In comparing the relation of state to people in northern Norway and the northwestern region of European Russia, I focus on the history of the northern Norwegians in Troms and Finnmark and of the Russians settled along the shores of the White Sea and on the Kola Peninsula. Special attention will

be paid to the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. As early as the thirteenth century, these two small northern communities of fishermen, farmers, hunters, and traders became neighbors in Finnmark and on the Kola Peninsula, where they asserted conflicting claims to the right to tax and collect tribute from the indigenous Saami. They entered into regular trade and commercial relations by sea at the end of the eighteenth century, following the liberalization of trade between Russia and Denmark-Norway and the foundation of Tromso, Hammerfest, and Vardo as trading centers. At the end of the 1920s, the Soviet authorities terminated friendly contacts between the northern Norwegians and their Russian neighbors, to whom the nineteenth-century Norwegians commonly referred to as Pomorer (in Russian Pomory). Trade and cultural relations between the Norwegians and Russians in the north were resumed in the 1980s.(1)

Useful for the purposes of viewing in historical perspective the recent development of northern Norwegians and Russians are the historicism paradigms of Ernst Sars and Sergei Mikhailovich Solov'ev, the leading Norwegian and Russian historians of the second half of the nineteenth century. Sars viewed Norwegian history as a form of gradual organic development that began in the political and cultural work of the medieval Norwegian kings and Roman Catholic Church. It continued in peasant institutions of self-administration, the administrative reforms of Dano-Norwegian officialdom, and the economic activities of the urban bourgeois and more affluent peasants during the periods of union with Denmark or Sweden.(2)

Russian historian S. M. Solov'ev contrasted Russia in his historicism paradigm with the despotic empires of antiquity. He argued that Russia, because of her Christian origins, was essentially a European state that, like other European states, had been formed "organically" in contrast to the "inorganic" great empires of the past. With this paradigm, he reconstructed rather convincingly how the rulers of Muscovy adapted the laws and the cultural and political heritage of Kievan Rus' to the needs of a vigorous, new state on the northeastern frontier of East Slavic settlement. He was less convincing, however, in arguing that the empire of Peter the Great was a logical and necessary result of the previous historical development of Russia. Did army, state, society and church really have to be restructured and Europeanized to the extent that they were during the years Peter ruled? In retrospect, the empire Peter proclaimed in 1721 hardly seems to have been any less inorganic than previous empires formed by external conquest, such as ancient China, Persia, and Rome.(3)

Early Norse, East Slavic, and Karelian leaders and traders competed for control of the nomadic Saami in northern Scandinavia and on the Kola Peninsula in order to obtain coveted and exportable furs (especially, beaver, marten, otter, sable, and squirrel), walrus tusks, whale bone, bird feathers, and animal skins. As early as the end of the ninth century, Norse chieftain Ottar led a number of trading expeditions by sea from as far east as the White Sea and as far west as King Alfred's England via Skiringssal in southern Norway and Hedeby in Denmark. His income came largely from tribute paid by the Saami and from the hunting and trading activities he conducted together with Norsemen and perhaps also Saami loyal to him who lived on the outer islands near his farmstead, presumably located somewhere in Troms county of today's Norway.(4)

