"At the Edge of the Earth": How the Soviets Destroyed Chukotka
Prepared for NeMoscow by the author of the project Canvas
When it comes to the Soviet “modernization” of the northern regions, we usually recall the same thing inventory: forced transition to sedentarism, the fight against "remnants" in the form of traditional religions and local languages, boarding schools, and the consolidation of settlements. Chukotka also had all of this. But several unique storylines also converged here: the border with the United States and transcontinental connections, an early experiment with cultural bases, a radical change in the written language of local languages, and an economy based on GulagHere, Soviet power did not simply transform everyday life; it reshaped the living fabric of the transborder world.
Northern Experiments
In the 1920s, after the end of the Revolution and the Civil War, the Red Army finally established itself in the Far East. Chukotka became the "edge of the world," where the new government arrived with a project of "proper modernization." Committee of the North (1924–1935), which was conceived as a think tank for work with "small-numbered peoples." The committee included renowned (and persecuted by the tsarist authorities) ethnographers Vladimir Bogoraz и Lev SternbergThey saw the indigenous people not as a hindrance, but as the "only possible inhabitants" of the tundra, without whose help the rich resources of the North could not be developed. But by the early 1930s, the committee's course had changed: a rigid vertical hierarchy had taken hold, and instead of working with grassroots self-organization, officials began creating collective farms and "educating" them through outposts.
In 1931, a cultural base (kultbaza) was established in Uelen, one of the main coastal settlements on Cape Dezhnev. It was a comprehensive Sovietization base with a hospital, a school, a trading post (a point for trading in hides, meat, clothing, tools, and food), and a reading room. The kultbaza became the center of the spatial hierarchy, attracting nomadic and coastal communities, and measuring the "civilization" of the district by its distance. It was around these bases that settlements were later consolidated and boarding schools were built.
In parallel, in 1930–1932, as part of the creation unified northern alphabet Native languages were written using the Latin alphabet, and then, following a general reversal in language policy in the second half of the 1930s, they were converted to the Cyrillic alphabet. This happened very quickly; newspapers, textbooks, and books had to be rewritten within just a few years. The effect was "pedagogically" intended to accelerate literacy education, but in practice, it interrupted continuity.
Vladimir Bogoraz noted at the time that the struggle to overcome religious prejudices in the Soviet North created a profound contradiction between the traditional animistic worldview and the new technocratic logic: "Iron birds: airplanes, motorboats, tractors—all of this has no spirit, all of this is man-made and subject to man." This quote illustrates how the authorities sought to integrate indigenous peoples into Soviet modernity, breaking the worldview that held that every object, animal, or natural object possessed a spirit and will. In Chukotka, this confrontation was particularly acute: traditional ideas were declared "relics" that must disappear for "progress" to occur.
A prime example of modernization through culture was the Uelen bone carving workshop, founded in 1931. While centralizing the craftsmen's work allowed for the preservation of coastal walrus ivory carving, it also integrated it into the Soviet system of crafts and artistic cooperatives, after which original motifs and themes were adapted to exhibition and export standards.
Ice Curtain and forced displacement
Unlike most northern regions of the USSR, Chukotka is not simply the "edge of the world," but a true borderland with the United States. Hunters have traveled here for centuries along the ice edge and sea, and vibrant family and trade ties stretch between the villages on both sides of the Bering Strait (Sireniki, Chaplino, and Lorino on one side; Gambell and Savoonga on St. Lawrence Island on the other).
These connections were reinforced by a mythological notion of "the other side," the reality of the American coast. Bogoraz's notes contain vivid images that demonstrate that for coastal residents, America was not a distant, unknown space, but rather part of a cultural universe: "[The Chukchi believed that] a tribe of polar bears with human faces and gentle customs supposedly lived somewhere on the American coast." This quote likely refers to the Central American Inuit tribe, who dressed in bearskins, and demonstrates that the border once signified a field of exchange and intersection, not a sharp barrier.
When the border closed in 1948, an entire stratum of social consciousness and economic ties was damaged. This wasn't just geopolitics—it was the disintegration of the social ecology of coastal peoples such as the Yupik (also known as Eskimos) and Chukchi. It wasn't until June 13, 1988, that the first Alaska Airlines "friendship flight" in decades arrived from Nome, Alaska, to Provideniya, Chukotka, initiating a series of family visits and attempts to reestablish ties. There is no regular service today, although visa-free travel for Alaska and Chukotka Natives remains in effect.
