In the summer of 2006, on the helicopter deck of the Russian icebreaker Yamal, I took a picture of two Russians. The nuclear vessel had just ploughed its way to the North Pole, and the expressions on the faces of the Russians revealed the emotional intensity of their pride in the power and skill of Russian engineering, navigation, and ice-piloting. This is our realm, their expressions said, because we can gain the top of the world at will.
Russia has been reaching the North Pole more or less at will since 1937 — almost as long now as the whole history of the Soviet period — so a feeling of competence in high Arctic operations is well-justified. In recent months, as during the Stalin era, Russian claims to the north are again rattling the west. So this history of scientific drift stations — with its central focus on Russian polar operations and published at a moment in world history that feels more and more like cold war II — would seem destined to command a wide audience in academic, military, and political circles. Unfortunately, what could have been a valuable introduction to an important chapter in the history of Arctic exploration and a primer on Russian–U.S. scientific competition in the Arctic, is undone by a writing style so obtuse as to create a work of near-insensibility.
The history follows the tracks of drift stations across the polar basin from the Soviet Severnyy Polyus 1 (SP-1, or North Pole 1) station in 1937 to recent millennial Russian attempts to regenerate their Arctic research programme after the long bad decade of the 1990s. The obligatory introduction to polar exploration history is written as classic heroic materialism, understandable since the bibliography does not reveal any secondary sources on the subject published in the last 40 years. Expeditions are ‘brilliantly executed,’ engineers like Andrei N. Tupolev are invariably ‘geniuses,’ and the SP-1 hut at St Petersburg's Russian State Museum of the Arctic and Antarctic is a ‘holy relic.’ The author categorises the press releases issued from Moscow during the SP-1 mission as ‘Stalinist-style prose, a mélange of bombast, information, and rhetorical excess’ (page 47). It is as good a description as any of the book itself.
The historical background largely begins and ends with Nansen and the Fram expedition, and even this abbreviated chronology stumbles. One would believe that no oceanographic research had been done in the north prior to the arrival of Nansen. Fram is ‘the first vessel designed for scientific sailing’ (page 8), although any number of legitimate claimants preceded Fram, including USS Albatross (1882) and Leigh Smith's Eira (1880). Eira was also 25 years ahead of Fram in sounding the Arctic Ocean and discovering temperature inversion layers in the deep ocean there.
The author delineates the Russian Arctic sector as a triangle formed by the extreme northeastern and northwestern points of the country with the North Pole at the top, then asserts that the ‘seasonal Norwegian settlements on Franz Josef Land [Zemlya Frantsa-Iosifa] lay beyond this claim’ (page 16). Franz Josef Land, of course, lies nearly smack in the middle of the Russian Arctic sector and, in any case, Norway was not able to plant a settlement there before the Soviet Union raised their flag on Hooker Island in the summer of 1929 (not 1928, as written here).
The text is sprinkled with general observations followed by simplistic aphorisms. For example: ‘Storms are frequent in the Franz Josef group; man has to abide his chances’ (page 40). Well, yes, of course he does, and not just because there are a lot of storms in Franz Josef Land. Synonyms are given a hard workout throughout, while the antique vocabulary (‘moil,’ ‘proffered,’ ‘drear’), passive writing, and purple sentences (‘Theirs proved a trail to break the heart,’ or ‘Thus was parted the curtain of mystery for that far sea’) is more appropriate to 1907 than 2007.
Ice, ships, and aircraft are personified (vessels become ‘reckless’ and ‘purchase sure destruction’), while people and places are introduced with little regard for their identity (Valeriy Chkalov appears first only as ‘Chkalov’ (page 26)), or biography (Nansen appears to have won his Nobel Peace Prize before he ever heard of a Jeannette relic), or history (Christiania becomes Oslo 10 years ahead of time and the appendices list the Fram expedition as occurring from 1883–1886). Commenting on the Soviet aviator Mikhail Vodopyanov's participation in the Chelyuskin rescue, we find this: ‘“Certainly the brightest page in his biography,” Leningrad told the author’ (page 36). What on Earth does that mean? Did the city of Leningrad tell him something? Did he glean this feeling while walking around Leningrad? Is there a reason the Soviet name is used rather than St. Petersburg? This is personification personified.
It is disappointing that the sections dealing with the history of Soviet aviation do not go deeper than their Soviet-era secondary sources, particularly given the author's previous work in aviation history and his visits to Russia. This is especially true with regard to the momentous events on Rudolf Island in 1937–1938, when a series of Soviet aeronautical triumphs was almost immediately followed by an equivalent number of catastrophes. Without the base at Teplitz Bay and the airfield on Rudolf Island's ice dome — the northernmost point of land in the European Arctic — Soviet polar operations and the drift stations they supported, would have been impossible. The author could have benefited from a study of recent and well-written examinations of Soviet Arctic bureaucracy, such as McCannon's Red Arctic, as he sought to explain the machinations of the Central Agency for the Northern Passage (Glavnij severnij morskij put, or Glavsemorput).
Drift station is a missed opportunity to describe, in straightforward terms, the power of the Arctic in the Russian imagination. With a resurgent Russia laying new claims to a warming polar ocean, understanding this imaginative power as it affects the real decisions of the Russian bureaucracy has assumed new importance. Such understanding cannot be found here, because in the end the author could not decide where to place his emphasis: history of science? exploration? technology? climate change? international relations? In the end, it doesn't matter. The unyielding prose takes what should have been a helpful narrative and breaks it as quickly as Yamal carves up pack ice in mid-summer.