Between 1250 and 1620, in northern Norway fishing replaced fur trading and hunting as a major source of income for the Norwegian state. The building of a royal chapel on Tromso Island around 1250 and a Vardo church in eastern Finnmark at the beginning of the fourteenth century demonstrated the growing importance of fishing in waters north of Malangen for Norway. The Norwegians continued to contest the right of Novgorodian and later Muscovite) agents to collect tribute from the Saami in Finnmark, but not so much for the sake of the fur trade as for defending Norwegian claims to the hinterland of coastal regions sparsely settled by Norwegian fishermen. In the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries north German merchants occupied a key position in the transport of Norwegian stockfish to Central and Western Europe. Between the mid-fourteenth and the beginning of the sixteenth century some 1,000 resident Germans at the Hanseatic trading station (kontor) in Bergen controlled the export of fish from northern Norway. These Germans, who had extensive commercial contacts abroad, seldom ventured north beyond Bergen, but they kept fishermen in the north in a position of dependence by extending to them credit for the purchase of supplies, fishing gear, and grain. In the fourteenth century, royal and aristocratic authority declined in Norway, especially after the advent of the Black Death. The presence in the north of agents and tax collectors representing the interests of the state, the bishop in Bergen, and the archbishop in Trondheim still assured, however, the flow of revenue from north to south in support of the cultural and political institutions of the Norwegian Catholic Church and state. With the introduction of the Reformation and Danish rule in the sixteenth century, these agents were replaced by a new officialdom (the Dano-Norwegian embetsstand) and a Lutheran clergy. Norway's new administrators and pastors usually spoke Danish but ran Norway internally according to legal and institutional norms established earlier.(5)

As unfavorable as some of these developments may seem to have been, they did stimulate the economic development of northern Norway for a number of centuries. In 1500, Arnved Nedkvitne has argued, northern Norway was more "commercialized" and "modern" than the south. The majority of the northern Norwegian fishermen remained poor and economically dependent on their creditors, but in the period 1350-1620 they came closer to meeting the basic needs of themselves and their families than at any other time before the second half the nineteenth century. After 1620, however, higher prices for grain and lower prices for fish during the Thirty years War, inclement weather, and competition from fishermen in southern Norway and abroad dealt crippling blows to the northern Norwegians and their economy.(6)

Meanwhile, since the twelfth century the White Sea and Kola Peninsula had been incorporated into Kievan and Novgorodian Rus' and, a little later, Muscovy. Ivan III and Ivan IV dealt severely, even brutally, with the Novgorodian boyars and unruly elements in the veche. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the burdens of empire building and serfdom did not fall as heavily on the peasantry of Karelia and of the littoral of the White Sea and southern shore of the Kola Peninsula as elsewhere in Russia. These peasants of the north certainly benefited from Moscow's removal of the Novgorod boyars from the formerly semi-autonomous Northern Dvina district. The far north did not particularly attract serf-owning Muscovite nobles, permitting the local peasants to continue organizing their lives within a framework provided by customary law and by their own institutions of self-administration. This customary way of life had been taken over from Kievan and Novgorodian Rus' and adapted to the natural conditions in the northern outposts of East-Slavic settlement.(7)

Elsewhere in Russia this way of life fell to the wayside as a result of the decision of Ivan III, Vasilii III, and Ivan IV to use the available resources of a poor and sparsely populated state on the periphery of Europe to pursue overly ambitious designs of imperial expansion. Unable to meet simultaneously the military challenges to the south and west of the Crimean Tatars, the Poles and the Swedes while it began to expand into Siberia, the Muscovite state collapsed during the Time of Troubles. Internal order was restored within Muscovy during the seventeenth century thanks to the cooperation of a military, service nobility and of the Russian Orthodox Church. But, as Solov'ev admitted, the Muscovite nobles could only serve the state militarily if they were provided a source of income by attaching the peasants to the soil and preventing them from fleeing from the more central areas of Muscovy where their movements could be more easily controlled. The Ulozhenie of 1649 legalized serfdom. Peter the Great's Polizeistaat did not improve matters by forcibly restructuring society from above and reducing the state peasants almost to the status of serfs. On the foundation of serfdom Petrine Russia built a mighty empire that lasted some three centuries, but at the price of serfdom, arbitrary government, and, in comparison with Central and Western Europe, economic and social backwardness.(8)

