A guest lecture by Dr Nadir Kinossian, a Senior Researcher at Leibniz-Insitut für Länderkunde (Leipzig). The event has been jointly organised by BAI and the PSIF research group
Since the end of the USSR, Russia’s spatial strategies has been in flux. Priorities, foci, and policies have changed alongside changes in political and economic arenas: from liberal market to statism, and, since the 2022 invasion of Ukraine, towards a mobilised war-time economy.
The Soviet period was characterised by spatial expansionism and efforts to rebalance the country’s spatial structure by creating industrial centres with permanent population in peripheral areas, including the Arctic (Hill and Gaddy, 2003). In the early post-soviet years, the state lacked both the resources for capital investments and a coherent vision for spatial development. The early 2000s marked a renewed interest in spatial planning and the economic benefits of concentrating resources around ‘urban agglomerations’ (Kinossian 2017a). In 2019, the government adopted the Strategy for Spatial Development of the Russian Federation for 2025 with its “growth in every region” narrative (Government of Russia, 2019). The 2013 Strategy for the Development of the Arctic Zone of the Russian Federation and Provision of National Security to 2020 prioritised integrated socioeconomic development of Russia’s Arctic territories and security provisions in the region. Its updated 2020 version extending the horizon to 2035 maintains the focus on socio-economic development and security. The apparent return of the Russian state to the Arctic has been reflected in regional strategies, for instance for Murmansk Oblast’ (Kinossian 2017b).
The shifts in spatial policy from the Soviet-style equalisation to market-led polarisation and, more recently, to the prioritisation of strategic regions (first of all, the Arctic and the Far East) require analytical attention. How can we explain the growing activism of the Russian state? Are we witnessing a revival of soviet expansionism practices? What implications do the policies initiated in Moscow have for the regions? Answering these questions requires a spatially and historically grounded approach embedded in political economy, history, and development studies (Kinossian and Morgan 2022). Yet, historicising the current policy process should go beyond the truism of ‘history matters’. Rather, such efforts invite a nuanced analysis of the patterns of continuity and change between the Soviet and the current period (Hedlung 2005).
Using Russia’s Arctic Strategy as a case study, the chapter demonstrates that since 2000 Russia’s interest in the region has steadily increased. Currently, Russia’s growing engagement with the Arctic encompasses several strategic priorities, including mineral exploration on the Arctic shelf, protection of Russia’s resources, economic development of peripheral regions, and control of a section of the global shipping route (the Northern Sea Route, NSR), the commercial relevance of which is believed to increase as a result of the impact of global warming (President of Russia, 2020). However, Kremlin’s expansionist agenda faces significant structural constraints of the vast Arctic periphery, including thin infrastructure, significant costs, low population density, and lack of economic activities that would make planned expansion more feasible. Crucially, spatial strategies, such as the NSR revival, find themselves at the centre of geopolitical tensions and rivalries epitomised by Russia’s decoupling from the West and its Eastern Turn (Blakkisrud and Wilson Rowe 2017).
An analysis of strategic frameworks and institutional arrangements reveals some patterns of continuity with the Soviet system. These include persistent political authoritarianism, growing antagonism towards the West, the increasing use of state-orchestrated economic planning, the concentration of resources within state-owned corporations, arbitrary interpretation of property rights and weak institutionalisation. Moreover, Putin’s unprovoked invasion of Ukraine has exposed the fundamental contradictions of Russia’s ‘state capitalism’ that, on the one hand, critically depends on trade and technological cooperation with the West and, on the other, undermines such cooperation. Similarly, while economic development strategies rely on private capital, Russia’s predatory state demonstrates little regard for private property and frequently resorts to expropriation. Finally, ‘old’ strategic priorities such as the Arctic are now in conflict with the ‘new’ priorities, such as the occupied territories of Ukraine that require investment from the budget sources severely constrained by the ongoing war.
References
Blakkisrud, H. and Wilson Rowe, E. (eds.) (2017) Russia’s turn to the East. Basingstoke: Palgrave.
Hill, F. and Gaddy, C. (2003) The Siberian curse. How communist planners left Russia out in the cold.Washington DC: Brookings Institution Press.
Hedlund S (2005) Russian Path Dependence: A People with a Troubled History. Abingdon: Routledge.
Kinossian, N., & Morgan, K. (2022). Authoritarian state capitalism: Spatial planning and the megaproject in Russia. Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space, 55(3), 655-672. https://doi.org/10.1177/0308518X221104824 (Original work published 2023)
Kinossian, N. (2017a) State-led metropolisation in Russia. Urban Research and Practice 10(4), pp. 466-476, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17535069.2016.1275619
Kinossian, N. (2017b) Re-colonising the Arctic: the preparation of spatial planning policy in Murmansk Oblast’, Russia. Environment and Planning C – Politics and Space 35(2), pp. 221–238. doi: 10.1177/0263774X16648331
Kinossian, N. & K. Morgan (2014). Development by decree: the limits of “Authoritarian Modernization” in the Russian Federation. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 38(5), pp. 1678–1696.
President of Russia (2020) ‘On the Strategy for the Development of the Arctic Zone of the Russian Federation and Ensuring National Security for the Period until 2035’, Decree No. 645, dated 26 October 2020. Available at: http://kremlin.ru/acts/bank/45972 (Accessed: 12 May 2021).