I knew the Danes and Canadians would never give up their imperialistic, plundering ways. Just ask the Inuit and Icelanders. Where are you, the Inuit Ed Lucas, to warn us against the historic injustices visited by Dread Canada against its peaceful Arctic neighbors?? Will the West slumber once again as Denmark and Canada continue their Drang nach Norden? Remember Munich!

http://www.hi.is/~tv/

Possibly equivalently important to the release of major new hydrocarbons reserves are the benefits for shipping. No longer iced over, trade between Europe and the Far East will increasingly use the North-East Passage. Russia will become a major transportation hub as well as energy superpower, at least until renewables really get noticeable. As such it is not surprising to read recent news, e.g. that Russia plans the long-term construct of 5-6 aircraft carrier groups (http://en.rian.ru/russia/20080404/103745057.html).

(In the even longer term the effects may be even more dramatic, as hundreds of millions of refugees from ecologically stricken countries to the South make their way up north.)

As for the Stalin discussion, I’d say Saltykov is just one of the very many who were taken in by the allure of totalitarian kitsch.

I have not read anything by Shoumatoff in years. I’m glad that thanks to Sean I rediscovered him. Years ago a dear friend gave me Shoumatoff’s “Russian Blood” as a gift. Because of my own background I found it quite good, but don’t know if others will find it interesting. He also wrote about Chico Mendes, the murdered Brazilian labor and enviromentalist organizer. I have never been to Africa (maybe some day!), but it was from Shoumatoff that years before the Rwandan genocide I first heard about Tutsis and Hutus–his wife is a Tutsi.

Tim mentioned Jared Diamond’s “Guns, Germs and Steel”–a very good book indeed. In my “to read” pile is the book of another highly respected ecologist and population biologist, Peter Turchin’s “War and Peace and War: The Life Cycles of Imperial Nations”. I heard good stuff about it. Peter Turchin is a Russian-born American. His father is Valentin Turchin, a scientist and former Soviet dissident.

Here is the link for Peter Turchin’s website:

http://www.eeb.uconn.edu/people/turchin/

The letter in LRB is pointing out one mistake that Siegelbaum made. It says nothing of his substantive criticisms of Figes. Here is the letter from Alyona Kozlova.

“Lewis Siegelbaum commends the Memorial Society for the ‘public deed’ of interviewing survivors of the Stalinist regime, but attacks Orlando Figes for ‘self-promotion’ in posting these interviews on his website (LRB, 10 April). The suggestion is that Figes merely used materials collected by Memorial. In fact, he initiated the project, organised the interviews and oversaw the collection of the family archives. He should be applauded for making these materials available on his website, so that schools and historical researchers may benefit from them in years to come.”

She’s right. Figes should be applauded for making these materials available online. It’s an invaluable resource. But this doesn’t mean how he uses that material is free come criticism.

Seigelbaum’s “attack” on Figes’ “self promotion” was off base and notice I didn’t quote that part. Authors promoting their books on personal websites is the wave of the future as far as I’m concerned.

Maybe the foxes have got smarter, having been caught and devoured at the same spot for the past century?

I used to think stories like this, especially ones with reference to languages dying out, were something to worry about until I read Guns, Germs, and Steel, where I learned that this process of a stronger group either displacing or completely absorbing a weaker group has been going on for thousands of years. There used to be thousands of peoples and languages in China, before the strongest one pretty much unified the country. And the blacks who now dominate Africa were at one time restricted to only a few areas, with the other parts being populated by people quite different, speaking languages which no longer exist. The people of Yakutia are just another at the end of an extremely long list, and there is nothing unusual about today’s modern culture which is encroaching on them in historical terms.

(I hope that embed works.)