The Power of Place: Ideology and Ecology in the Bering Strait, 1848-1988 by Bathsheba Rose Demuth a Dissertation Submitted in P
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
The Power of Place: Ideology and Ecology in the Bering Strait, 1848-1988 By Bathsheba Rose Demuth A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in History in the Graduate Division of the University of California, Berkeley Committee in charge: Professor Yuri Slezkine, Chair Professor Brian DeLay Professor Alexei Yurchak Summer 2016 Abstract The Power of Place: Ideology and Ecology in the Bering Strait, 1848-1988 by Bathsheba Rose Demuth Doctor of Philosophy in History University of California, Berkeley Professor Yuri Slezkine, Chair At the Bering Straits, Russia and Alaska share a common ecology: rolling tundra and icy mountains divided by the narrow ocean. Every living thing exists without plentiful solar energy, curtailing the productivity evident in temperate climates. Yet over the course of the long twentieth century, Russians and Americans were drawn north by its potential riches, from the energy in walrus blubber to the currency of gold. They stayed to make converts, fortunes, and states. This dissertation chronicles the environmental, political, economic and cultural revolutions that came in their wake. These revolutions map onto the distribution of energy in arctic space. Europeans began by harvesting whales, moved to hunting walrus on coasts, attempted to farm reindeer on land, sought gold underground, and finally returned to hunting whales at sea. Organized around these spaces, the following five chapters trace a narrative from the stateless meetings of indigenous Yupik, Inupiat, and Chukchi with commercial hunters, to the inception of national borders and ideas of citizenship, through to the region’s division along ideological lines. Using ecological and anthropological scholarship and sources from twenty local, regional, and national archives in the U.S. and Russia, it examines how capitalism and communism, which imagine history as universal, progress as inevitable, and production as infinite, met with the constraints of the far north. The common extremity of the Beringian environment provides a unique space in which to compare the twentieth century’s two great economic systems. The resulting insights transcend the peripheral geography, and contribute to major questions in the histories of capitalism, socialism, and the environment. First, comparing how people understood their northern environs, and how they chose to change them, demonstrates how both economies were laced with normative assumptions about the trajectory of people’s lives and history. Capitalism was never simply about how commodities were owned and traded, any more than communism was only about collective ownership of the means of production. Rather, both were ideologies that shaped what was thinkable, valuable, and rational. Second, these ideas did not exist outside environmental context. In ways specific to marine, coastal, and terrestrial habitats, local ecologies changed the practice of communism and capitalism. By investigating how intent became action, and action shaped new intents, this project shows instances of socialist rationality, market irrationality, and unexpected resemblance. Above all, both economic and ideological systems were contingent on factors beyond human control. Attention to the non-human, from animal behavior to climate, demonstrates how agency, in the sense of individual or collective will working on the world, was situational. The result is a history of how human intention and action were negotiated in concert with the environments they inhabited. 1 To Stanley, who taught me how the land speaks. And to Alex, who understands why I listen. i THE POWER OF PLACE: IDEOLOGY AND ECOLOGY IN THE BERING STRAIT, 1848-1988 Bathsheba Rose Demuth iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS iv MAJOR ARCHIVES v MAP vi INTRODUCTION 1 CHAPTER ONE: The Sea 1848-1900 41 CHAPTER TWO: The Shore 1870-1960 81 CHAPTER THREE: The Land 1890-1970 124 CHAPTER FOUR: The Underground 1900-1980 166 CHAPTER FIVE: The Ocean 1920-1990 206 CONCLUSION BERINGIA, 2015 211 BIBLIOGRAPHY ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS There are many ways to begin a dissertation. This one started on the back of a dogsled when I was eighteen. Along the banks of the Porcupine River, I learned to hunt, fish, mush and love the north; even in the dustiest library that landscape and its tastes and smells stays close. As does the wit and wisdom of Stanley Njootli, who kept me alive then and keeps my head filled with questions still. Wisdom and wit were also the gifts Yuri Slezkine brought to advising this project. I am indebted more than I can say to the years he spent offering written or spoken guidance, always filled with rigor, curiosity, and compassion. I hope to take from