MURMANSK, Russia— In the noonday twilight, as dockworkers squint through the gloom to move mountainous heaps of coal bound for Europe, the hum of Arctic power is unmistakable.The stevedores labour in the damp cold, 200 kilometres north of the Arctic Circle, part of the vanguard leading Russia’s latest push to build its future on the rich resources of the Far North.
Grab buckets with massive steel jaws, dangling from yellow cranes several storeys high, chomp at mounds of coal, iron ore pellets and other bulk cargo steadily replenished by a stream of trains from the south. And this is a slow winter’s day.
Russians stopped wondering about whether to develop the Arctic generations ago. The only question now is, how fast can progress march?
The Kremlin has declared the Arctic critical to the country’s 21st-century economy and national security. And it is risking billions on a strategy to reverse years of neglect and decline in its Far North.
A once-utopian vision of the north heavy on Soviet control has given way to a pragmatic view that science and technology, driven by political will and business savvy, can re-energize a slowing economy.
“Strategically, the Arctic is Russia’s future — no doubt about that,” said Anton Vasiliev, Russia’s ambassador-at-large for Arctic issues.
In 2007, Prime Minister Stephen Harper defined what’s at stake in the competition to maintain control of Canada’s Arctic when he declared: “Canada has a choice when it comes to defending our sovereignty over the Arctic. We either use it or lose it. And make no mistake, this government intends to use it.”
The two countries share at least three-quarters of the circumpolar Arctic, and standing on the Russian side of the vast expanse, the chasm between rhetoric and reality is startling.
About 4 million people live in the circumpolar Arctic. Half are Russians, and some 300,000 of them live in Murmansk.
Another 175,000 live in Norilsk, built by 300,000 prisoners of Soviet gulags from the mid-1930s until the death of dictator Josef Stalin in 1953. The punishing slave labour, bitter Arctic cold and starvation killed more than 16,000 people during those dark years.
With more than a third of the world’s nickel reserves, and some 40 per cent of its platinum, Norilsk still thrives as a mining centre.
Mikhail Prokhorov, the billionaire owner of the NBA’s New Jersey Nets who is challenging current Prime Minster Vladimir Putin for the presidency in March, ran Norilsk Nickel until 2007. Under him, it became the world’s largest producer of nickel and palladium.
Northern rail lines once busy with trains moving prisoners to a network of Soviet concentration camps are quieter now as the region’s high-cost mines struggle to sell coking coal to southern steel plants.
Profit, not political prisoners, drives 21stcentury industry in Russia’s Far North. The Kremlin’s ambitious plans for an Arctic revival depend largely on whether it can make an often cruel environment economically efficient.
Danish researchers maintain that 97 per cent of the Arctic’s resources — the oil, natural gas and minerals — are safely locked up in various countries’ undisputed sovereign territory. Yet both Canada and Russia have competing claims over a patch of sea bed near the North Pole. The countries are hurrying to compile scientific evidence to support their sovereignty claims before a United Nations commission by a 2013 deadline.
“The best way to defend your sovereignty in the Arctic, for one thing, is to use it,” Vasiliev said. “And the second thing is to solve all the remaining regional problems because the more problems you have, the less sovereignty you have.
“Solving the issues shows that you have created the possibility to govern, to manage, your sovereign territories.”
By that measure, it isn’t guns and troops that Canada needs to fear, it’s the workaday Russians in places like Murmansk. They’re conquering the Far North each day.
Early December, and the city has entered what people here call the polar night, a trying seven weeks when the sun doesn’t rise, the temperature can fall to minus 30 degrees Celsius and howling blizzards blow in from the sea.
Yet the permafrost gives way to a forest of apartment blocks dominating Murmansk and its busy port.
Cars jam its streets at rush hour, people stroll along broad avenues, past boutiques and department stores, factories churn out goods, all as if this were just another industrial town in the south.
Even after years of exodus, which has cut Murmansk’s population by some 40 per cent since the collapse of the Soviet Union, it’s by far the world’s largest Arctic city.
Three times the number of people live within Murmansk city limits as are scattered across the Canadian Arctic.
It’s on the 95-year-old shoulders of Murmansk that the weight of a Soviet-era experiment rests. The premise is as audacious at is simple: As fragile as the Arctic is, it must be developed and exploited.
Canadian Arctic experts such as Shelagh Grant, who has spent decades studying Arctic people and geopolitics, worry Canada isn’t doing enough to keep up with its northern neighbours.
She is encouraged by announcements from Ottawa that back up patriotic rhetoric with action, humble though it is next to Russia’s buildup of security forces, ice-class vessels, bases and ports across the Arctic.
“Apathy may be our greatest enemy,” warns Grant, author of a recent book on the history of competition over the Arctic and a former professor at Trent University.
The Harper government recently announced it will move the Coast Guard’s northern headquarters to Iqaluit in 2013.
In 2015, the Navy is scheduled to receive the first of up to eight ice-class patrol boats, at a cost of more than $3 billion.