Only after they abandoned their quest of imperial glory did the political leaders of Denmark-Norway and Sweden give serious attention to internal social and economic development. The Norwegian subjects of the Danish king, for example, only began to move ahead socially and economically after the Denmark lost total control over the Oresund and abandoned to Sweden contested territories and islands to the east. The Dano-Norwegian embetsmenn staffed administrative posts, carried out the Lutheran reform in Norway, collected taxes, and presided over the institutions of local self-administration. They interacted with the Norwegian urban bourgeoisie (which now also included many Danes and Germans) and a growing elite of peasant proprietors in southern Norway in developing that region's natural resources (especially, fish, timber, copper, iron, silver, waterways, and shipping) and in implementing useful educational, religious, and social reforms. The cameralistic policies that the Danish authorities carried out more or less successfully in southern Norway proved, however, to be ineffective in the north, where the population was much more scattered and poor and where there were no towns or comparable mineral and forest resources. This population was in no position to give meaningful support to the parish elementary schools envisioned by the decrees of 1739 and 1741 or to the diocesan boards set up in 1741 and 1790 to deal with poverty. Some progress was made, however, in organizing elementary education in the immediate vicinity of the administrative center of the TromsO clerical district (prestegjeld). Sporadic efforts to organize schools were made as well in other nearby parishes, especially after 1776, when three parishes formerly under the Tromso church became independent clerical districts. In the 1790s the involvement in these efforts of more affluent elements from the lay community was encouraged through their co-option to school and poor-relief commissions, which were replaced by new institutions of local self-administration in the first part of the nineteenth century.(9)

The abolition of the trade monopoly of Copenhagen's merchants in Finnmark in 1787 and the granting of trading privileges between 1787 and 1794 to the newly established towns of Hammerfest, Vardo, and Tromso set the stage for the modernization of Troms and Finnmark during the nineteeenth century. After 1787 the Russians from the White Sea took advantage of Copenhagen's decision to liberalize trade in the north by building new ships to carry grain to Vardo, Hammerfest, and Tromso in exchange for Norwegian stockfish.(10)

The Russian north was among the few areas of Muscovy where free peasants benefited from the empire-building policies of the Muscovite state. Ivan IV, who needed direct contact with Western technology for the purposes of modernizing his army, opened the White Sea to Norwegian, English, and Dutch traders, founded new towns and monasteries (for example, Arkhangel'sk and Pechenga) on the White Sea and the Kola Peninsula. Arkhangel'sk lost its position as Russia's only port in the first quarter of the eighteenth century after Russia's capital was moved to St. Petersburg. Peter and his successors, however, did not intend to cut off the White Sea altogether from the rest of Russia and the outside world. Thus a new state-owned shipyard in Arkhangel'sk built naval vessels, while other shipyards launched ships for privileged merchants or peasants to transport goods between established trading centers, not only in Arkhangel'sk and Kholmogory but also in Kandalaksha, Kargopol', Kem', Kola, and the Solovetskii Monastery. Other trading routes led over land via Karelia or northern Swedish Finland to St. Petersburg or to Skibotn in Troms and the Varangerfjord in Finnmark. At the same time, the Pomory continued to fish from the late spring to the early fall off the coasts of the Kola Peninsula and Dano-Norwegian Finnmark. The Danes then tried to maintain a trade monopoly in Finnmark and to regulate all trade between the Norwegians and Swedish and Russian traders. It proved difficult to do so because the local Norwegians in Troms and Finnmark often found themselves dependent on Russia for needed grain. The Pomory and other Russian traders were in a position to meet this and other needs of the local Norwegian population because they formed an integral part of a Russian market system, which was then more developed commercially and economically than that of northern Norway.(11)

