In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

10 Tabula Rasa in the North THE SOVIET ARCTIC AND MYTHIC LANDSCAPES IN STALINIST POPULAR CULTURE JOHN MCCANNON During most of the 1930s, the Soviet Union experienced a fascination with Arctic exploration that can be described only as a national craze. Excitement about the Russian North mounted steadily after the early part of the decade, when the Stalinist regime launched a battery of polar expeditions that, in scope and ambition, were unprecedented in the history of Arctic exploration. In 1932 the icebreaker Sibiriakov, in an expedition headed by Professor Otto Shmidt, the prime mover behind the USSR’s great campaign in the North, became the first vessel to cross the entire northern coast of Russia—the famed Northeast Passage—in a single navigational season.1 Two years later, when the Cheliuskin, a vessel carrying Shmidt along with 104 other men, women, and even children, developed a crack in its hull and sank to the bottom of the Chukchi Sea, Soviet polar aviators staged one of the most daring aerial rescues of the century by evacuating the stranded passengers from the drifting ice.2 In 1937, the banner year for the USSR in the Arctic, Soviet pilots captured the world record for long-distance aviation twice in succession by soaring over the North Pole from Moscow to the United States. The first was Valery Chkalov, dubbed by the Soviet press “the Greatest Pilot of Our Time”; the second was Mikhail Gromov.3 That same year, during the famed Severnyi polius-1 (SP-1) expedition, an extravaganza planned by Otto Shmidt, the USSR became the first nation in history to land aircraft at the Pole itself. In the course of the operation, the Soviet Union also became the first country to establish a scientific outpost there, a four-man station headed by Ivan Papanin.4 The Arctic was a key element in Stalinist propaganda and popular culture of the 1930s.5 Polar exploits were featured almost endlessly in the mass media, and the pilots and explorers themselves became national celebrities of the first magnitude. The vast cultural output asso241 ciated with Arctic heroics—hereafter referred to as the “Arctic myth”— fit well into the framework of socialist realism, which, with its themes of technological progress, patriotism, the glorification of Stalin, and above all heroism, was emerging as the dominant idiom for cultural expression in Stalin’s Russia. In short, the USSR’s Arctic myth was immensely important as a cultural phenomenon, and it reveals much about the official Stalinist worldview of the 1930s: how the Soviets viewed the natural world, how they understood their country and its place in the world, and how they conceived of the relationship between the individual and the state. As a result, the Arctic became something of a reflective lens for the Soviets, in which their self-image took form even as they formed images of their northern frontier. As one historian of exploration has noted, terra incognita serves as “a mirror for the habitual.”6 For the USSR, the Arctic was the country’s last terra incognita, its final blank space on the map. Therefore, the language used metaphorically to fill in that space reveals as much about Soviet attitudes concerning the USSR itself as it does about the polar world. Conveyed to a public audience by means of carefully manipulated words and images, the Arctic became a vital part of Stalinist Russia’s mythic landscape. In this essay I examine the Arctic’s place in the USSR’s modern cosmography . I focus first on the symbolic relationship between Moscow and the Arctic, which were portrayed as diametrical opposites. Then I turn to the topic of how the Arctic was used to demonstrate the Soviet Union’s ability to bring the light of civilization and culture to the deepest recesses of the wilderness. Finally, I discuss how Soviet settlement of the Arctic was presented as a model of the society that the USSR was to become in the future. The Antipodes: Moscow and the Arctic According to the cultural geography mapped out by the socialistrealist worldview, Moscow was both the physical and the spiritual center of the universe. For the Soviet nation and the Soviet people, it was the axis mundi around which the USSR turned. At the very center was the Kremlin, the sacred sanctuary in which Stalin himself sat enthroned in glory. Stalin, the great Father of Nations, remained hidden from ordinary eyes, but his love and concern radiated outward...

Share