The Soviet Perspective on Canada's North

An Overview of the Literature, 1947-1988

J. L. Black

Soviet writers have been interested in Canada's northern regions since their pilots first overflew the North Pole in the 1930s, and a very descriptive essay on "Northern Canada," was published in the U.S.S.R. as early as 1941. But it was only after the Second World War that they began to write about the area seriously-and their initial concern was purely strategic.

 The epitome of this concern was a Pravda cartoon of 28 June 1947, with the caption, "Eisenhower Defends Himself." The future U.S. president-then Army Chief of Staff-is shown atop a jeep, surrounded by tanks and planes, prepared for an invasion through Canada and Alaska. When asked by a journalist, "What's going on, General?", he replies: "What? Can't you see that the enemy's forces are concentrated here? It is from here that the threat to American freedom will come." His army is confronted by three puzzled-looking Eskimos-two of them children-a reindeer, a fox, a penguin (from Antarctica, perhaps?), a seal, and two bemused polar bears.

 During the first decade after the war, the Soviet press was filled with articles decrying U.S. and Canadian plans to militarize the Canadian North. These began on 11 September 1946 when Pravda and Izvestiia ran pieces in which a new Canadian military expedition to the North was deemed a "continuation of Project 'Musk Ox"' and part of a U.S. campaign to initiate a Third World War. The visit to Canada of British Viscount Bernard Law Montgomery at the time was taken as confirmation of that analysis. Similar accusations were carried in Soviet newspapers throughout 1947 and 1948.

 Even a new series of weather stations were described in an organ of the Ministry of Defence, Krasnaia zvezda (Red Star), as strictly military outposts.

 In March 1947, E. Zhukov wrote in Pravda that a "secret protocol" was affixed to a general agreement between the two countries, which gave the United States control of Canada's Arctic for military purposes. This single-minded vision of Canada's North remained consistent until 1949, and then merely moved up a beat in intensity when Newfoundland joined Canada. From the Soviet perspective, that event was not so much a Canadian matter as it was an attempt by the United States, which had a base in Newfoundland, to acquire more military territory in the North to use as a "platform" for an invasion of the U.S.S.R.

Books and articles in leading journals stressed the same issues. In 1947, G.A. Agranat, the U.S.S.R.'s leading expert on Canada's North in the 1940s, prepared a piece for a teachers' magazine on economic development in Canada's North. He outlined the changes stimulated in Canada's northern regions by the war: a dramatic population increase, helped by a transportation system built for military purposes; the post-war development of an oil industry; and uranium finds for atomic energy. But the most important incentive for growth, he said, was still military manoeuvres. His closing lines were characteristic of all Soviet writing about Canada's North during the period:

One need only look at a map to see against whom these military measures are being taken. The shortest path from America to the Soviet Union lies through Northern Canada. Reactionary circles of the U.S.A. and Canada are attempting to turn Northern Canada into a military strategic platform, but are very little inclined to pay attention to its economic development.

The next year, Agranat produced a much longer study, "Northern Canada", for the U.S.S.R.'s leading journal of geography. He opened the piece with a statement closely resembling the final lines of his earlier essay, and quoted Stalin's right-hand man, Andrei Zhdanov, to the effect that the United States and Canada were "feverishly preparing for the exploitation of the Arctic for the purpose of military aggression". He went on to describe in detail the growth of transportation systems (air, rail, road, and water) in Alaska and Canada's North, the oil industry, uranium mining, fur trapping, and settlement. The latter topic was summed up as follows: "Indians and Eskimos regularly protest against their oppressors-the murder of missionaries, traders, and policemen are a frequent event in Northern Canada." After all the geographic and demographic information, however, he concluded once again that development incentives came solely from and for "the warmongers". But the harshest picture of Canada's North came in 1950, when M. Nikoforov reviewed a collection of essays on the "American North" for Izvestiia. In spite of various attempts by contributors "to disguise the true state of affairs", all was rotten in the North. Hunger, unemployment, and disease ran rampant among the native people, he said, and the United States hoped to take over "Greenland, Iceland, and all of Canada" for a giant military base from which to attack the U.S.S.R.

New Emphasis

The tone has changed in more recent times. Currently, the most prolific Soviet writer on Canada's North is Arkadi Ivanovich Cherkasov, Doctor of Geography at the Institute of the U.S.A. and Canada in Moscow, who has travelled extensively in Canada. In 1972, seven years before he completed his Kandidat dissertation, "The Canadian North: Contemporary Problems of Geography and Economic Development", Cherkasov published his first article on transportation issues in Canada's Far North. He then prepared detailed research for print on questions of Canadian northern development generally, the territorial organization of industry, native populations, and energy policy.