In the 1950s and 1960s, settlements across the Arctic were consolidated, turning two or more settlements into one. The most famous episode was the complete closure in 1958 of the Eskimo settlement of Naukan on Cape Dezhnev (the easternmost point of Eurasia) and the resettlement of its residents to the settlements of Lavrentiya, Lorino, Uelen, and others.
Anthropologist and specialist in northern peoples Igor Krupnik later described it as a forced depopulation and disintegration of a community with an ancient cultural landscape (today the empty Naukan is included (The decision was made "for security reasons," but the consequences for hunting routes and family ties were irreversible, and the Naukan language became almost extinct.
Along with Naukan, other coastal points were also transformed: some small campsites were consolidated into centers like Provideniya, Lavrentiya, Lorino, and Nunligran. The result was a radical shift in economic cycles: where hunting and gathering were subordinated to the seasonal logic of animal migration, people were forced to adapt to the artificial infrastructural geography of schools, factories, and roads.
Internization, "industrial breakthrough" and the Gulag
Boarding schools, where indigenous children were forcibly taken, existed in many regions of the USSR. But in Chukotka, the isolation was exacerbated by the distance: hundreds of kilometers of tundra sometimes lay between family camps and the school. By the mid-20th century, coastal communities had developed a pattern in which children and adolescents spent the entire school year away from their families, returning only during the peak hunting and herding seasons. This not only resulted in forced linguistic and cultural assimilation but also interrupted the transmission of sea hunting skills, tundra navigation, and crafts.
The boarding of Chukotka played a significant role in the tragedy Sireniki Eskimo language, which differed significantly from neighboring Yupik languages and ultimately disappeared in the post-Soviet era. Its exceptional vulnerability was a result of both the small number of speakers and the entire previous policy.
While modernization on the coast was driven by culture, boarding schools, and border regulations, inland from the 1930s to the 1950s, a different driver—raw materials—dominated, as Chukotka became a zone of large-scale resource extraction, largely by prisoners. For example, Chaunlag (Chaunsky corrective labor camp, 1951–1953) was engaged in the industrial development of uranium deposits.
In addition to uranium mining, large tin deposits were discovered on the Pevek Peninsula and tungsten-tin mines in Iultin between 1934 and 1937. Industrial gold mining began in 1958. The coal industry also developed, with mines in Anadyr, Ugolnaya Bay, and later in the Chaunskaya Lowland. All of this required infrastructure: ports, airfields, and power lines, which were often built by prisoners from forced labor camps.
Geological exploration, roads, and camp settlements completely changed the region's demographics. The very logic of territorial development required the massive importation of a foreign population and did not include the indigenous inhabitants as equal actors with voting rights. They were relegated to the role of local labor in subsidiary sectors. This entire industrial "breakthrough" was accompanied by camp violence and created a parallel geography, little connected to the local economies.
And this is another distinctive feature of Chukotka: a rare combination of two regimes in the USSR—a border regime (the securitization of the coast) and a camp-based, raw-materials-based regime (the interior of the peninsula). As a result, the region was simultaneously closed and transparently extractive: entry was by permit, and resource export was unrestricted.
Why is this important?
Archives and research help us see that Soviet policy in Chukotka wasn't limited to aiding a backward region or combating the oppression of pre-revolutionary kulaks and shamans. It was, above all, a reshaping of space—from the artificial creation of a written language and a network of cultural centers to the administrative closure of the border and the forced depopulation of individual villages. The purpose of the reforms here wasn't abstract "progress," but rather the reconfiguration of flows (of people, knowledge, loot, symbols) in the interests of the metropolis.
The first decade of Soviet rule had some real educational and organizational benefits: certain cultural practices, such as Uelen carving, did indeed receive institutional support. But the result was still asymmetry: indigenous societies became objects of remote governance, and their worldviews and traditions—seasonal, kinship, and cross-border—were declared relics subject to correction.
The history of Chukotka is important not only as a memory of the trauma of Naukan or the camp geography of Pevek. It is valuable as an example of an empire operating without "heavy" colonization: not through millions of settlers, but through an administrative grid, a shift in scripts, a pass system, the reinvention of "centers" and "peripheries," and the subtle but persistent restructuring of the social world.
