The collection, “Children of the Nineties” in Contemporary Russian Arctic: A Collective Monograph investigates an entanglement of questions of (im)mobility: how and why do people choose to stay in the North, or what drives them out? Why do people who grew up in the same environment respond differently to the changes of the surroundings? There is a certain split between the discursive and the behavioral. While people actively engage with these questions in conversations, their behavior is not necessarily defined by what they say. Rather, the narrative and actions are in a complex relationship. It boils down to the difference between the reason for the behavior and the reasoning about this behavior. Perhaps ethnographic methods are responsible for this mismatch (spoken versus perfromed), but it is possible that it signifies a gap between what humans do and what humans think they do, what they are, and how they perceive themselves. Deti devianostykh is a Russian expression loosely and sometimes humorously applied to a generation that came of age in the aftermath of the collapse of the USSR. The editors specify that it is a generation born between 1980 and 1995. They focus on those living in the North.
The collective of authors offers an encyclopedia of the North by outlining the economic and demographic conditions of the regions from Murmansk Oblast to Kamchatskii Krai. The picture is familiar: the infrastructure is often stretched thin. Where a road is present, it is a great connector defining the closeness to or remoteness from the city. In many settlements, the mobile telephone service is scarce outside of certain spots; the internet is slow and is the subject of small talk. WhatsApp plays an important role connecting people together for a great variety of business and personal enterprises. Settlements range from those founded in the sixteenth century by Cossacks as part of tsarist colonization of the North to those founded by Soviet ambitions. In the post-Soviet years, the population is decreasing in many places, with the exception of many big cities. Depopulation of the North is a problem, and the motivation to stay or to go is not limited to economic reasons. The theoretical framework that writers consider most relevant for the conversation about the North revolves around the keywords of infrastructure, mobility and migration, sustainability, resilience and vulnerability, as well as lifestyle. The question of choice is closely connected to the question of agency, but no one, no matter how powerless, is denied agency in “choosing” a path for themselves.
In the first chapter, “To move away or stay: Social mechanics of Northern migrations,” Elena Liakskaya, Valeria Vasilieva, and Anastasia Karasiova argue that mobility is a crucial part of life in the North, interwoven into the fabric of everydayness. Movement does not neatly fall into categories with which mobility and migration are traditionally described. Such models as brodiaga (vagabond), when a young person moves between several places using social infrastructure—family, kin, and friendship connections—defy notions of departure and arrival, as does the “distributed” way of living of many Russian families moving between apartment, dacha, garage, cellar, barn, and other localities where life unfolds.
The second chapter, “Mobility, infrastructure, and the perception of the place” by Valeria Vasilieva, Anastasia Karasiova, and Alla Bolotova asks an interesting question: how does the comparatively higher intensity of mobility in the North correspond to the more rarified state of the infrastructure. At the first glance, higher mobility and “lower” infrastructure are at odds. Yet mobility thrives in the attempt to fulfill the infrastructure deficits (159). Whether people travel to get medical services unavailable locally or for the enjoyment of “nature,” mobility aims to supplement the deficits of place.
In Chapter 3, “Of subjugated space and unsubjugated dreams: Factors of outmigration from South Yakutia,” Veronika Simonova analyzes the dreams and desires accompanying decisions of migration. She comes to the conclusion that images of the future of many in South Yakutia are continuations of their parents’ dream to build comfortable northern cities and/or to earn enough money for a “good life” in a big city somewhere in the south. Today these dreams, largely unfulfilled, dictate the individual ideas of staying or going.
For lack of space, I am going to address here one more chapter out of the four remaining ones—namely, Chapter 6, “Size and its significance: Of social networks and social comfort in the Yamal Peninsula and Kamchatka” by Elena Liakskaya and Ksenia Gavrilova. Here again we see the refusal of the authors to treat their interlocutors as agentless beings. Staying is considered a choice. The focus is the size of the settlement, as it also plays a role. Living in a closer-knit community from several hundred to several thousand people has advantages, such as a feeling of safety and familiarity, as well as greater food security compared to what they could count on if they moved to a city.
One of the striking features of the book that distinguishes it from other works—and on that the editors reflect in the “Introduction”—is the near-complete absence of the “Soviet/post-Soviet” framework as the informants do not use it as a referential model. This absence is as sudden as it is refreshing and opens up the space for other frameworks. But going forward we must see more and more of it, for the obvious reasons, where “Soviet/post-Soviet” further enwraps the past in a shroud, becoming the stuff of nostalgia, disinformation, and selective remembrance.
The question of whether to leave or stay and what influences decisions remains. This book considers a great variety of factors. One thing seems doubtless to me: the North has a future that will be woven and intersect with many individual fates, and it offers a lot of surprises waiting to be discovered.
