One of the jobs of Sasha, the werewolf FSB officer In Victor Pelevin’s postmodern fantasy novel, involved communicating with the Earth and persuade it to keep providing oil for the Russian elite. To do this, he utters the following prayer:
(Quote courtesy of Serguei Oushakine)
In real life, it looks like the elite is getting the answer to those prayers: according to today’s NPR report, rapidly melting arctic ice in my hometown of Murmansk augurs wild petro-opportunity for state energy companies…er…the depressed post-Soviet communities of fishermen and reindeer herders..to “not live for something else but for themselves”. That’s not to say that those communities would not share in the bounty. As examples of Siberia under Abramovich or Nikel show, there is enough money in energy extraction to pass more than a few kopeks to the natives. Murmansk can sure do with some development. After the devastation of the fishing industry following thepost-Soviet privatisation of the Trawler Fleet, the formerly half million person nest of arctic highrises spent almost two decades as a town without a mission. And we are not even talking about villages like Teriberka, mentioned in the report.
“But what about the risks to the environment?” asks the earnest NPR reporter to one villager.
“Of course we worry. But I would not say that this is the first worry in our life,” he says. “Economic life is much more important for people.”
That seems to be mandate enough, if Putin needed one, to drill baby drill.
So should we all be expecting a new photo op of the Prime Minister diving into the Barents sea and emerging with two dripping barrels of crude under his arms?
As the article observes, “many of the offshore oil and gas projects are at least a decade away from bringing economic benefit — assuming they succeed”; and talk of oil and gas wealth off the coast just willing to be scooped up has been circling Murmansk for years.
