Simulating sovereignty 207 Pole, carrying the Olympic torch, a court hearing was under way in Murmansk, 13 Simulating sovereignty in which 30 Greenpeace members were charged with piracy. A month earlier, the Greenpeace boat, the Arctic Sunrise, approached the Russian oil platform Prira­ The role of the Arctic in constructing zlomnaya in Russia's 200-mile exclusive economic zone in the Pechora Sea, and two activists tried to board it, in a protest against oil drilling in the Arctic that Russian post-imperial identity entailed significant environmental risks. Russia responded in a war-like manner: the Arctic Sunrise was boarded, searched, and captured in an airborne operation Sergei Medvedev by the FSB Special Forces, all members of the crew arrested, and the ship con­ voyed to the Port of Murmansk, where the members of the crew were charged with piracy (the charge was later.. changed to hooliganism). All those detained were released by Christmas 2013, and later amnestied, and the ship was released in June 2014. In August 2015, the permanent court of arbitration in The Hague Introduction: sovereign performances then ordered Russia to pay damages for that harsh arrest (BBC, 2015a). This war­ like episode, in which the state used all its security and law enforcement mecha­ On August 2, 2007, the Russian expedition Arktika 2007, led by a famous Rus­ nisms to protect an oil platform against an unarmed group of environmentalists, sian Polar explorer and State Duma deputy Artur Chilingarov, planted a titanium was yet another conspicuous display of sovereignty. flag of Russia on the seabed at the North Pole, descending more than 2 miles The three episodes cited - planting a titanium flag, carrying the Olympic torch tinder the ice cap in a pair of submersible vessels (de Beauvais 2015). This was at the North Pole, and the armed assault on the Greenpeace boat - were important part of the Russian scientific expedition seeking to find evidence to substantiate performative acts, exemplary displays of sovereignty in contested Arctic waters Russia's extended continental shelf claim. The high-profile submersion received that highlighted Russia's territorial ambitions in the Arctic. Indeed, in the past wide media coverage, and was televised on national channels in a large PR cam­ decade, Russia has launched a diplomatic and symbolic offensive in the Arctic, paign promoting Russian sovereignty and Arctic legacy. Upon examination, sea­ supported by increased military activity, megalomaniac economic plans, and reg­ bed samples were reported to be similar to those found on Russia's continental ular displays of sovereignty. The Arctic is increasingly seen as the new frontier of shelf, allowing Russia to claim that the Lomonosov Ridge, originating in Russian a re-emerging Russia, "standing up from her knees," as the popular propagandist territory, reaches the North Pole, legitimating the Russian claim to that seabed. meme has it. What are the origins, elements, and, most importantly, the limita­ The United States and Canada dismissed the flag planting as purely symbolic tions of Russia's new Arctic ambitions? What is its practical versus its symbolic and legally meaningless. To that, the Russian foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, significance? retorted,, "I was amazed by my Canadian counterpart's statement that we are This paper seeks to answer these questions by looking at the history of Rus­ planting flags around. We are not throwing flags around. We just do what other sia's expansion in the Arctic and analyzing the changes in the country's policies discoverers did. The purpose of the expedition is not to stake whatever claims of in the region over the last decades. The research will draw upon the constructivist Russia, but to prove that our shelf extends to the North Pole. By the way, on the paradigm in international relations, focusing on the significance of the Arctic for Moon, it was the same" (Gabuev 2007). a national identity and the state's attempts to project its power in the international Another symbolic display of Russian sovereignty in the Arctic occurred on arena. It will study the image of the Arctic in mass consciousness and among the October 19: 2013, when the unprecedented Olympic torch relay ahead of the 2014 political elites, using the methods of text and discourse analysis. For the major­ Winter Olympic Games in Sochi, lasting 123 days and covering over 65,000 kilo­ ity of Russia's population, the Arctic is a distant region, which, however, has meters, reached the North Pole by a special trip ·Of the Russian atomic-powered always been one of the top political priorities for the government. The Arctic is icebreaker (the first ever to make it to the North Pole during the polar night). In the cold, but resource-rich; mysterious, but attractive. Thus, it is a perfect object for entire relay, there were two episodes when the Olympic torch was carried outside political speculations, and in interpreting Russia's actions in the region one has of Russian state territory proper - one was taking it to the International Space to take into