RECENT AMERICAN SCHOLARSHIP ON RUSSIA’S ARCTIC

This paper analyzes the scholarly contributions of two recent books on the Russian Arctic produced by American scholars. The monograph Paul Josephson’s Conquest of the Russian Arctic and Marlene Laruelle’s Russia’s Arctic Strategies and the Future of the Far North, were both published in 2014. Josephson’s book is a work of historical scholarship that details Russian and Soviet attempts to develop the Arctic. Although these efforts were initiated in the nineteenth century, the bulk of Conquest is devoted to the twentieth and, to a lesser extent, the twenty-first centuries, when Soviet and post-Soviet approaches to the region, informed by ideology as well as strategy, often diverged from those of other northern countries. Whereas Josephson’s monograph focuses on the assimilation of Russia’s north from the late nineteenth century on, Laruelle’s deals almost exclusively with its realities and prospects in the twenty-first. The paper assesses and contextualizes them. Neither of these books offers definitive answers, but they both make important contributions to our ongoing debates.