Trade with the Russian Pomory and the new constitution that went into effect in 1814 when Norway entered into personal union with Sweden contributed significantly to the development of northern Norway during the nineteenth century. Christiania then replaced Copenhagen as the capital city where the important decision affecting the lives of the Norwegians were made. Between 1814 and 1905 the "Kingdom of Norway" was, according to the constitution of November 4, 1814, "a free, indivisible and inalienable realm, united with Sweden under one king." This constitution granted Norway a representative assembly (the Storting) elected on the basis of a broad franchise. The Swedish king exercised his executive powers through a government in Christiania organized into five sections, each headed by a cabinet minister and consisting of senior officials, or embetsmenn, appointed by the king. These embetsmenn, who were inherited from the period of Danish rule, dominated the government in Oslo until 1884, when peasant and bourgeois opposition in the Storting finally forced them and the king to accept the principle of ministerial responsibility to the Storting. The embetsmann government lasted as long as it did largely because it effectively defended Norway's interests and pursued policies that promoted progress and "rule of law" and gradually brought the Norwegian standard of living closer to level of the more advanced European countries to the south.(12)

The modernization process in northern Norway proceeded at a somewhat slower pace than in the south. Yet the measures taken by the embetsmann government to promote trade, industry, banking and commerce, to encourage greater peasant ownership of land, to reform local government, to improve communications, and to expand education also affected the development of northern Norway. Until the 1820s peasants in northern Norway, unlike the majority of their compatriots in the south, did not own but still leased land. This changed after lands belonging to the church were put up for sale in the 1820s and 1830s. In 1843 the owner of the largest "nobility estate" (adelsgodset) in Troms died. The auction of this estate in 1844 and the gradual sale of the remaining proprietary lands in Troms offered new possibilities for the peasants. They now were in a position to profit from the growing local market economy opened by the regular steamship service between Tromso and Trondheim in 1838 and between Tromso and nearby fishermen-farmer settlements after 1867.(13) To survive in this economy, however, the northern Norwegian fishermen-farmers needed to have more education and knowledge about the outside world and to be better organized politically.

The elections to the Storting (where two thirds of the members came from rural districts) after 1814 and the local self-government law of 1837 provided frameworks within which these northern Norwegians could have organized themselves politically. Only the peasants from southern Norway, however, made their presence felt in the Storting during the nineteenth century, while those in the north usually were represented by merchants, clergymen, officials, and other members of the local elite. This elite also dominated local self-government, although in the second half of the century artisans and even workers and fishermen living in the town of Tromso demonstrated an obvious interest in acquiring more influence over local affairs.

Tromso implemented the elementary school laws of 1827, 1860, and 1889 and, by the 1870s, had a middle school and gymnasium, a normal school, a specialized school for seamen, and an evening technical school. During the second part of the nineteenth century, school-age children in Tromso usually received some rudimentary instruction in reading, writing, and arithmetic. There was more resistance to obligatory elementary education in the rural districts of Troms and Finnmark counties, where fisherman-farmer families often considered this education irrelevant to their own lives. After 1861 truancy became a special problem in the scattered settlements on the islands, and in the fjords and inland of Troms and Finnmark, where, in the struggle for existence, parents needed their children at home, on the farm or boat, or in the work place. Earlier, the two or three weeks their children spent in school annually were not seen as an overly onerous burden for their families, but the new laws for elementary education envisioned three to six weeks in 1860, seven to eight weeks in 1881, and twelve weeks after 1889. The slowly increasing number of weeks spent by children in local rural schools was accompanied by a rising rate of school truancy. Around the beginning of the twentieth century, however, the rate of truancy in the north dipped as the economy improved. More rural fishermen and farmers began to appreciate the usefulness of book knowledge and writing (skriftkultur) for the purposes of defending their own interests and participating more effectively in the life of society. "The general education that the elementary school could now offer," Havard Bratrein wrote in 1992, "came to be considered more and more by the population as something beneficial."(14)

