The World in 2050: Four Forces Shaping Civilization's Northern Future (25 page)

Stalin’s Gulag

America’s northern investments during World War II and the Cold War were purely military.
³⁹⁹
But Joseph Stalin’s underlying purpose for building the Gulag ran far deeper. It was more than just a convenient way to punish criminals and silence political dissidents—it was a deliberate decision to industrialize the Soviet Union using the slave labor of his own people. It intended to advance certain socialist ideologies, like asserting man’s triumph over nature and
Engels’ dictum
—the notion that industry should be evenly distributed geographically across a country. It was nothing less than a forced settlement of his country’s barely habitable Siberian territories—then thinly occupied by aboriginals and a sprinkle of outposts—with ethnic Russians.

The use of prison camps in Russia dates to the tsars, but Stalin took it to a whole new level. By the 1930s he had established camps throughout all twelve Russian time zones. By the program’s peak in the early 1950s, the total camp population had swelled to 2.5 million prisoners. Nearly five hundred complexes were built, comprising thousands of individual camps, each holding a few hundred to thousands of people.
⁴⁰⁰
Many were condemned for minor crimes. Over the course of the program perhaps eighteen million are believed to have passed through the camps; another six million were banished to live near them in exile.

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 one another and from potential international trading partners by great distances. They are precariously linked by absurdly stretched infrastructure, if even linked at all. Their subsidization so saddled the Soviet economy that some researchers believe they helped bring about the collapse of the USSR in 1991.
⁴⁰²
Afterward, of course, the subsidies evaporated and in the 1990s the giant Siberian cities depopulated faster than Detroit in a bad layoff year. In eastern Siberia the population fell by
half
—from about twelve million to six—a free fall that is only now stabilizing as the region’s population downsizes to some semblance of a free-market equilibrium economy. But even after this depopulation, the Russian Federation is unique among the NORCs in having so many big cities in its coldest, most remote territories.

Perhaps one day, having far-flung urban cores and disseminated infrastructure throughout the New North will pay off. But for now, Russia continues to pay the price for the inefficient layout and bitterly cold temperatures of her Siberian cities. The economic geographer Tatiana Mikhailova estimates that remote distance and cold temperatures cost the country at least 1.2% GDP annually in extra energy and construction costs alone.
⁴⁰³
That is nearly half the GDP contraction suffered by the United States during the recession of 2008-09 (2.5%).

An extreme example of this kind of geographic inefficiency is Yakutsk, the capital of the Sakha Republic in eastern Siberia. Despite having a population of over two hundred thousand—more than ten times larger than Canada’s Yellowknife—Yakutsk is essentially a fly-in city. Getting there otherwise requires either a thousand-mile-long boat ride down the Lena River during its short shipping season, or braving the “Road of Bones,” a twelve-hundred-mile-long rutted track from Magadan, built by Gulag prisoners, that is only really drivable in winter. The road even ends on the wrong side of the bridgeless Lena River from Yakutsk. Finishing the trip thus requires driving over the river ice in winter or a ferryboat in summer. During the Lena’s violent, ice-jammed spring flood, Sakha Republic’s capital city is completely cut off from the world except by airplane.

In contrast to Russia, the vast share of Canada’s population and infrastructure closely hugs its border along the warmest and most accessible parts of the country. Its big population centers are close to U.S. population centers. This proximity, together with NAFTA and a historically friendly border, encourages massive volumes of trade and traffic between the two countries. Many Americans are surprised to learn that the United States’ largest trading partner is not China but Canada. However, there is a penalty (or benefit, depending on one’s point of view) that Canadians pay for clustering along the American border. With its small population and economy concentrated in the south, the vast share of their country is inaccessible except by airplane or temporary winter road servicing a sprinkle of little villages. The same is true, on a smaller scale, for Alaska. To this day, much of Canada and Alaska remain stunning wilderness.

