Arctic Euphoria and International High North Politics by Geir Hønneland

Author:Geir Hønneland
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Springer Singapore, Singapore

In Autumn 2012, the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) accused Ivan Moseev of working with Norwegian intelligence to destabilize Arkhangelsk socially and politically, a charge carrying a 20-year sentence. 23 Accusations of high treason were dropped when the case came to court, but he was charged with incitement to ethnic hatred. The reason seemed to be that Moseev was believed by FSB to have posted a piece on a newspaper website where he referred to Russians as “scum”. According to the editor of the website, the comment had been sent from Moseev’s IP address, which Moseev denied. A group of Russian patriots gathered outside the court carrying banners accusing Pomors of being separatists and traitors of Russia’s national interests. One of them asked, “Is Arkhangelsk oblast the big, sovereign Russian North or Norway’s Pomor colony?” Another urged people to “Say NO to Pomor fairy-tales in Norwegian orchestration!”

Two years before, a book called Pomor Fairy-Tales had been published in Norwegian and Russian, financed by the Norwegian Barents Secretariat—free copies were distributed to schools in Northern Norway and North-Western Russia . Around the time of Moseev’s trial, the book suddenly attracted the attention of the media. In an article that spends some time ridiculing the book’s attempts to adapt modern Russian to “Pomor style”, its author speaks of the publication as “a Norwegian–American attempt at destroying the Russian ethnos”; the message transmitted to Russian schoolchildren is, “Be a Pomor – that is, DON’T BE RUSSIAN”. 24 Another article—entitled “‘Pomor hysteria’: When will Norway ‘negotiate with the Pomors’, and not with the Russians?” 25 —calls the fairy-tale book “propaganda” whose purpose is to “defend Norwegian interests […] against the interests of the Russian people and the Russian state”. Moseev is referred to as a “perpetual activist, with no constructive work to his name, no real [standards of] professionalism, a noisy person who loves the [sound of] loud words of the ‘civil society organizations’”. The author quite correctly observes that the word Pomor is used differently in Norwegian and Russian, a result, he explains, either of Norwegians’ ignorance of the word’s real meaning, or as a determined effort by Norway to create chaos in Russia in order get hold of Russia’s natural resources. Norwegian attempts to “create a positive northern identity” necessarily imply a perception of “traditional Russian identity [as] something ‘negative’”.

Yet another article attacks the premises of the entire enterprise—both the fairy-tale book and Barents regional cooperation as such—which is reflected in the book’s foreword, where the Barents Region is portrayed as the “common home” of Norwegian and Russian Northerners. 26 The Barents region, the author argues, is not a historical region; the concept was invented by Norwegians for political ends (and not very benign ends either). Northern Norway and North-Western Russia are united “artificially” in a regional structure to promote collaboration. The claim that Northerners on both sides of the border are fundamentally similar is a lie and an insult to the North-West Russian population: Northern Norway is the “utmost periphery” of

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.