consideration the identity factor. As put by Alexander Wendt, identi­ Station by a Russian spaceship, and another was carrying it to the North Pole. ties are relatively stable, role-specific understandings about self that are acquired Although the symbolic run at the North Pole included representatives of all Arctic by participating in collective reasoning about certain objects (Wendt 1992). Rus­ nations, the very fact of taking it there further reinforced Russia's sovereignty sia's growing interest in the Arctic is driven by national memories and myths, among different political and economic factors. However, the more Russia claims claim in the Arctic. In the same days, as the Russian atomic-powered icebreaker 50 Years of Vic- its sovereignty in the Arctic, the more it reinforces its imperial and post-imperial tory was making its way through the polar night and the Arctic ice to the North identity, generating new symbols and discourses. 208 Sergei Medvedev Simulating sovereignty 209 A symbolic legacy project ("filling in the blank spots in the comp/eat mappa mundi," as Zygmunt Bauman eloquently puts it, explaining the spirit of modernity [Bauman 2000]). In Russia's quest into the Arctic has lasted since the early explorations in the six­ 1926, the Soviet Government announced all lands and islands in the Arctic Ocean teenth-seventeenth centuries, as hunters and prospectors moved along the great between 32°4'35"E and 168°49'30"W and up to the North Pole to be Soviet ter­ Siberian rivers to the Arctic coast, and the Cossacks, in their narrow boats (strugi), ritory. In 1932, a special ministry was established for the Northern Sea Route made the first explorations of the coastline - to the geographic discoveries ofVitus (Sevmorput'), and in the same year, the Soviet polar explorer Otto Schmidt was Bering, Semyon Cheluskin, Grigory Shelikhov, Ferdinand Wrangel, Boris Vilkit­ the first to traverse it by an icebreaker in one season (in 65 days). In 1937, the skii, Georgi Sedov, and other explorers the eighteenth-twentieth centuries. of Soviet pilots Valery Chkalov and Mikhail Gromov were the first to fly over the The Arctic has become an essential part of Russia's identity, premised on the North Pole from Moscow to the United States, and the first Soviet drifting ice sta- idea of large territory (one-sixth of the world's landmass, as proudly claimed in tions were established. ~ the Soviet propaganda) and of inexhaustible resources. Territoriality as such plays In the 1930s and 1940s, the Arctic ports of Igarka, Dikson, Pevek, and Tiksi a major role in the construction of Russia's political community that it is sacral­ were built, as well as the cities ofNorilsk and Vorkuta, built around the nickel and ized in the political discourse and serves as one of the key markers of "Russian­ coal mines, while hundreds of labor camps were established in the Kolyma River ness" (Medvedev 1997). In the Russian case, territoriality has become the key basin around the gold mines. In the Stalin period, most of the Arctic development marker of statehood, and in some cases - a substitute for statehood. was done by the slave labor of millions of GULAG prisoners, working in grue­ The symbolic significance of the Arctic has far prevailed over its practical some conditions, dying of cold, famine, and exhaustion. In the 1960s and 1970s, n~ture:in fact, Russia took pride in possessing one immense emptiness. Different a large-scale oil and gas exploration and development started, with the biggest from the colonial projects of other European empires of the Age of Modernity, for oil fields ofUrengoy discovered in 1966 and Yamburg in 1969. Likewise, a large a long time, Russia could not extract substantial material benefit from possessing military infrastructure was built during the Cold War, including submarine bases, these lands. Different from Siberia, rich in fur - the prime Russian commodity airfields, and radar stations to provide a strategic balance with the United States. traded on the world markets, the Russian "oil and gas" of the sixteenth-nine­ However, the latter years of the USSR, and especially the post-Soviet period, teenth centuries, and a major source of export revenue (Etkind 2011) - the Arctic have seen a dramatic decline in the significance and scope of Arctic development. could not provide any typical colonial wealth, like gold, fur, agricultural produce, In fact, after the end of the Cold War and of the strategic Soviet-American stand­ or slaves. True, there was fish, whale, and walrus, furs, and other commodities off in the Arctic, the region started losing its military and strategic significance, typical of the Northern Seas, as exemplified by the Pomor trade of the eight­ which resulted in a drastic cut in funding and support for the Arctic infrastructure eenth-twentieth centuries; still, it was more of a regional, rather than a national, in Russia. Military installations and mining facilities were abandoned, towns and significance. In this sense, the Arctic was mostly a symbolic asset, important for villages were decaying, and, by the turn of the twenty-first