But other Arctic commitments are lagging. Five years ago, Harper said construction on Canada’s first deep-water port would begin at the former north Baffin Island mining town of Nanisivik in 2012.
That’s been pushed back a year. Even if the new schedule sticks, and the naval facility opens in 2016, ice is expected to keep it closed from November to June each year, according to a consultant’s report released in August.
“When the facility is unmanned, heat and power will be maintained to the minimum required to maintain equipment and provide site security,” the report says.
Although the warm waters of the Gulf Stream keep Murmansk ice-free year round, Russia’s fleet of nuclear and diesel icebreakers keep ports and naval bases open each winter across some 5,500 kilometres of Arctic coast.
Canada has 18 icebreakers in its fleet. Only two, the CCGS Louis S. St-Laurent and the CCGS Terry Fox, are heavy icebreakers.
Harper announced in 2008 that the Coast Guard would get a new icebreaker to replace the Louis S. St-Laurent, the largest in Canada’s fleet.
Almost four years later, Ottawa finally awarded the contract to build the vessel, which Harper has already named after his political hero, former Conservative prime minister John Diefenbaker. Seaspan’s Vancouver Shipyards Co. Ltd. will build the polar icebreaker, one of eight ships worth a total $8 billion.
But the company still has to negotiate individual ship construction contracts with Ottawa, and workers aren’t expected to start building the first of the vessels until 2013.
As the Coast Guard waits to rebuild its aging fleet, the Louis S. St-Laurent is showing the scars of its 42 years ploughing through Arctic ice.
It broke down off Cambridge Bay in September after a journey in the High Arctic to map the seabed in support of Canada’s sovereignty claim to the United Nations commission.
The Arctic isn’t kind to laggards.
“The government’s revised Arctic policy released in the summer of 2010 is an excellent strategy, but we urgently need action, not promises,” Grant said from her home in Peterborough, Ont.
“Canada must be able to enforce its marine regulations in the Arctic if we are to retain control over the adjacent waters and it must be prepared to provide the investment in Arctic infrastructure to accomplish these objectives.”
Russians who pay any attention to Canada’s growing interest in the Arctic are perplexed by what they see as our sudden appetite for competition.
They find the commotion about territorial disputes, the talk of maybe arming Coast Guard icebreakers, the military photo-ops of soldiers taking aim in the snow, to be reckless — if slightly amusing — fear mongering.
“Frankly speaking, I don’t see any areas of conflict in the Arctic, but many areas for cooperation and close bilateral work together,” said Alexander Shestakov, director of the World Wildlife Fund’s Global Arctic Program.
Each Arctic nation has something vital to learn from the other about responsible development in one of the planet’s most sensitive and endangered environments, one that plays a critical role in cooling a warming climate, Shestakov said.
“We have 300 years of experience compared to Canada’s 50 years of experience, so absolutely, it would be better to work together.”
Right now, Russia is running away with the race.
Its state-owned energy companies are moving to tap vast offshore fields of oil and natural gas, where icebergs and thick ice sheets with enough force to snap regular steel once made drilling a pipe dream.
For decades, Russia has been the world’s leader in navigating through Arctic ice, with the only nuclear-powered icebreakers. One even cruises with tourists to the North Pole.
Russia currently has around 40 icebreakers, nine of which are nuclear-powered. The rest are diesel-electric.
The fleet is about to get better. Russia is building three nuclear and six diesel icebreakers to help keep open the Northern Sea Route, marketed to the world’s shippers as a shorter, cheaper route between Asia and Europe.
Russia is building a floating nuclear reactor, part of a plan to string seven sea-based power plants along its Arctic coast to provide remote mines and settlements with electricity.
The Russian navy is getting new nuclear submarines and expanding its northern security forces to patrol the region where Canada and Russia have competing claims over a patch of seabed near the North Pole.
Russian officials and experts say the disputed area around a mountain range called the Lomonosov Ridge isn’t likely to be a source of significant amounts of oil and natural gas, as some in the West believe.
A bigger problem for Canada is the Northwest Passage, which is opening to international shipping as heavy ice melts for longer periods each summer. It could challenge Russia’s long-established Northern Sea Route as a shorter, cheaper way for ships to move between Europe and Asia.
Ottawa insists it is a Canadian waterway. If it wins the argument, foreign ships would need permission to use the passage. But many countries, including the U.S. and the European Union, consider it an international strait open to all.
In a sign of the rising stakes, China is building a huge icebreaker set to launch in 2014.
China says it will use the new icebreaker for scientific research and exploration in the Arctic and Antarctic. It could also prove a valuable political tool if China chooses to make a solo transit of the Northwest Passage to back its position that the waterway should be open to international traffic.
An early Soviet dream of dominating the Arctic only started to seem possible when the climate suddenly warmed in the 1930s — and gulags full of political prisoners provided slave labour.
