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ABSTRACT
This paper is about reading and using the Soviet texts published in the 1930s on the Northern sea route (NSR) and the Arctic in general. The history of the NSR exploration and exploitation and its current potential as a round-the-year transportation waterway connecting the Pacific and the Atlantic is outlined. Specific features of the 1930s’ sources for the study of the NSR are explored using the example of the journal Sovetskaya Arktika (The Soviet Arctic), published between 1935 and 1941. The representation of the Northern Sea Route in this journal is described from two perspectives: what was presented (and what wasn't) and how it was presented. Special characteristics of the language used are considered to be interesting examples of the Soviet version of “totalitarian language” (newspeak, langue de bois). Historical sources written in this kind of language require special skills and special caution to read, interpret, and use.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1 The initial nineteenth-century concept of the NSR was to provide Siberia with an effective route to communicate with the rest of the world: this meant that landlocked Siberia by way of its mighty rivers could find an exit for its natural produce and an entrance for foreign industrial goods. In the 1910s the timber industry of the central part of the Yeniseisk Province came into play. As Siberian industry gained momentum in the 1920s, the Kara Sea Expeditions ceased being delivery voyages. The first Soviet Kara Sea expedition was organized in 1921, the second in 1922 (Josephson Citation2014, 46); by the 1930s, Siberia was exporting timber, graphite, and polymetallic ore (later, metals) from Norilsk. The author is grateful to his anonymous reviewer for this comment.
2 On the contemporary political, legal, and economic situation of the NSR see Keupp (Citation2015), especially the editor's introduction, pp. 7–20.
3 Glavnoe Upravlenie Severnogo Morskogo Puti, or Glavsevmorput', or GUSMP – Russian for “Central Administration of Northern Sea Route”, was established in December 1932, ceased to exist as an independent unit in 1953, and closed down in 1964.
4 Dal'stroi, aka State Trust for Road and Industrial Construction in the Upper Kolyma Area, was established in 1931 by the NKVD in order to manage road construction and gold mining in the far northeast of the Soviet Union (Magadan and Chukotka). Reorganized in 1952, it closed down in 1957 (Shirokov Citation2009).
5 Charles-Victor Langlois and Charles Seignobos in their 1897 work Introduction aux études historiques were, it seems, the first to formulate the principle of external and internal evaluation of the reliability of a historical document (in the original – critique des sources).
6 Committee of the North, or Committee for Furthering the Population of the Northern Territories, was established by the Soviet government in 1924 with the mission to involve the Indigenous people of the Far North into the Soviet modernization project, to help their economic, cultural, and political development, and to protect their interests (see: Vakhtin Citation1992, 10–11; Bartels and Bartels Citation1995).
7 See http://www.cnb.dvo.ru/ii/sevasia.htm for complete tables of content of this journal in .pdf format.
8 According to some sources, the journal began in 1927, but this is in all probability a mistake.
9 See http://ekb.aonb.ru/index.php?id=1586 and http://ekb.aonb.ru/index.php?id=1585 for more information.
10 The journal is now available online at: https://www.booksite.ru//sov_ark/index.htm
11 Ivan Papanin (1894–1986), a leading Arctic explorer, became famous after his 274 day drift on an ice block in 1937–38 as head of the North Pole-1 Station (SP-1). The crew included Ernst Krenkel, Evgeny Fyodorov and Pyotr Shirshov and they carried out extensive research in the Arctic area. SP-1 was evacuated by a small plane in February 1938.
Valery Chkalov (1904-1938), pilot, Georgii Baidukov (1907-1994), copilot, Alexander Belyakov (1897-1984), navigator – three people who in June 1937 made the world's first flight from Moscow to the USA via the North Pole in an ANT-25 airplane; sixty-three hours and sixteen minutes from the time they left Moscow until they landed at Swan Island Airport in Portland, Oregon.
12 Sergei Mironovich Kirov (Kostrikov), 1886–1934, a high-ranking Soviet leader. On December 1, 1934, Kirov was assassinated in Leningrad. The assassin Leonid Nikolayev and his 13 suspected accomplices were sentenced to death. This gave Stalin the necessary pretext to launch an intense purge (The Great Purge of 1935–1938) when hundreds of thousands were killed or sent to labour camps. After Stalin's death Nikita Khrushchev in his classified address to the Twentieth Party Congress (1956) strongly implied that Stalin himself engineered Kirov’s assassination.