 In reviewing Richard Rohmer's The Arctic Imperative in 1974, Cherkasov showed himself to be familiar with a wide cross-section of Canadian writing on northern resources and their development. He praised Rohmer for arguing on behalf of Canadian self-sufficiency in gas and oil. He quoted Rohmer's observation that Canada was "selling its heritage" to U.S. oil companies, noted his antipathy toward "continentalism", and welcomed his warning that the Canadian government was in danger of losing control of the Arctic altogether. Rohmer's advocacy that the rights and habitat of the northern native peoples be protected also attracted favourable comment from Cherkasov, who concluded that Canada must act quickly or "its wealth of resources will be put to bad use" by foreign capital.

This note of urgency was repeated regularly in the 1970s. In 1975, V.P. Ulasevich quoted a myriad of Canadian statistical sources and resource-oriented journals to demonstrate the increasing role of the Canadian government in arctic development. Ulasevich explained this trend as a consequence of the Canadian bourgeoisie's recognition that an enforcement of Canada's sovereignty in the North would be to their material advantage. He stressed as well that there was a deeply rooted sentimental attachment to the North among the Canadian people, who strongly opposed any sell-out to U.S. capital. Indeed, he depicted the Canadian North as a final testing site of the Canadian government's willingness and ability to "Canadianize" its own territory in the face of increasing U.S. pressure. He implied that control of the North was the one thing on which nearly all Canadians could agree.

 Cherkasov was back in 1979 with a piece on the native population in Canada's North. He outlined in detail the dilemma faced by the Inuit and other northern peoples, who could see their way of life threatened by southern developers. This time, he relied exclusively on Canadian sources, including a large number of government publications and items from the mainstream press. Farley Mowat's favourable commentary about reindeer management in the Soviet Far North (Sibir: My Discovery of Siberia, 1970) was highlighted. Cherkasov concluded with a remark to the effect that the Canadian North was the "largest of the last territorial-resource reserves within the imperialist camp", which embodies quite well a basis of Soviet concern for the future of Canada's North.

 In another major essay in 1979, "Developing the North", Cherkasov wrote that Canada was just beginning to initiate full-scale development of northern resources, with special emphasis on arctic oil and gas reserves. He attributed this thrust to the "energy crisis in the capitalist world" of 1973-74, and cited a myriad of statistics from Canadian sources to demonstrate the sharp increase in investment in the North between 1960 and 1978. Of particular interest to Cherkasov was the participation of the federal government in all aspects of northern development, which strengthens the "state-monopoly regulatory" character of the Canadian economy. He was pessimistic about further growth, however, because of the inability of Canada to provide the Far North with a permanent, non-native work-force, or to create a diversified northern economy to sustain a larger population in the region.

 Fully one-third of this Cherkasov essay dealt with "the North and problems in strengthening Canadian independence". He attributed the rise in the Canadian government's interest in northern development as much to political as to economic reasons. The question of Canadian sovereignty over arctic territories became acute in the early 1970s, said Cherkasov, because of the active interest of U.S. investors in the area. Large U.S. oil companies set out plans to send supertankers through the Canadian Arctic, and the case of the Manhattan in 1969-70 was described as a source of panic in Parliament and the Canadian press. He noted that, in the matter of "sectorial sovereignty in the Arctic", the Canadian and Soviet positions were "identical".

 The old issue of U.S.-Canadian military co-operation in the North was blamed for much of the confusion. Canada had long since allowed the United States to take control of the "defence of the North". The predominance of U.S. capital in the oil, nickel, and other industries had led to a U.S. "economic conquest" of non-military regions of Canada's North as well. Thus Canada would have a difficult time re-establishing a sovereignty lost by default, unless the government were to make a "social contract" with the Canadian bourgeoisie, which had become strong enough to lead the struggle for a sphere of influence with its foreign competitors. The establishment of "Petro-Canada" in 1976 was seen by Cherkasov as a healthy sign, as was the debate about control over the proposed Mackenzie Valley gas pipeline and the report of the Berger commission which, Cherkasov was pleased to add, was strongly supported by the Communist Party of Canada. The problem of an "American corridor" in Canada's North remained, however, and would not go away of its own accord. Thus, although Cherkasov had access to considerably more sophisticated information than that available to his predecessors (and quoted mainly Canadian sources), his vision of Canada's Arctic was overwhelmed, as it is for many Canadians, by his vision of the United States.

