Paul Goble
Staunton, August 2 – Much of the land now within the current borders of the Russian Federation is either vacant or largely so and thus has no ethnic face as such or, if it does have people, they are members of non-Russian nations rather than the favored ethnic Russian community.
The Russian Far North is a clear example of this. Much of the northern third of the country lacks any population at all. And where there are people, they are primarily the numerically small peoples of the North, who number fewer than a million between Finland and Alaska
The Putin government has sought to Russianize this part of Russia by promoting migration to it from the south and by imposing the Russian language on these populations. The former hasn’t worked all that well given that few Russians want to work in the harsh north now that subsides are gone, although the second has been more successful albeit unpopular.
Now, the central authorities have come up with another tactic to Russianize this region if not on the ground then at least in the minds of ethnic Russians elsewhere by organizing “Orthodox tourism” to Russian churches and other religious sites there (sgnorilsk.ru/news/na-krajnem-severe-budut-razvivat-pravoslavnyj-turizm and indigenous-russia.com/archives/14013).
Moscow has provided a collective of church, government and business groups in Norilsk and elsewhere in the Russian North a grand worth almost a million rubles (13.000 US dollars) to create videos and guidebooks to attract Russians to the regions as tourists and thus promote what it calls “the Orthodox spirit of the Arctic.”
While small, this grand is intended as seed money for the expansion of tourism into a region few Russians have ever voluntarily visited and, along with efforts to restore ancient wooden churches and monasteries there, demonstrate to Russians that this is a truly Russian region and not vacant land or land populated by others.
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