until I got the chance to study political history. It was maybe the best choice that I have made what comes to my studies, because here I could combine the knowledge of Russian language and culture with history.

I have been working almost two years as a coordinator in two projects, which study reindeer herding and nomadic pastoralist livelihoods in Yamal Peninsula. During this time, I have gained knowledge in general about the Arctic and the key issues, one must know “in the business”. Still my focus is in the Russian Arctic, not in the herding, but the history of the “conquering” of the North from the 1920’s onwards. So called Arctic boom isn’t anything new in the Russian context, so what bothers me, is the historylessness of the narratives about the Arctic, which most often start from the year 2007 and the planting of the Russian flag into the seabed in North pole. In my PhD I want to show, how the Arctic policies developed, using the concept of the Arctic as a key to understand the main transformations in the history of the Russian Arctic.