 During the 1980s, Soviet concern about the U.S. military presence in the Arctic continued in much the same form as it had in the 1940s, though with less frequency. One need only turn to a long article published in Krasnaia zvezda by a Captain V. Roshchupkin in 1980 to hear echoes of the post-war years. Complaining that Canadian Brig. Gen. Clayton Beattie was calling for a special military organization "to gain effective control" over the arctic regions, Roshchupkin asked rhetorically: "Who threatens the northern regions of Canada?" The answer, of course, was "not the Soviet Union!" Therefore, Canada still served as a "flunkey" for the United States and NORAD in its own Arctic. And in June 1987, Soviet newspaper criticism of C a n a d a ' s White Paper on defence was focused directly on its "obviously aggressive" policy of adopting nuclear submarines for use in the Arctic. At a Novosti Press Agency briefing held for foreign journalists in Moscow in July 1987, Soviet Admiral Nikolai Amelko, of the Ministry of Defence, said that Canada was wasting its money if the purchase of atomic-powered submarines was "to defend oneself against 'Soviet expansionism"'. He insisted that the U.S.S.R. had no submarines off Canada's coast or in its straits, and that it had no intention of sending any there. He spoke favourably of the Canadian-Soviet agreement on joint exploration of the arctic regions and hoped for continued co-operation in the area.

Such themes continued early in 1988, when the Pravda correspondent in Ottawa, V. SheLkov, quoted an Inuit group to the effect that an agreement with the United States on the Northwest Passage was little more than "giving the North to the Americans". In later pieces, Shelkov has written that Canada maintained her position on sovereignty in the North during a visit by George Shultz, but still tends to be a "submissive" partner on the question of cruise-missile testing in the North.

 Mikhail Gorbachev's call for a denuclearized Arctic in a speech delivered in Murmansk on 1 October 1987, received considerable attention in the Soviet press and rather mixed press in Canada. One unusual consequence of the Soviet campaign in this regard has been the recent appearance in the prestigious journal, SShA (U.S.A.), of an essay by Hanna Newcomb, a Canadian advocate of a demilitarized Arctic. Thus, the militarization of Canada's North under U.S. guidance has been a consistent theme in Soviet writing about the region for 40 years.

Arctic Co-operation

In contrast to the 1940s, however, the 1980s have witnessed repeated calls in the Soviet press for Canadian-Soviet cooperation in the Arctic. Indeed, such cooperation had already been given pride of place in an article prepared by L.A. Bagramov, economist and head of the Canada section in the Institute of the U.S.A. and Canada, and a junior associate, V.B. Povolotskii, in 1977. They placed "the development of the North and other nearly inaccessible areas" in first place on a long list of matters on which the U.S.S.R. and Canada could work together. In support of their assumptions about Canada's interest, they quoted favourable observations on Noril'sk by Pierre Trudeau.

 In spite of the periodic trade and scientific exchange sanctions levied by Canadian Conservative governments against the U.S.S.R. (after Soviet intervention in Afghanistan, the crisis in Poland, and the destruction of Korean Airlines flight 007), the desire for northern and other forms of co-operation with Canada remained consistent in Soviet writing. V. Matveev, political commentator for Pravda, prepared a long essay in December 1982 in which he said that a U.S. threat to Trudeau's National Energy Program ("Canadianization") could be offset by more Canadian trade with the U.S.S.R. Among his several points was a clear call for co-operation in arctic development.

 We have a good many common problems in developing the Arctic regions. Canada is showing a great interest in Soviet methods of developing these areas. The Canadian territory that lies north of the 60th parallel...is the least populated part of the planet after Antarctica, though it contains enormous natural resources....

 In May 1983, before he became General Secretary of the Communist Party, Gorbachev led a delegation of the Supreme Soviet to Canada. His emphasis on a Soviet desire "to see the arctic region used jointly for scientific research and development, and not as a theatre for military activity", was granted attention in the Soviet press. When V.I. Vorotnikov, member of the Soviet Politburo and the Russian Soviet Federation Socialist Republic Council of Ministers, visited Canada in May and June 1985, the question of arctic co-operation again was referred to regularly in Soviet reporting as one of the most important common interests between the two countries.