century, the Russian Russian sovereignty and security, and for the territorial construction of the politi­ Arctic has turned into a giant frozen monument of failed Soviet attempts at mod­ cal community. ernization. As Clifford Gaddy and Fiona Hill have shown in their book The Sibe­ Indeed, there is a certain non-referential semiotic in the idea of the North. The rian Curse: How Communist Planners Left Russia Out in the Cold, over the course Arctic is humanity's last remaining frontier; the East and West are explored and of the twentieth century, Russia's temperature per capita {TPC, a population­ loaded with political meaning, and the South, too, represents an overpopulated weighted measure of mean January temperatures) has dropped to the lowest in the Third WorlSoviet Union in the 1920s-1960s, inspired by the modernist zeal for the Soviet the presidency of Vladimir Putin. This time, it is not about geographic discoveries 210 Sergei Medvedev Simulating sovereignty 211 and expanding the realm of the crown, as was the case in the imperial period, shelf, and vessel transit in the Arctic. Moscow's claim, submitted in 2001 and nor is it the Soviet modernist zeal of inhabiting and cultivating a barren land. revised in August 2015, includes the Lomonosov and Mendeleev Ridges, which This time, it is about Russia "standing up from its knees," the restoration of great run toward the North Pole, the Sea of Okhotsk, and parts of the Barents and Ber­ power status - derzhavnost' (Roi 2010: 558), and coping with an overwhelming ing Seas - roughly 1.2 million square kilometers (Cohen 2011 :7). Citing lack post-imperial ressentiment (Medvedev 2014). Putin's revisionist project is about of sufficient data, the UN Commission on the Limits of the Continental Shelf re-playing the end of the Cold War and healing the wounds of the Soviet breakup (UN CLCS) rejected the claim. Since then, Russia bas prioritized gathering aca­ (which he regards as "the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century" demic and scientific evidence to support its claims to both an extended EEZ in the [Putin 2005]), and re-establishing Russia's geopolitical greatness lost in the woes Arctic Ocean and the Northern Sea Route (Carlsson and Granholm 2013). Cur­ of transition in the 1990s. The entire Russian foreign and security policy of the rently, Russia's claims to an extended EEZ overlap with claims made by Denmark past 15 years should be seen in this light, from the early attempts at allying with and Canada, meaning that for certain claims - the Lomonosov/Mendeleev Ridge the West following the terrorist attacks of 9/11, to accusations of the West of claim in particular - resolution may be many years away. fueling the anti-Russian "Orange Revolution" in Ukraine and other post-Soviet Russia recently scored its first major victory on an extension of its EEZ in states in 2004-05, to the hard-line Munich speech by Vladimir Putin in 2007 the Sea of Okhotsk, off Russia's southeastern coast. In March 2014, the UN (Putin 2007), the war in Georgia in 2008, the annexation of Crimea in 2014, and CLCS adopted Russia's claim to the 52,000-square-kilometer sea north of Japan the proxy war in East Ukraine in 2014-15, and, lastly, to the Russian engagement (United Nations 2014) which Russian authorities described as "a real Ali Baba's in the civil war in Syria in 2015-16. cave" (Zakharchenko 2014). Although not officially part of the Arctic (the Sea of lt is in this lineup of post-imperial strategies and maneuvers that Russia's Arctic Okhotsk falls just below the official Arctic administrative boundary), the recogni­ policy should be interpreted. The Kremlin sees the Arctic as a key arena for bran­ tion is likely to boost Russia's efforts in support of its Arctic claim. dishing its great power status (Geber 2015). As Marlene Laruelle has observed, The reasons for Russia's claim are manifold. First, Russia views the Arctic as a Moscow's narrative for domestic public audiences implies a more aggressive role potential resource base for the twenty-first century. It is intent on developing new for Russia in the Arctic, while the narrative for international audiences positions oil fields on the continental shelf, and the Prirazlomnaya oil platform targeted by the Kremlin as an actor on par with other great powers, and open to cooperation Greenpeace in 2013 was supposed to be a showcase. Second, as global warming (Laruelle 2014:3). proceeds and the Arctic ice melts, there are serious hopes in Russia to develop the Russia issued a comprehensive Arctic strategy in September 2008 under then­ Northern Sea Route (Sevmorput') as an alternative shipping route between East president Dmitri Medvedev (Rossiiskaya gazeta 2009). Since then, several other Asia and Europe, cutting the traditional route through the Suez by almost two relevant strategy documents have been published, which further confirm Mos­ weeks. Third, largely promoted by top security officials like Secretary Nikolai cow's prioritization of the region. Foremost among them is the National Security Patrushev of the Security Council of Russia (Patrushev 2013) and Chief Alexan­ Strategy (2009), which emphasizes energy resources as an important political fac­ der Bortnikov of the FSB, there is a strong belief in the Russian leadership that tor, affecting Russia's status in the international arena (Security Council 2009), the Arctic will be stage of a major competition for resources and a site of terrorist and the February 2013 "Strategy for the Development of the Arctic Zone up to attacks (Bortnikov 2015 ), hence the idea of increasing the Russian military pres­ 2020," which outlines a vision for the development of these resources (Govern­ ence in the Arctic, building new military bases, and preparing to deploy the newly ment of Russia 2013). As put in the National Security Strategy (2009), "In the created Arctic Brigade to any desolate shore in the Northern Seas. By 2018, new long term, th.e attention of international politics will be focused on ownership of military bases will be built on Cape Schmidt, in East Chukotka, and on the Kuril energy resources, including in ... the Barents Sea shelf and other parts of the Arc- Islands, to support the already-existing base on the island ofKotelny, whereas the "11C."Finally, in December 2014, the Kremlin released a revised military doctrine, military contingent on the archipelago ofNovaya Zemlya will be doubled (Prone­ which tasked its armed forces with "ensuring the national interests of the Rus­ dra 2015). All these installations will form the infrastructure of the future Arctic sian Federation in the Arctic"; this revision from the 20 I 0 version marks the first Group of Forces. Meanwhile, a revised Maritime Doctrine that Putin approved time the Arctic has been explicitly mentioned in Russia's military doctrine (Office in July 2015 places heavy emphasis on protecting Russia's interests in the Arctic of the President 2014 ). Particularly since Russia explicitly views its Arctic as a (Office of the President 2015). "strategic resource base capable of fulfilling the socio-economic tasks associated Underlying these three interests is a fourth, and probably the major, one - Rus­ with national growth" (Rossiiskaya gazeta 2009), the Kremlin's links between the sia's Arctic policy as a symbolic resource, supporting the territorial ambition of Arctic, energy, and security seem clear (Geber 2015). a resurgent Russian power, challenging the United States on the Arctic Front, The key to Russia's new Arctic strategy is the legal claim concerning demarca­ flexing its military muscle, and putting Russia back on the "Grand Chessboard" tion of exclusive economic zone boundaries, the delimitation of the continental of geopolitics. 212 Sergei Medvedev Simulating sovereignty 213 Conclusion: simulating sovereignty and power projection, for writing and representing Russia's sovereignty. As once noted by Russia's Deputy Prime Minister Dmitrii Rogozin, "If Russia did not By the late 2015, Moscow's plans for the Arctic were largely rebuffed, as aptly protect its interests in the Arctic, it would lose its sovereignty and independence" observed by the Arctic security analyst Pavel Baev (Baev 2015). First came the (RBK, 2012). setback from the oil sector. The double blow of US and EU sanctions, imposed However, Cynthia Weber raises a follow-up question. It is no longer sufficient on Russia after the annexation of Crimea and war in Ukraine, and lower oil prices to ask, "How is sovereignty represented?" International relations scholars must mean that Russia now has neither the technology or know-how for Arctic oil drill­ move on to another question: "How is sovereignty simulated?" (Weber 1995: 9). ing, nor the economic rationale - at the current (and supposedly long-term) price Using the terms of Jean Baudrillard, she goes on to examine the "simulations of level of around $50 per barrel, oil production in the Arctic is unprofitable. In a sovereignty" by the United States in its invasions in Panama and Grenada. Like­ symbolic move, in late September 2015, Royal Dutch Shell announced its with­ wise, we can trace simulations of sovereignty by Vladimir Putin in his actions in drawal from the Arctic projects, following a similar move by Exxon Mobil, Chev­ Ukraine and Syria, trying to bolster national sovereignty through symbolic inter­ ron, and BP (BBC 2015b ). Russian oil companies are left alone in the Arctic, with ventions (a proxy war in Ukraine in which Russian involvement was never offi­ little available credit, no technology, and dim economic prospects. cially acknowledged by Moscow, and a hi-tech sanitized airwar in Syria, much Likewise, the Northern Sea Route has also turned out to be commercially unvi­ like Baudrillard's Gulf War that "never took place" [Baudrillard 2012]). able (Inozemtsev 2011 ). The problem is that the old Soviet infrastructure along the Russia's rhetorical expansion in the Arctic is yet another "simulation of sover­ Sevmorput' is so obsolete that navigation in the difficult northern waters remains eignty," a symbolic exercise in dip1omatic activity, territorial claims, and a mili­ too. risky. 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