Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 March 2023
The Soviets liked to build cities. Armed with a worldview that explicitly valorized urban life as a more advanced stage of history, the revolutionary regime that ruled the former Russian Empire from 1917 to 1991 created new settlements throughout its terrain. Part of the thinking was that a predominantly peasant country had to embrace industrial modernity in order to achieve socialism. But the longing extended to places, usually near mineral deposits or in militarily strategic locations, that had few to no rural populations anywhere in the vicinity. With the constant discovery of rich reserves of natural resources, the Soviet north became one of the most rapidly urbanized areas in the USSR. Several hundred industrial cities, towns, and workers’ settlements were built from scratch there, often in previously uninhabited territories and by drawing in completely migratory populations. While eleven permanent towns existed in the Soviet far north in 1926, there were already forty-one in 1933.1 By the 1960s, this number had increased to over 500 big and small industrial settlements.
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