Nomadic People in Russian North Benefiting from Moscow’s Effort to Hold Populations along Arctic Coast

Paul Goble
    Staunton, Jan. 6 – The non-Russian peoples have generally been the collateral victims of broader Soviet and Russian policies; but occasionally, they can beneficiaries of Moscow policies that were adopted not so much to improve their lives as to promote other goals of the centralized state.
    So it has happened over the last several years to the nomadic peoples of the Russian Far North. They have seen the number of their families jump by more than 30 percent between 2020 and 2024 to 6582 and the number of children in these families go up by more than 66 percent to 12,018 (tass.ru/obschestvo/22816253  and nazaccent.ru/content/43362-chislo-kochevyh-semej-v-rossii-vyroslo-na-tret/).
    Not surprisingly Russian officials and pro-Moscow commentators are celebrating this as being the result of Moscow’s solicitude to nomadic peoples and especially its willingness to open schools and other institutions that allow the nomads of Russia to continue their way of life. But the real reason lies elsewhere.
    Until recently, Moscow has run roughshod over nomadic communities in order to allow Russian companies to make profits for the Kremlin by exploiting the lands such communities have traditionally used. The only limiting factor in this push seems to have been that Moscow feared the nomads might at some point revolt (windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2016/10/taking-reindeer-away-from-russias.html).
    But in recent years, Moscow has become worried about another problem -- its inability to hold enough people in the North to support the Northern Sea Route and Moscow’s geopolitical expansion in the Arctic – and it has made concessions to try to hold communities there (windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2024/04/russias-lack-of-infrastructure-makes-it.html and jamestown.org/program/moscow-struggles-to-deliver-supplies-to-populations-along-northern-sea-route/).
    Such concessions are a sign that the Nentsy and other nomadic groups may be able to extract even more benefits from Moscow not because the Kremlin is solicitous to them as nations but because Moscow has needs that the nomads may be able to help meet and thus be in a position to extract more from the center.