The North of Western Siberia in the Socioeconomic Space of the USSR: Shifting Models of Nature Use

Abstract

Abstract The north of Western Siberia is a region that in a historically short time went from a hub of territorial development, where it was only necessary to control the volume of extraction of certain resources, to a zone of extensive industrial development of vast territories with the need for comprehensive environmental protection. The models of embedding the north of Western Siberia into the socioeconomic space of the USSR were simultaneously based on the need to develop the region’s rich natural resources and to rationally use them. At their core was an industrial standard. In the 1930s–1950s, this industrial standard depended on the use of biological resources, where the main producer of material wealth was the Indigenous inhabitants of the north. Yet it failed. A need arose to rely on resources with a more powerfully transformative and modernizing potential. These resources became hydrocarbons. Beginning in the 1960s, the model of natural resource use in the north was reoriented towards the extraction of oil and gas. The favorable market conditions and large export potential of these resources made it possible to solve not only economic but also ideological tasks. The main producer of material goods became the migrant population, which had the necessary professional and social skills to translate the industrial standard into practice. The Indigenous peoples of the north found themselves on the sidelines of socioeconomic development. A stereotype took root in Soviet society and science that the main object of management and transformation should be nature, which can be modified unlimitedly and at any speed. At the same time, it is obvious that technological and socioeconomic mechanisms are more, not less, malleable than natural ones. A person in the “human-nature” system was considered utilitarianly, exclusively from an economic standpoint. All of this speaks to the need to better understand the historical experience of state environmental management in northern Siberia and the role of people in this process.