13 References to SA are given in the format Year-Issue-Page(s).
14 In 1936 and 1937, the infamous “show trials” of Trotskyists and the Zinovievists took place in Moscow; dozens of accused were condemned and executed, and mass repressions against their alleged “followers” spread all over the country. See Conquest (Citation1990) and Rogovin (Citation1998) for details.
15 Naturally, “commercial” was understood within the tight limits of Stalin's totalitarian socialism: Sovnarkom demanded that the NSR should switch to the so called hozrasschet, that is, become financially sustainable and operate without support from the government.
16 Alexsei Stakhanov (1906–1977) was a Soviet miner who became a celebrity in 1935 when he was reported to have set a new record by mining 102 tonnes of coal in a single shift instead of the required seven. This fake record became the start of “the Stakhanovite movement”, a campaign intended to increase worker productivity in the USSR (Troitskiy Citation2010).
17 One year before Orwell's famous 1984, a book was published in Germany (Klemperer Citation1947) in which a very similar phenomenon was analyzed, the language of the Nazi propaganda: LTI, Lingua Tertii Imperii (see Young Citation1991 for comparison of Orwell's, Hitler's, and Stalin's varieties of totalitarian language). In French, this phenomenon has been known as langue de bois; in English, as totalitarian language; in Russian, as sovetskii iazyk, “Soviet language”. There are both classical and recent works on totalitarian language and totalitarian orders of discourse (Zaslavsky and Fabris Citation1982; Karpinski Citation1984; Seriot Citation1985; Thom Citation1989). Statements on “Bolshevik language” have become ubiquitous (compare: Wierzbicka Citation1990; Epstein Mikhail Citation1991; Young Citation1991; Kupina Citation1995; Zemskaia Citation1996; Dunn Citation1999; Gorham Citation2014; Guseinov Citation2003, Citation2004; Chudakova Citation2007; Pöppel Citation2007; Petrov and Ryazanova-Clarke Citation2014; Vakhtin and Firsov Citation2016), but detailed studies of it are still rare.
18 Levin quotes from Hannah Arendt's The Origin of Totalitarianism: “Total domination does not allow for free initiative in any field of life, for any activity that is not entirely predictable” (Arendt Citation[1968] 1979, 37) and continues: “but if speech is entirely predictable then it must be of ritualized character and can only be ‘appropriate’ or ‘inappropriate’ – but not 'true' or 'false', because truth can't be entirely predictable” (Levin Citation1994, 148).
19 Dmitrii Kolyadov (Citation2014) compared several pairs of scholarly texts written by the same authors in the 1920s and 1930s in order to investigate the differences between the language of the two epochs. He showed that all texts from 1930s demonstrate noticeable traits of “Newspeak”, most strikingly in lexicon: all 1930s texts follow the Manichean vocabulary pattern, whereas this feature is completely absent from the 1920s texts. This linguistic shift allows the reader to distinguish between “good” and “bad” scholars, “good” and “bad” theories, and “good” and “bad” objects of study. There are also other features of totalitarian language in the 1930s texts, such as desemantization, stylistically marked words demagogically used to condemn opponents for wrong (“anti-Marxist”) methods, data, or conclusions. (Needless to say, this critique had nothing to do with Marxism). On the fate of the humanities and social sciences after The Great Turn of 1929 see also Barber (Citation1979), Solovei (Citation2001), and Robinson (Citation2004).
20 In this case, not a rhetorical device that emphasizes something by omitting it, but simply a lacuna, a deliberate omission, a yawning. From the writer's perspective, this must have developed from the original ban to touch upon certain topics or facts into instinctive self-censorship when one avoided even thinking about the dangerous topics or facts.
21 In all probability, not only SA was censored, but all newspapers and magazines that reprinted the telegram.
22 Compare Table I.1: Early Russian/Soviet icebreakers of British manufacture in Josephson (Citation2014, 37).
23 This transition from individual achievement to everyday routine work, from a prototype to a series, so to say, has always been a weak point of the Soviet economy in general.