Construction of a region through scarcity and abundance: resource regimes in the European North of late imperial and Soviet Russia

This dissertation addresses the issue of the governance of Russian peripheries in the context of imperial modernisation in the forty years between the 1890s and 1920s. It is devoted to the history of natural resource management in the European North of the late Russian Empire and early Soviet Union from the standpoint of environmental, economic, and global history. Focusing on forest, maritime, agricultural, and sub-soil resources, the study looks at how the Russian state and the educated public attempted to shape policies regarding the exploitation and distribution of natural resources to overcome underdevelopment in the region, providing a critical assessment of visions of political, social, and economic futures for this outskirt of empire. The key objective is to understand how the European North of Russia was governed through its resources and thus evolved as an economic region. The core themes of this dissertation include the marketisation of natural resource use in the region; infrastructure construction related to resource extraction and use in the region; and regional governance that to a great extent resulted from the management of natural resource use and infrastructure building. The key arguments of the dissertation imply that there were three major approaches, or “regimes”, to resource use in the north between the 1890s and 1920s: the old traditional paternalistic regime; a market-oriented regime that began in the 1890s that focused on international trade and globalisation; and finally the technocratic regime that started in the 1900s and was later favoured by the Soviet leadership. Collectively, these regimes contributed to the emergence of the region as an economic entity, with state governance complimented and to some extent shaped by the active role that the educated public played in marketisation.