his example and never stop adventuring, intellectually and otherwise, or lose the sense of sardonic joy that comes from writing history. My other intellectual debts are numerous. Brian DeLay enriched my understanding of U.S. history and the historian’s profession. Ryan Tucker Jones sent files, comments, and letters from every corner of the Pacific. Alexei Yurchak lent me an anthropologist’s perspective. Victoria Frede always asked the impossible but perfect question. Kerwin Klein taught me how to speak. Many other people have read and commented: Robert Chester, Daniel Sargent, Alan Roe, Chris Casey, Erica Lee, Tehila Sasson, Julia Lajus, and Dolly Jørgensen. The Berkeley Russian History Kurzhok suffered insightfully through years of reading about walrus, as did the Berkeley Environmental History working group, the Borderlands Writing Group, and the Global History Workshop. A fleet of archivists, contacts, and friends foreign and domestic, made my research possible. In the United States, I benefited from experts from Fairbanks to Anchorage to Washington, D.C. In Russia, Edvard Zdor showed me Chukotka. Gennady Zelenskii made it possible for me to go to Chukotka at all. Anastasiia Iarzutkina made me feel at home in Anadyr. In Magadan, Maksim Brodkin took me exploring; Olga Gdurdovna plied me with tea; Liudmila Khakhovskaia was an excellent guide; and Anatolii Shirokov shared wisdom and assistance. Elena Mikaelovna made me a Vladivostok Thanksgiving. In Moscow, the archivists at GARF, RGAE, and Memorial managed not to laugh when I asked for material on a place and people that are the butt of many a Soviet joke. Meeting all these far-flung people was funded by a Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad Fellowship, a Jacob Javits Fellowship, a Reinhard Bendix Memorial Fellowship from the Berkeley Institute for International Studies, a Mellon-ACLS Dissertation Completion Grant, several rounds of Foreign Language and Area Studies funding, and small but consequential grants from Berkeley’s History Department and Institute of Slavic, East European and Eurasian Studies. Because research and writing requires sanity and a sense of adventure at least as much as funds, this dissertation has its deepest roots with my family, especially with my parents, who had the courage to pack their daughter off to the arctic many years ago and have supported me ever since. Without the encouragement and bedrock belief of my long suffering spouse Alex, I would never have made it through years spent thousands of miles distant or doubtful hours close. When at home, the only things vying for the importance of husband, coffee, and wine, were Oakland’s Redwood Regional Park, Peggy O’Donnell’s constant companionship across hundreds of single-track miles, and the unadulterated glee with which my dog Murphy throws himself at a foggy morning run. I am grateful to all of you. iii MAJOR ARCHIVES APRCA Alaska and Polar Regions Collections & Archives, Fairbanks AK BL Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley CA ChF TFGI Chukotskii filial, Territorial’nyi fond geologicheskoi informatsii po Dal’nevostochnomu federal’nomu okrugu, Anadyr ChOKM Chukotskii okruzhnoi kraevedcheskii muzei, Anadyr GAChAO Gosudarstvennyi arkhiv Chukotskogo avtonomnogo okruga, Anadyr GAMO Gosudarstvennyi arkhiv Magadanskoi oblasti, Magadan GAPK Gosudarstvennyi arkhiv Primorskogo kraia, Vladivostok GARF Gosudarstvennyi arkhiv Rossiiskoi Federatsii, Moscow GWBWL G.W Blunt White Library, Mystic Seaport Museum, Mystic CT IWC International Whaling Commission, Digital Collection MSA Memorial Society Archive, Moscow NARA AK National Archives and Records Administration, Anchorage, AK NARA MD National Archives and Records Administration, College Park, MD NARA DC National Archives and Records Administration, Washington D.C. NARA CA National Archives and Records Administration, San Francisco CA NBWM New Bedford Whaling Museum Research Library, New Bedford MA PRIPL Providence Rhode Island Public Library, Providence RI RGAE Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi arkhiv ekonomiki, Moscow RGIA DV Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi istoricheskii arkhiv Da’nego Vostoka, Vladivostok SI Smithsonian Institution Archives, Washington D.C. TsKhSDMO Tsentr khraneniia sovremennykh dokumentov Magadanskoi oblasti, Magadan UAA University of Alaska Archives & Special Collections, Anchorage AK iv BERINGIA The piers are pummelled by the waves; In a lonely field the rain Lashes an abandoned train; Outlaws fill the mountain caves. Fantastic grow the evening gowns; Agents of the Fisc pursue Absconding tax-defaulters through The sewers of provincial towns.…. Unendowed with wealth or pity, Little birds with scarlet legs, Sitting on their speckled eggs, Eye each flu-infected city. Altogether elsewhere, vast Herds of reindeer move across Miles and miles of golden moss, Silently and very