Putin

In late 2015 Dmitri Rogozin, deputy prime minister in charge of space and defense, tweeted the following: “The Arctic is Russia’s Mecca.” A flamboyant type, Rogozin has been known to say what others cannot or dare not. He first gained notoriety when he headed up the faux opposition party Rodina (Motherland), which produced a racist film spot, “Let’s Throw the Garbage out of Moscow,” showing dark-skinned men from the Caucasus leering at pure Russian women and littering the streets with watermelon rinds until a couple of real Russian men walk over to put things right. Rogozin was one of the first seven people to whom Obama’s sanctions were applied. His response: “Tanks don’t need visas.” He speaks four languages and has a Ph.D. in philosophy.

When it comes to the importance of the Arctic for Russia’s future Rogozin is hardly alone in voicing such maximalist sentiments. Addressing the next generation of Russians at a youth camp outside Moscow, Putin said of the country’s future: “Our interests are concentrated in the Arctic. And of course we should pay more attention to … strengthening our position [there].” When serving as president, Dmitri Medvedev frequently said that the Arctic must become a “main resource base” by 2020. The problem now is that after the break with the West over Crimea and Ukraine, the Arctic becomes both more essential to Russia’s future and, without Western investment, equipment, and expertise, much more difficult to exploit.

Calling the Arctic “Mecca” implies that the Arctic will save Russia not only economically, but spiritually as well. The identity that failed to crystallize in the decades after the fall of the USSR will finally coalesce around a great new national enterprise where heroic boldness, economic feats, and patriotism will merge. For grandeur and complexity the Arctic project is often compared to the mastery of outer space, and from the societal point of view, it has the advantage of allowing many more people to participate.

Russia made its Arctic intentions fully explicit on August 2, 2007, when Artur Chilingarov, scientist, polar explorer, and politician, startled the world by descending to a depth of some fourteen thousand feet in a submersible and planting a titanium Russian flag on the seafloor beneath the North Pole. His courage was admirable. Chilingarov was sixty-seven at the time. There was no guarantee that he would find his way safely back to the hole on the surface, and the submersible could not break through the ice on its own. In quite un-Soviet fashion, the entire proceedings were broadcast live.

Staking a claim by planting his nation’s flag like explorers of old elicited derision closely followed by alarm. “This isn’t the fifteenth century…. You can’t go around the world and just plant flags and say ‘We are claiming this territory,’” mocked Peter MacKay, Canadian foreign minister at the time.

But the Canadians changed their tune quickly, dispatching their prime minister to the Arctic. As a senior official put it: “The Russians sent a submarine to drop a small flag at the bottom of the ocean. We’re sending our prime minister to reassert Canadian sovereignty.” (From the wording, it wasn’t clear if they were also sending him to the bottom or whether a photo-op stroll on an ice floe would suffice.) Upon his arrival he announced the establishment of two new military bases in the region to defend that sovereignty.

Beyond the politics and the posturing a lot is at stake. The Arctic is warming twice as fast as the rest of the planet and is now ice-free long enough that its vast deposits of oil, gas, and precious minerals could conceivably be extracted. Passages for shipping have been opened up over Russia and Canada, which reduces distance, time, and costs by significant amounts. Potentially, the melting will make enormous fish stocks available for commercial harvesting. All this makes the Arctic a place worth exploiting and worth fighting for.

Most of us have maps rather than globes, which are already acquiring a sort of retro chic like typewriters. Maps are slightly absurd, of course, as are any two-dimensional representations of three-dimensional phenomena, especially when it comes to depicting Earth as a whole. A globe, when viewed from above, is a much better guide to the relative presence and proportion of the five Arctic countries—the United States, Canada, Russia, Denmark (as the foreign-affairs representative of Greenland), and Norway. It is there where all the lines of longitude converge in zero that the fate of Putin’s Russia will play out sometime in midcentury.