The World in 2050_ Four Forces Shaping Civilization's Northern Future - Laurence C. Smith [94]
Stalin’s Gulag is one of the darkest chapters in Russian history.401 Its atrocities include uncounted deaths from starvation, exposure, exhaustion, and even outright murder. Thousands of projects were blazed into the wilderness without supplies, a plan, or competence. Many were ultimately abandoned. But as a blunt tool to force massive industrialization and resettlement of Siberia, the program was a resounding success.
A large fraction of this giant captive labor force was aimed directly at the heart of the frozen frontier. Prisoners blasted mines and cut forests. They built roads, bridges, railroads, and factories. The Soviet Union proceeded to industrialize on the backs of these workers and the iron, coal, and timber they produced. If they survived their sentences, many prisoners were forbidden to return home. Millions of exiles and prisoners’ family members instead moved into the growing towns and cities near the camps. Factory towns grew huge, attracting further subsidies and emigration programs from Moscow. Even after Stalin’s death and the dismantling of the Gulag system in 1953, these subsidies continued. By the 1980s there were gigantic industrial cities scattered across some of the coldest terrain on Earth: Novosibirsk, Omsk, Yekaterinburg, Khabarovsk, Chelyabinsk, Krasnoyarsk, Noril’sk, Irkutsk, Bratsk, Tomsk, Vorkuta, Magadan. . . . At staggering cost in blood and treasure, Mother Russia had urbanized Siberia.
Contrasting Patterns of Settlement
The decision of Soviet planners to relocate millions of people and force the growth of giant cities across her coldest, most remote terrain has created one of the most fascinating contrasts in human settlement found on Earth.
On a world map or globe Norway, Sweden, and Finland look coldest of all. Their settlements and infrastructure are arranged in a north-south direction and extend even farther north than most Siberian cities. But don’t be fooled. They are bathed in heat from the North Atlantic Current and enjoy much warmer winters than Russia, even high above the Arctic Circle. I once visited Norway’s lovely city of Tromsø, at 70° N latitude, in January, its coldest month of the year. Its residents were out in force, romping in the snow and chatting amiably in their front yards. Even in January the average daytime temperature is +25°F in Tromsø, warmer than Minneapolis. Reykjavík, the capital of Iceland, which is plunked squarely in the warm current, averages a balmy +35°F. But in Russia’s Novosibirsk, way down south at 55° N latitude, temperatures are subzero, averaging -2°F. Worry not for the Nordics.
Returning to our world map or globe, Canada and Russia at first look rather similar. Both are enormous countries with long east-west coastlines fronting the Arctic Ocean. Both have vast emptiness in the northern parts of their bulk. Both have a band of cities also running in an east-west direction, just north of and roughly parallel to their long southern borders.
But upon closer inspection some differences emerge. Canadian cities hug the U.S. border like a long spotted eel, whereas Russian cities are arranged more like a shotgun blast. Owing to the peculiar orientation of Russia’s climatic gradient (recall that in Canada, temperatures grow coldest moving from south to north, but in Siberia from west to east), Russian cities, unlike Canada’s, push deeply into the coldest parts of the country. It is roughly analogous to Canada establishing her population centers in a band of huge cities running from south to north, from the U.S. border all the way to the Arctic Ocean.
Under the Soviet planned economy, metropolises were grown in places that don’t make sense: in harsh cold, separated from