The Palgrave Handbook of Women and Gender in Twentieth-Century Russia and the Soviet Union by Melanie Ilic

Author:Melanie Ilic
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan UK, London

Klenova, the Far North and Far South

One of the remarkable achievements of Klenova’s career as a polar explorer was her participation in the expedition of 1932 on a small wooden ship, Nikolai Knipovich, led by the prominent polar oceanographer Nikolai Zubov (1885–1960), one of the founding fathers of the Plavmornin institute . Based on Zubov’s detailed estimates of the favourable ice regime resulting from ‘Arctic warming’, the expedition was the first in history to circumnavigate Franz Josef Land. 20 This was their contribution to the programme of the Second International Polar Year (IPY 2‚ 1932–33). The IPY expeditions involved international collaboration and were dominated by men. In the picture of the participants at the first meeting of the Committee for the Preparation of the IPY 2 there are only three women: leader Dan Le Cour’s secretary, M. Bruun de Neergaard ; daughter of the President of the USSR Academy of Sciences , E.A. Tolmacheva-Karpinskaya , who also served as a translator; and Soviet climatologist Tat’yana Klado . 21 However, a number of women worked in the field, in marine expeditions and on the numerous polar stations established in the Soviet Arctic. The most well known was zoologist Nina Demme , who was appointed leader to establish a new station at the northern tip of the northern Novaya Zemlya island, where she spent two years living in extreme conditions. 22

Sometimes women went to the Arctic as wives of polar explorers. This was the case with Galina Papanina , who spent several seasons working at the polar stations with her husband, Ivan Papanin , future famous leader of the ‘North Pole–1’ drifting ice station . Or they went to the Arctic as young specialists and met their future husbands there. Another future member of Papanin’s Four, Yevgenii Fedorov, met his wife at the polar station on Franz Josef Land. 23 Many of Klenova’s female colleagues married scientists alongside whom they worked in expeditions or at stations. Klenova’s personal life, however, was not happy. She fell in love with geologist Leonid Pustovalov , also a pupil of Samoilov at Moscow University. He did not work in the Arctic, but went on long expeditions to other parts of the country. Although in official documentation Pustovalov is named as Klenova’s husband, from their correspondence it is evident that even if a marriage was registered they did not live together. They corresponded throughout their lives, and this unique correspondence spanning half a century is available in the archives. 24

For Klenova , her intellectual and personal ties to Pustovalov , a leading Soviet geologist by the 1950s, were crucially important. From the late 1940s to the beginning of the 1950s she worked under his leadership at the Caspian Sea on oil geology. Their research formed the basis for the development of the very first Soviet marine oil extraction site, Bakinskie Kamni. In her letters of this period she often addressed him as ‘my dear friend’, or more ironically as ‘my dear friend and boss’, but sometimes the

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