five minutes with bathsheba demuth
Interview for Pushkin House by Andrew Jack (@AJack)
How did you get interested in Russia?
I came to studying Russian history from the opposite end to many, which is often via the gateway of literature. In my case, it was moving to the Canadian Arctic when I was 18, living on the very edge of the Russian’ empire’s borders for several years training sled dogs, making sense of this space that is so physically challenging, next to a village with a Russian orthodox church. I didn’t study Russian in college, which is an on-going regret. My husband was born in the Former Soviet Union, and he and I were peace corps volunteers in Moldova, which is where I decided to do a Russian-focused doctoral degree.
What drew you to the Arctic?
Maybe it was the result of reading too much Jack London as a kid. I had very romantic notions and I realised when I was of the age to go to university that I didn’t know what I wanted to study. So I figured I should work that out before spending thousands of dollars on my education. I strung together this ad hoc itinerary in the Yukon, with the intent to spend three months there, then go to Costa Rica and do a world tour on a shoestring. I ended up staying several years.
Why did you decide to write this book?
I was really interested in thinking about the ways in which people’s ideas about a place and the place itself interact. This particular part of the Arctic is ideal because diverse indigenous cultures have been present for millennia, then American-style capitalism and Soviet-style socialism tried to inhabit it in the twentieth century. So you had these very different projects wrestling it out in this very difficult environment and I followed what happened when these ideas hit the ground – and frozen ground at that. I realised much was to do with the history of energy-extraction – not of oil, gas and coal, but going after different animal species for the energy they contain.
What sources did you use?
A lot was in archives, in Alaska and Chukotka. Some is based on oral histories. There are dozens of villages on each side of the Bering Strait, so I couldn’t go to each for a year and hang out as an ethnographer. I ended up using a lot of material that communities had assembled, relying on them as historians of their own past. That is a more common approach in native American histories, less so for Russian history. I wish I could read more than I do in the different languages, but because of the state pressures to speak the national languages, how the local people think about their history has been translated into English or Russian for a long time.
How different was the impact of the American and Russian systems?
In some ways, I thought they would look very different, but they often ended up quite similar. There are important distinctions in the ways mining was carried out: the US relied on a pool of people who feel under-served by the capitalist market and were willing to risk their lives. The Soviet approach begins with the gulag. They look divergent but they often end up making compromises with the environment that make them pretty similar. Both societies were interested in transforming, colonising and assimilating indigenous folks, and trying to make natural systems fit American or Soviet ideas about what is useful.
What surprised you during your research?
It was less the history, more the present: the ways that some of the underlying promises of the Soviet project in its early days had such a commitment to creating radical equality, the kingdom of justice on earth, and how that bleeds into architecture and common space: the emphasis on medical care, schools in every community, which has stayed even after the Soviet collapse, in a way that makes the Russian-side communities better supplied and connected today, such as to the internet. It sets an expectation for what a state is that I didn’t expect to be so durable. But the political position of indigenous folks in Russia is far less flush – they have less representation or a sense that they should be recognised as having sovereignty.
How close are the indingenous communities on either side of the border to each other?
Both Russia and the US were involved in projects to make their people into citizens. That often meant speaking the dominant national language. But historically, the indigenous nations have long intertwined histories. The locals are the same people on both sides of the border and speak the same language. The histories they tell of themselves and each other are of long term relationships that go back and forth between violence and trading depending on the decade. Things change after the arrival of whalers, but it is only really after World War Two that the border becomes strictly enforced. The period of real separation for Yupik people isn’t really until 1948. It starts to open up again in 1988 with US/Soviet flights, then in 1990s there is a real florescence of contact as the visa regime opens up. Unfortunately, it has regressed since. The local consulates have closed so you have to fly 9 hours to Moscow first for a visa.
Do the local people live in harmony with their environment?
The ways in which people from outside have understood native cultures has a really complicated past, which tends to oscillate. A lot of Soviet descriptions judge them as being so much in harmony with the environment that they are timeless or backward. The alternative is that they have “fallen” from a state of grace. The reality is neither or both. Of course these cultures have changed over 200 years with the forces of assimilation, and because all cultures change. The way the folks I know understand the place, their relationship with whales, berries and the place they live in is not one that emphasises harmony. The Arctic environment does not lead you to see yourself in its warm bosom. It can extract quite a price if you slip up. There is an ethic of dependence on a lot of factors, only some of which are people. It’s ethically quite a different orientation than thinking of everything simply as a resource.
Are you optimistic about the Arctic?
It’s a tough question right now. In the US, the current administration is not one particularly amenable to thinking about the environment. But one thing I came away realising is that both of these ideological systems gave lives meaning and shape to thinking about the future. Both were able to adjust their ideas about what a person is, how we should relate to the natural world, which is not entirely destructive. It required society to think about valuing things in a more holistic way. We are capable of making these choices as societies though we don’t necessarily do so. For the Arctic, we need to act pretty quickly. Our societies have taught themselves to use energy in such a heedless way. It doesn’t matter if we stop visiting the Arctic, drilling oil or mining minerals. If we keep using fossil fuels at the rate we are, we will transform the way it looks.
What is your next book?
I’m in that terrible early phase where everything is just a swamp. But it will be about the Yukon river watershed, which is half in Canada, half in the US, and also with a Russian and British imperial story. Those empires are layered on top of indigenous political spaces. I’m interested because I lived on a tributary of the Yukon, I know it well and want to go back to. There has been a lot of discussion in the past five years about ways of incorporating the non-human world into the political process by giving ecosystems and animals formal legal rights. If it wasn’t for coronavirus, I would be there now.
Bathsheba Demuth (c) Peter Goldberg