Carceral Urbanism in the Arctic: Architects, Scientists, and Prisoners and the Building of Norilsk

• In Event: Laboring Bodies, New Soviet Subjects: Socialist Imaginaries at the Peripheries of Science, Medicine, and Technology

Abstract

This paper explores the creation of the Soviet (and now Russian) Arctic city of Norilsk, located about 300 kilometers above the Arctic Circle, which emerged from one of the largest labor camps in the Soviet Arctic, Norillag. As I show, the urban plan of Norilsk was defined by several contradictory impulses. In their early proposals, Soviet architects sought to recreate the conditions of normative socialist cities (sotsgorodi) where the guiding philosophy was one that would insulate the city from the Arctic environment. From the 1950s onwards though, architects and specialists began to think of the city as embedded within the Arctic, i.e., to imagine a place defined by the conditions of extreme cold rather than against it. Here, geosciences specialists were crucial in finding a solution to constructing structures on permafrost. These two often contesting trends were deeply shaped by a third factor, the permanent and lived reality of mass incarceration and forced labor during the early decades of the city’s existence, which left a legacy that still endures in the contested memory of the architects who “built” Norilsk. This paper explores these multiple threads through an examination of the lives, work, and subjectivities of architects, engineers, and geosciences specialists, most of whom were also prisoners at Norillag. Their co-construction of both Norillag and Norilsk allows us to understand the logic of carceral urbanism in the Soviet Arctic, one whose idealized vision was a new type of Arctic city with its new Arctic subjects.

Author

• Asif A. Siddiqi, Fordham U