As limited as the education was, it prepared fishermen-farmers or workers in Tromso and in nearby rural communes (especially, Helgoy, Karlsoy, and Tromsoysund,) for what has been referred to as the "great break through" ("det store gjennombruddet"). In Tromso, where artisans and industrial workers made up 34% of those employed around 1900, a few artisans and also workers were occasionally elected to local offices, but businessmen, capitalists, and embetsmenn represented the town in the Storting and remained firmly in control the organs of local administration. In the Helgoy and Karlsoy communes, however, Pastor Alfred Eriksen began in the 1890s a sort of revolution in defense of the interests of the local fishermen-peasants against the so-called "nessekonger" (i.e., rural "kings") who had taken advantage of the opportunities created by improved communications and expanded trade in northern Troms. As merchants and sources of credit, the nessekonger contributed to the economic development of Helgoy and Karlsoy, but they also abused their power locally in dealing with fishermen-peasants who owed them money. Eriksen, with the support of others who opposed the nessekonger, defended in court the rights of common fishermen-peasants, at the same time gaining control for his supporters of the institutions of local self-administration. In 1902 Eriksen founded a newspaper, the Nordlys (Northern Lights), which announced in the summer of 1902 a new political and economic program. This program aimed at defending the interests of the fishermen-farmers of northern Norway, including secure land tenure, state- or commune-guaranteed house, farm and boat loans, and measures to protect whales and to prevent vested interests in the Storting from curtailing trade with the Pomory. In 1902-1903 Eriksen managed to mobilize the overwhelming majority of the voters in the Helgoy and Karlsoy communes and in the rural districts of Troms in support of the new Norwegian Labor Party.(15)

While Eriksen sat in the Storting between 1903 and 1912, his allies in the Helgoy and Kalsoy communes worked to carry out his program of 1902. During these years commune-guaranteed loans made it possible for many fishermen-farmers in these two communes to obtain state support for the improvement of housing and to purchase new boats and equipment. By 1910 a substantial proportion of the fishing boats from Helgoy and Karlsoy were motorized. In the immediate vicinity of Tromso to the southwest, communal and state financial support for the improvement of housing and the modernization of the fishing fleet was less important. Here fishermen applying for loans had at their disposal not only the established Tromso Savings Bank but also a new business bank, the Tromso Private Bank, and the Tromsoysund Savings Bank, founded respectively in 1899 and 1904. The willingness of Tromso and Tromsoysund fishermen at that time to take financial risk for the sake of greater efficiency and possible economic gain testifies to a change in the mentality of the hitherto cautious and conservative northern Norwegians at the time of the "great break through" at the beginning of the twentieth century. Alfred Eriksen's Nordlys helped shape this new mentality, but to be noted is also the initiative of individual northern Norwegians in forming local organizations of fishermen. In 1915-1916 a hundred and thirty-eight local organizations of northern Norwegian fishermen, with a total of approximately 5,000 members, came together in the Northern Norwegian Federation of Fishermen. The twenty-seven-year old Aldor Ingebrigtsen, a successful fisherman who had bought his own fishing motorboat at the age of twenty one, became the second chairman of the federation in 1916, serving in this position until it was absorbed into the national organization for all Norwegian fishermen in 1930. Aldor Ingebriktsen represented Tromsoysund in the Storting after 1921 and served as president of the Lagting between 1945 and 1951.(16)

In Russia it proved to be more difficult to impose on rural society the goals and objectives of the modern state. Catherine II and Alexander I indulged in what can be described as an intermittent dialogue with privileged and educated Russian society concerning the possible reform of certain more objectionable features of the Petrine police state. Catherine emphasized the need to govern Russia in accordance with good laws, and she even cautiously raised the question of improving the lot of the Russian peasant. Her grandson Alexander shared her interest in legal and peasant reforms, but neither of them was very successful in carrying out their projects for reform. Systematic and thorough study of reform in Russia began during the reign of Nicholas I. He and his advisers, however, did not deal meaningfully with Russia's central problem, her failure to move ahead in step with the more dynamic pattern of social and economic change in Western Europe. The emphasis of Nicholas and his officials was on stability, social order, and slow and deliberate progress under the control of the tsar's most trusted, high-ranking advisers. They were particularly cautious and circumspect in dealing with peasant reform. Some progress with peasant reform was made during the reign of Nicholas I within P. D. Kiselev's Ministry of State Domains. The state-peasant legislation Kiselev and his young assistants prepared in 1838 and 1850 strongly influenced the reformers who drafted the decrees that emancipated the Russian serf in 1861 and the guidelines for organizing the zemstvos in 1864. Yet the late N. M. Druzhinin, an authority on Kiselev, considered Kiselev's influence on the reformers of the 1850s and 1860s "reactionary," because Kiselev and his officials, having grown up under serfdom, retained in the legislation they drafted for the state peasants many "antiquated residues from the feudal past."(17)