 G.A. Agranat reappeared in the 1980s as a Soviet expert on northern development, with an article, "Northern Development in the U.S.A. and Canada", written for SShA. This time, he emphasized the "qualitative development of the northern regions of Canada and the U.S.A.", and military issues were not mentioned. Repeating opinions expressed by Ulasevich in 1975 and by Cherkasov in 1979, he said that these regions were the "largest (and last!) reserves in the capitalist world of practically unsettled land...filled with various types of natural wealth." The fact that the Canadian North was also politically secure made it especially attractive to U.S. investors. The essay contained many statistics, from U.S. and Canadian sources, about the potential of untapped resources (especially energy-related) in Alaska and the Canadian North.

Ecological concerns were outlined by Agranat as one of the obstacles to rapid development of northern resources, in a tone which implied that the United States and Canada might not have fully considered such matters. Ronald Reagan's "anti-conservationist" policies were described as threatening. The policy of leaving such resources untapped, "in reserve for a black day", was also deemed to be influential, and the United States was chastised somewhat for its willingness to use up resources from other countries by means of transnational corporations while keeping its own potential supply in reserve. Agranat suggested that diversification was the wave of the future in the North, in part because such a policy might attract settlers. In the Canadian case, development of the North has political implications. Trudeau is quoted as saying that the North was a symbol of "Canadianization", and Agranat saw the region as an area for potential clashes between Canadian and U.S. investors. He concluded this rather descriptive piece by suggesting that "bourgeois economic sciences" had not yet worked out a balanced methodology for northern development. "The world of imperialistic monopolies", he said, "has its own built-in obstacles against rational development."

 Other Soviet writers have concentrated on specific dimensions of Canada's North, among them Iu. M. Feigan, who in 1983 discussed the great difficulties faced by those who wished to protect the natural habitats of northern and arctic wildlife from the by-products of development. Canada's part in NORAD has also received considerable attention from Soviet writers, usually within the context of Canadian-Soviet and Canadian-U.S. relations. But the most prolific Soviet author on Canada's North during the 1980s remains Cherkasov. Between 1983, when he published an essay on the policies of northern development, and 1987, when he and S. Iu. Danilov prepared a book on 12 Canadian regions-with a section entitled, "Canadian North: Storeroom of Resources"-he has been the author of one book and six major articles on Canada's North. Development generally, and the fate of the native population specifically, have been the focus of his attention. In the most recent book, Cherkasov and Danilov allocated two chapters to Canada's northern regions. They haul out statistics to illustrate once again the predominance of foreign capital, the lack of economic diversity, problems faced by the native inhabitants, the failure to attract non-native workers to settle in the North, threats to the environment, and the increasing role of the government in northern development. However, the activity of the Department of Indian Affairs and Northern Development is described as a very "positive" force in northern development. The most "negative" by-product of growth has been the "destruction of the traditional society of the native peoples of the North", which has been replaced by a "shallow pseudoculture" (i.e., bourgeois culture). The two authors conclude that Canadians and Soviets have much to learn from each other, since they share the Arctic and have similar northern regions. Canadian successes in transportation (e.g., use of snowmobiles) and in small technical and equipment projects are of interest to the U.S.S.R.; and the Soviets, who "truly lead" in the field of large projects and in the diversity of their northern development (e.g., reindeer farming), have much to offer Canadians. The signing, in April 1984, of a Canadian-Soviet protocol for co-operation in northern research and development is singled out as testimony to that mutual interest.

 It is in Cherkasov and Danilov's epilogue, however, that the current Soviet assumption of the importance of the North to Canada is best expressed. They suggest that Canada can find its true identity only in its "northernness", or as L. E. Hamelin termed it, its "nordicité". They point to strangely diverse and chronologically scattered examples from Canadian literature and culture as evidence for this contention: Farley Mowat, the Group of Seven, Ernest Thompson-Seton, Yves Thériault, Gilles Vigneault, and even the national anthem ("True North, strong and free").

 From the perspective of Soviet writing, a Canada that is deemed to be truly northern looking, economically "strong and free" of U.S. "monopoly capital", and willing to co-operate with the Soviet Union would be an ideal neighbour with which to share the North. Only then would the fear of U.S. domination of the North, which the cartoon of 1947 both revealed and helped to shape, slowly dissipate.

 J. L. Black is Director of the Institute of Soviet and East European Studies at Carleton University in Ottawa.