If Canada and Alaska are wild, and Russia colonized, then the Nordic countries are downright civilized. On my first visit to Iceland I was amazed to learn that I could lease a sleek sedan from my choice of several multinational rental-car companies, then drive it comfortably at high speed around the entire island. My accustomed experience with driving through thinly populated Arctic countries was crawling with clenched teeth over a potholed gravel road in a battered 4WD truck, either hired from a local driver or borrowed from the government, praying that the one decrepit gas station two hundred miles away would actually have some gas and a working telephone. But Iceland, Norway, Sweden, and Finland all have beautiful paved thoroughfares extending to their remotest extremities. They are dotted with gleaming service centers, stores, and restaurants. Cell phones work everywhere. Reaching the Arctic Circle in Alaska, Canada, or Russia can quickly turn into a bushwhacking expedition. In the Nordic countries, it’s just a pampered weekend getaway.

Soviet planning didn’t turn out exclusively bad results. The next time you pay your natural gas utility bill or fill up your fuel tank, you might nod your head to some ghosts of Soviet planners past: If not for their uneconomic, market-forces-be-damned decision to develop a remote Arctic swamp half a continent away from Moscow, you’d surely be paying a lot more than you just did.

The West Siberian Lowland is a vast, soggy plain bounded by the Ural Mountains in the west and the Yenisei River in the east and from 52° to 73° N latitude. It spans nearly one thousand miles in every direction, is one-third the area of the continental United States, and nearly six times larger than Germany. Weather alternates between a long subzero polar night in winter and dank mosquito heaven in summer. It is blanketed in wet, semifrozen peat and covered with lakes; its northern half is permanently frozen in permafrost. The fate of this frozen, carbon-rich peat, which is relatively fresh (<12,000 years old), is discussed in Chapter 9. But trapped in the rocks below the peat, thousands of feet down, we find another form of carbon that is considerably older. It is the cooked remains of twenty-three trillion tons of organic-rich muck that settled to the bottom of a long-gone sea between 152 and 146 million years ago. That muck is now called the Bazhenov Shale,
⁴⁰⁴
and it has changed not only Russia but the entire world.

New Hydrocarbon Cities

In 1960 West Siberia was empty except for mosquitoes and aboriginal reindeer herders. But when four supergiant oil fields were discovered there between 1962 and 1965, Soviet planners back in Moscow made an extraordinary decision. The USSR would massively develop the West Siberian Lowland, no matter how stunningly remote it was. Never mind that there was no good way to get there, that it was loaded with permafrost, frozen solid in winter, and a flooded swamp in spring. Never mind that everything would have to be built from scratch—ports, roads, railroads, drilling pads, and pipelines—by sending boats up the Ob’ River. Never mind that the magnitude of the initial investment would mean the venture could not be profitable for decades. It was a historically crazy decision that could never be done by private energy companies today.
⁴⁰⁵

For years Moscow poured money into a place few Russians had even heard of. It was east of the Urals, for starters, so might as well have been on the moon. But three decades later the supergiant oil fields Samotlar, Fedorovskoye, and Mamontovskoye were household names. From the region’s tens of thousands of wells flowed one-fifth of the world’s oil and natural gas. The once-empty boggy plain was dotted with cities—Surgut, Nizhnevartovsk, Noyabr’sk, Novy Urengoy, and others—and a population of over three million people.

I have been to these cities and driven across thousands of miles of West Siberia.
⁴⁰⁶
Much of it is still empty and indescribably beautiful in the way that only endless mossy bogs, tea-colored rivers, and scraggly forests can be, silently existing under a surreally glowing northern sky. But entrenched across this Pleistocene still-life is the spoor of the oil and gas industry: wide paved highways, belching bulldozers and diesel trucks with tires taller than your head, thousands of wells, and a labyrinth of pipelines streaming west. Piled high are stacks of rusty pipe, mountains of sand, and jumbled iron graveyards of cannibalized trucks. Our grubby faces were stared at in disbelief over surrendered American passports:
⁴⁰⁷
To West Siberians, a clump of dirty, sunburned field scientists wearing fleece and rubber boots hardly fit the profile. To them, Americans are smiling oil company executives, with briefcases and business suits.

Because of the West Siberian Lowland, the Russian Federation is now the world’s largest producer of natural gas and second-largest producer of oil. It is home to her major oil companies and Gazprom, the state-owned natural gas monopoly. After almost five decades of operations in the region, Russia’s energy industry has amassed enormous political, brainpower, and economic presence there. West Siberia is to the Russian energy industry what Silicon Valley is to technology, New York is to finance, or Los Angeles is to entertainment in the United States.