Despite Putin’s Push for Northern Sea Route, Russian Settlement of Dikson is Dying

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Oct. 8 – Vladimir Putin has insisted and others have repeated without critical examination that Moscow is making major progress in developing the infrastructure on land needed for the effective expansion of the Northern Sea Route in which he has placed so many hopes (ura.news/articles/1036285544).

            But a new portrait of Dikson, one of the northernmost settlements expected to grow as part of this program, suggests that at least there, Putin’s plans are not being realized but in fact are ever more rapidly failing. If the situation is similar at other northern settlements, then all Moscow’s talk about infrastructure development there is almost certainly for naught.

            Once celebrated by the Soviet government as “the world’s Arctic capital,” Dikson has declined in population from about 5,000 at the end of Soviet times to just over 500 now. It no longer has a hospital or even a doctor, and flights there have been cut to one a week and then only in small planes and only when the weather allows (regnum.ru/news/society/3682625.html).

            Soviet aspirations for the settlement were enormous: the area of this small settlement is approximately equal to the size of Belarus, something that means there are currently approximately 500 square kilometers for each resident, with that number declining still further with each passing year as people move to the south.

            It is in short becoming “a ghost town,” the Regnum news agency reports, despite all the hype about Arctic development. That is a rather inglorious end to a place that 40 years ago attracted a certain Western interest because it bears the same name as the birthplace of the American president at that time, Ronald Reagan, who was born in Dixon, Illinois.