The Indigenous Citizens of Igarka: Colonial Discourse and Socialist Modernity in the Arctic Soviet Cityin the 1930s

Abstract

The public history of the first Arctic Soviet city in the 1930s tells about the drifts and receptions of colonial discourse and ideas about socialist modernity. In the initial era of Stalinist industrialization, the colonial imagination about Indigenous peoples was completely connected with the policy of collectivization. At the same time, this economic policy of forcibly uniting the Indigenes was accompanied by the creation of a category of agitators from among the Indigenous population itself. Students of the Party School, returning to their native places, told other Indigenes how to live well under the collective farm system. This colonial policy of Igarka’s city managers remained largely an ironic compromise of discursive mimicry until the end of 1934. After the political activists of Glavsevmorput came to power, the ideology of technocratism began to totally dominate the public discourse of Igarka. The new polar explorers, who were convinced of the creation of the Northern Sea Route, set a course for the sedentarization of the Indigenous population and introducing it to life in socialist modernity. Technocrats dramatically intensified political agitation, making the image of Igarka as a socialist industrial center of the Arctic the main propaganda weapon. In their rationalizing imagination, colonial rhetoric took the form of city discourse, in which a prosperous life as in a city was declared an achievable ideal for native collective farmers who had moved from the simplest production association to a collective farm according to the Stalinist charter of artel.