Paper short abstract:

This paper scrutinises goals and practice of governance in the north of the European part of the Soviet Union through export oriented timber industry and both voluntary and coerced colonisation between 1920s and mid-1930s.

Paper long abstract:

This paper scrutinises goals and practice of governance in the north of the European part of the Soviet Union through timber industry and colonisation between 1920s and mid-1930s. Timber exports were the specialisation of this region for decades before the Soviet rule. Since 1920s these exports became particularly important for the young socialist state as a source of hard currency needed for industrialisation and acquisition of critical materials and goods. 1920s and 1930s saw two major resettlement campaigns, one voluntary and another coerced, launched by the state aimed at population of the northern fringes of what just recently used to be the Russian Empire. The former was conducted by the Karelian-Murman railway colonisation combine and the latter in the interests of the timber exporting trust Severoles. These campaigns showed novelties in approach to nature and resources extraction along with imperial continuities. The latter were embodied in the very experts planning and executing resettlement and global demand for timber. The paper also examines the roles timber as a commodity played in power relations and building of a regional economy, while being not only a ‘green currency’, but also a bureaucratic one. Ultimately, the case of northern timber extraction shows the Soviet power not as a given autarkic dictatorship, but a system in the making. It reveals how universal ideals of progressivism and modernity born in the previous epoch were adopted by the new power and gradually evolved into their opposites while serving the state and global economy.