Abstract
Russia’s Arctic has been integral to its development historically. If the attention paid to this region has waxed and waned in response to other geopolitical developments, the current growing global interest in the Arctic as a potential source of natural resources and as a possible shipping route has motivated Russia’s renewed focus on the Arctic. This heightened interest is evident in a number of policy documents produced over the past decade. After a brief overview of the geography of Russia’s Arctic, we consider Soviet policy, as critical context to today’s development. We then briefly describe Russia’s recent Arctic policy documents, and discuss the main priorities identified in these documents. These include the Arctic’s role in providing strategic resources for the development of Russia as a whole; developing the Northern Sea Route; maintaining the Arctic as a zone of peace and cooperation; and preserving the arctic ecosystem. Given that other chapters in this volume examine military security, we focus on the non-military aspects of Russia’s recent arctic policy. We identify the dearth of attention to some areas, most notably regarding Indigenous peoples of the Arctic, but also in terms of the development of human capital and capacity in the North.
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- 1.
‘Federal subjects’ refer to the various administrative units such as republics, territories (kray), regions (oblast) and districts (okrug).
- 2.
The figures include the populations of the regions as a whole, not just their Arctic counties, due to the available statistics.
- 3.
Other sources suggest a smaller share for these resources in Russia’s Gross Regional Product: for instance, Tabata and Tabata (2018) give 8.1% (for 2015). They note that the Arctic fishing accounts for over 28% of Russia’s fishing GRP and almost 26% of its subsurface (hydrocarbon and mineral) GRP comes from the Arctic (Tabata and Tabata 2018, 17).
- 4.
Heininen (2018) notes that this focus on economic development of natural resources parallels similar developments at the level of the Arctic Council.
- 5.
The lower house of the Federal Assembly (national legislature) of Russia.
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Fondahl, G., Espiritu, A.A., Ivanova, A. (2020). Russia’s Arctic Regions and Policies. In: Coates, K.S., Holroyd, C. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Arctic Policy and Politics. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-20557-7_13
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