There is at least a grain of truth in Druzhinin's interpretation of peasant reform under Nicholas I. Druzhinin conceded, however, that the reforms of the 1860s opened doors to more rapid economic and social change in Russia. After the Crimean War no one of consequence in the government denied that changes had to be made, but there was little agreement about how far one could go without undermining social and political order. Counsels within the government and society were therefore divided in regard to how one should proceed in carrying out the "Great Reforms." Moderate members of the Council of State and Ministers of Finance Michael Reutern, Sergei Witte, and Vladimir Kokovtsev insisted on the need for rule of law, a stable financial system, and a developed industrial economy as the sine qua non for Russia's future as a great power in Europe. They were opposed within the government by defenders of the police state who, fearing the consequences of too rapid social and economic change, gave higher priority to social stability than to economic progress. The counter-reforms introduced by the latter in the 1880s and 1890s served to keep alive a number of "antiquated residues from the feudal past" in Russia, which were especially harmful in the area of elementary education for industrial workers and peasants. In 1897 only 21% of the population of the Russian Empire was literate, and a year later about 4,000,000 students attended Russian elementary schools in a total population of 128,000,000, or an estimated 35.5% of school-age children.(18)

Russia's champions of order and stability, however, could not halt industrialization and the construction of the railways, two major sources of social and cultural movement and change. Railways were required by the military for the mobilization of the army. Capitalists and industrialists needed them to link the sources of raw materials with industrial plants and to connect the grain fields of the Volga, Siberia, and Ukraine with the sea so that the government could pay interest regularly on foreign loans financing the modernization of the Russian industry. Social and economic progress in Russia had its greatest impact in the Moscow, south Ukrainian, and St. Petersburg industrial areas, as well as in other major regional industrial or administrative centers. It also stimulated development in agricultural regions where landowner as well as many peasants adopted more advanced farming methods, used machinery, and took advantage of improved communications and new markets opened by growing towns and the export of grain. The majority of peasants and many landowners did not fare so well, especially in the depressed areas of northern Ukraine and in the central agricultural and mid-Volga regions. In these regions and elsewhere peasants suffered from the results of the policies of a government interested more in building industrial and military power than in social investment in backward areas and in agriculture.(19)

Arkhangel'sk guberniia, whose 368,000 inhabitants were settled in an area of 740,347 square kilometers in 1901, had the dubious distinction of being the only Great-Russian province in European Russia excluded from the zemstvo reform of 1864. In the other Great-Russian-populated gubernii of European Russia, schools supported by the zemstvos proved to be a factor in raising the level of literacy in the rural population. In Arkhangel'sk guberniia, only 3.5% of the population was enrolled in schools in 1895. But the Pomory, who accounted for only about five percent of the population of Arkhangel'sk guberniia, understood the importance of literacy for reading navigation charts and regulations. They made it a point to send their male children to the available church and state elementary schools. What their children learned there was often supplemented by instruction given within the local "male obshchina" and also by the so-called "skippers' courses" taught in Arkhangel'sk and Kem' since the 1840s. Tat'iana Bernshtam has pointed out that in 1920 sixty-six percent of Pomory males living on the western shore of the White Sea from Soroka (Belomorsk) to Kandalaksha were literate, which was the literacy rate not of rural but of urban Russia.(20)

