With Subsidies Gone, Commodities Slumping, Population Flows Away From Russia's Arctic Cities & Towns

[hatrack]

Crusted with snow and ice, they stand like monuments to a lost era. With their windows gaping empty over the freezing tundra, the deserted apartment blocks of Yor Shor speak of a time when the Kremlin believed ideology and industry could defeat nature. A decade ago more than 5,000 people lived in this village about 70 miles beyond the Arctic Circle in Russia's far north, where winter temperatures drop to -50C (-58F) and blizzards sweep down from the North Pole, burying cars and whisking roofs from houses. The population today? Ten.

"We are the last survivors," said Karp Belgayev, 52, a miner, whose family is one of two in a pitted five-storey apartment block. "The shop, the school, the restaurant, the surgery - they've all closed." In a few weeks the Belgayevs and their neighbours will be gone, the authorities will throw the switch on the electricity supply and close the heating sub station that keeps them from dying of cold. Then the human grasp on Yor Shor will unclench forever, leaving it to slowly tumble into the Arctic desert.

The demise of Yor Shor is powerfully symbolic. In the last two years, a resurgent Russia stimulated a global dash for the riches of the far north. Famously, two mini submarines were sent to the Arctic seabed in 2007, planting a titanium Russian tricolour and claiming its millions of tonnes of hydrocarbons. In September, President Dmitry Medvedev said the Arctic was a "strategic" zone that "must be transformed into Russia's resource base for the 21st century", and last month a government strategy document warned of a coming battle for those resources that could even escalate to warfare with competing states.

Yet there is a paradox. Just as bureaucrats in Moscow target huge resources to develop offshore Arctic gas fields and build new oil pipelines, the north is dying. Every year, thousands of people are fleeing to warmer climes. Whole settlements are abandoned. Put together, Murmansk, Norilsk and Vorkuta, the three biggest Arctic cities in the world - all in Russia - have lost almost a third of inhabitants since 1989. Until recently, the outward migration had appeared to be slowing. But in places such as Vorkuta, a coal mining town and former gulag outpost a few miles from Yor Shor, there are fears of a fresh exodus as the financial downturn sends commodities prices tumbling.

EDIT

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/feb/23/russia-mining

[OKIsItJustMe]

1. How long do you think it will be until they're back?

I mean, living by the Black Sea may seem attractive today, but in the future, Siberia may be a Summer haven.