Between Permafrost and a Hard Place: Loss and Livelihoods Amidst Post-Soviet Infrastructural Decline

Abstract

In Western media accounts of Russia, narratives of crumbling and decaying infrastructure pervade. Photographs of decrepit Soviet structures, from quotidian bus stops to monolithic factories, exemplify a growing fixation with “ruin porn” and the post-industrial sublime. Recently, these depictions have included Siberia and the Russian Arctic, where The Guardian recently featured photographs of “slow-motion wrecks”: buildings in Norilsk, a major Russian Arctic mining city, cracking and failing as the permafrost underneath them melts with climate change. Yet, environmental explanations for the fragility of Russian infrastructure are insufficient in the face of massive investments in railroads, pipelines, and even potentially a multistory skyscraper in the city of Yakutsk, which sits entirely on permafrost. It should also be noted that in many of these regions, nomadic peoples who could have once moved in response to environmental shifts have now been forcibly settled into permanent structures, weakening their adaptive capacities. Across the border, China, flush with cash, is building infrastructure on permafrost, including the Qinghai-Tibet Railway, opened in 2006. Political determination and sufficient capital significantly reduce environmental obstacles and the perception of risks. Yet as countries like Russia and China undertake expensive megaprojects regardless of climactic risks, the odds are that one day, these may have to be condemned. An important consequence often lost in popular depictions of ruins are the people who remain in places that have become abandoned, disconnected, and newly remote. This paper draws on ethnographic research on sites of infrastructural ruins in post-Soviet spaces, with focus paid to the Russian Far East, and a review of visual narratives of these areas to make two arguments: first, how the fragility of infrastructure is not only environmentally produced, but also politically engineered, and second, how individuals living in landscapes of fragility cope with disconnection and the “disenchantment” of infrastructural ruination.