When the Soviet Union ended 20 years ago, so did many of the state subsidies and controls that had kept Murmansk thriving for decades, and the mass movement south started.
The future of those left behind depends on the massive bet Putin is wagering that the Arctic can make Russia great again.
Each winter day, they wake to darkness, trudge through the morning in it, get just a tease of reflected sunlight around midday and then slip back into night by mid-afternoon. In summer, their minds must adapt to 24-hour sunlight.
The campaign to tame the unforgiving landscape started under Stalin in the 1930s, when gulag labourers were forced to build his vision of an industrialized Far North that supplied essential resources to the south.
“When the country became more closed, and wanted to be less dependent on imports, it went in search of its own resources,” said Julia Lajus, a historian who heads the Center for Environmental and Technical History in St. Petersburg.
“It was also of strategic importance. We have a very long border along the north. And today we are concerned about warming, but we forget that the first concerns about Arctic warming was also in the 1930s.”
Then, average Arctic temperatures rose by 1.7 degrees Celsius, a climate shift Lajus called “considerably large.”
The warming wasn’t quite as profound as today’s, but vast areas of ice melted. As ice disappeared, Stalin opened the Northern Sea Route, which Putin is revitalizing as a potential money-maker.
The Kremlin hopes it will rival the Suez Canal, and earn billions of dollars in shipping fees, which would make the route Russia’s second biggest source of foreign revenue, behind only oil and natural gas.
Boris Baryshnikov has lived in Murmansk all his 73 years. He has watched oil, chemicals and nuclear waste ruin a coast that was once teeming with fish. As a boy, he used to scoop plaice and flounder from puddles in the bay when the tide went out. Today all he sees at low tide is thick oily sludge.
He has read the newspaper reports of plans to drill for oil and natural gas in vast offshore fields in the western Arctic and thinks it is a disaster waiting to happen.
“We Russians are not well-disciplined people,” the retired construction engineer said. “We definitely will have accidents now and then.”
Baryshnikov was born here in 1938, when Stalin’s vise-like grip was tightening, a son of the Arctic, who grew up a “child of the people’s enemy.”
His father was one of eight children in a peasant family deemed wealthy by the Communists because they had more cattle than other villagers, and ran a small shop from their log house. In the early 1930s, the state seized the family’s property and scattered the parents and children to Siberia, the Urals and other parts of the Soviet Union. Baryshnikov’s father was ordered to settle in Murmansk and work as a carpenter. He was under the constant supervision of the ruthless NKVD, which later became the KGB spy agency.
In 1939, the year after Baryshnikov’s birth, his father was arrested and sent to work in a mine.
Word of his whereabouts came with the announcement of his death.
Baryshnikov could tell from his mother’s tears, the hateful stares from neighbours and strangers, the endless refusals of fairness from government workers, that he was somehow bad.
“We were always the last to get anything,” he told me. “My mother had to beg for everything, many times, with tears. When people learned we were the children of the people’s enemy, their attitude was stern.”
Baryshnikov is a barrel of a man. He used to be captain of the Murmansk soccer team, and he stopped playing only last year when his knee gave out. Leaning forward to make a point, his shoulders and biceps bulge like a man half his age.
I told Baryshnikov his face, especially when he smiled, reminded me of former Soviet premier Nikita Krushchev.
He took exception to the comparison, and eagerly launched into a story about Khrushchev’s visit to Murmansk in 1963, when a large crowd of workers pushed their way past security to hear him speak at a sports field.
It was an unusually warm, sunny day, Baryshnikov said, and that apparently made Khrushchev doubt that Arctic workers deserved a 100 per cent salary bonus mandated by law.
He told the crowd they earned a lot, which they took as a compliment and cheered, whereupon the notoriously short-tempered premier said he was criticizing them.
The crowd objected.
“We even have difficulty buying socks!” someone bellowed.
“Who do you think I am?” Khrushchev fired back. “Do you think I’m your supply officer?”
The premier left in a huff, and not long after he got back to Moscow, the pay bonus for Arctic workers was cut to 80 per cent.
It’s still one of several Arctic perks on the books, but workers in state-owned companies are more likely to get it than employees of private firms, which try to avoid the high cost of business in the Far North.
Many Russians are growing uneasy with what looks to them like an authoritarian streak in Putin and President Dmitry Medvedev, who plan to switch places again next year. It reminds them too much of the Soviet ways.
The Russian government’s new love of the Arctic leaves Baryshnikov cold. He has heard a lot of promises from the Kremlin that never came true.
Over cups of strong coffee, I told Baryshnikov a lot of Canadians wonder if Russia has designs on our Arctic, and whether we would be strong enough to defend it.
He smiled, flashing a glittering top row of gold-capped teeth.
“Canadians don’t need to worry,” he said. “We will not move too fast here.”
To at least one pioneer of Russia’s Far North, the most unsettling hot air over the Arctic blows in from the Kremlin.
Not far from the shores where he once fished, drilling rigs may soon prove him wrong.
Origin
Source: Star
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