Diamonds and Rust in the Soviet North: Extraction and Enclosure in the Yakut ASSR, 1945-1973

• In Event: “Onward! No Retreat!”: The Matters & Memory of Asia’s Conversations with Central and Eastern Europe during the Cold War I

Abstract

The discovery of diamonds in the Yakut ASSR in the mid-20th century reshaped Sakha life, accelerating Soviet industrialization, consolidating labor, and integrating the region into global resource networks more than ever before. This project examines the ecological and cultural dimensions of diamond extraction through Almazy Sibiri (1957), written by the geologists who first uncovered diamonds at Zarnitsa Pipe in 1954, and Ivan Efremov’s The Diamond Pipe (1945), a sci-fi novel that inspired real-life geological expeditions. These sources, alongside Soviet ethnographies from the 1950s-60s, the propagandistic Morning of the Diamond Province (1973), modern ethnographies, and Sakha mythology, reveal competing visions of Yakutia’s resource-rich environment.

Diamond mining not only displaced traditional Sakha economies but also restructured early Soviet collectivization efforts. By the 1950s-60s, the local economy had been reoriented toward supplying food for the diamond industry and its workers. While the Soviet state imported thousands of Russian and Ukrainian laborers, the Sakha saw their labor structures transformed, deepening their dependence on Soviet industry. Soviet narratives framed diamonds as symbols of socialist progress and postwar industrial growth, fueling military production. Yet beneath these triumphalist accounts lies a parallel story—one of environmental degradation and local displacement. By juxtaposing Soviet scientific, literary, and ethnographic sources with Sakha oral histories, this project situates Yakutia’s diamond boom within broader histories of colonialism, industrial modernity, and Sakha resilience.

Author

• Jon Adsit, Indiana U Bloomington