The government left economic development in Arkhangel'sk guberniia pretty much in the hands of either Russian and foreign capitalists or the Pomory. Capitalists, half of whom were apparently foreign, financed the lumbering and shipping operations that brought Russian wood products to the West European market. More than ten percent of the lumber produced in tsarist Russia in 1913 came from Arkhangel'sk guberniia, almost all of which was exported. Another important export out of Arkhangel'sk and other White Sea ports was grain from the southern part of the guberniia and Siberia. In the summer and early fall, the Pomory carried this grain aboard their ships to Norway, where they sold or exchanged it for fish. The export of grain was facilitated in 1858 by beginning regular steamship service on the Northern Dvina River, which was linked by rail with Siberia at Kotlas in 1899. The narrow-gauge railway between Vologda and Arkhangel'sk completed a year earlier had no commercial or military importance until after it was widened during World War I.(21) Before then, it is noteworthy, the government largely confined its efforts to improve communications in Arkhangel'sk guberniia to relatively inexpensive measures intended to speed the export of grain and lumber via Arkhangel'sk, beyond which the Pomory and foreigners could be relied upon for the transport of Russian exports to Norway or Western Europe.

From late May to early November during the second part of the nineteenth century, Pomory from all the shores (berega) of the White Sea continued to fish and to trade or barter along the coasts of Finnmark and the Kola Peninsula and among the islands of the Helgoy and Karlsoy communes in northern Troms. After 1870 from 3500 to 4500 of these Pomory sailed each year to the Murman coast, Finnmark, or northern Troms. Most of them fished and traded from smaller or medium-size boats, but some 1500 of these Pomory usually served as sailors aboard larger sailing ships owned by either Arkhangel'sk merchants or captains from the Pomory settlements along the White Sea. The three hundred percent increase between 1850 and 1900 in the value of grain and fish traded at the annual Margarita Fair (Margaritinskaia iarmarka) in Arkhangel'sk gives some idea how successful the Pomory were economically during these years. The greater part of the fish sold at this fair was, however, caught by Norwegians, not by the Pomory themselves; and after 1900 the demand for Russian grain declined in northern Norway because of the increased availability of high-quality American wheat and reasonably priced consumer goods from southern Norway. As a result, the Russian Pomory and merchants from the White Sea no longer appeared in Vardo and northern Troms primarily to exchange grain for fish but, more likely, to purchase, with convertible Russian currency, fresh or salted fish intended for the markets of northern Russia and St. Petersburg.(22)

As advantageous as this modus operandi was for the fishermen of northern Norway, the Pomory, and the merchants in Arkhangel'sk and Vardo, it did not contribute to full utilization by Russia of the natural and fishing resources of northern Russia and the Barents Sea. Between 1857 and 1908, three important and detailed studies were made by Russian officials or scholars of how these resources could be utilized more effectively and how communications by land and sea in the Russian north could be further improved.

N. Ia. Danilevskii, a well-known biologist, statistician, and Panslav philosopher, made the first of these studies. His expertise on the northwestern region of European Russia was based on experience as the head of a three-year expedition for the study of the fishing and trapping enterprises on the White and Barents Seas. In the reports he made to the government in the 1860s, he emphasized the importance of avoiding repetition of the economic crises and famines that had periodically threatened the welfare of the region's inhabitants. He outlined in some detail how the government could improve the unsatisfactory living and working conditions among peasants, lumberjacks, and sawmill workers in Arkhangel'sk guberniia. He also summarized a number of the proposals that had been discussed within the bureaucracy and consular service for securing the welfare of Russians living in the far north. Within the Russian consular service, for example, steamer service to the Murmansk coast and Norway had been suggested. Danilevskii himself proposed a spur track connecting the Northern Dvina at Kotlas with a railway line leading to Viatka guberniia, which he considered a means of stimulating the economic development of the Murman coast by opening a new market for codfish in the Kama River basin and western Siberia.(23)

Sergei Witte's ministry of finance made the second study in the 1890s. Witte, a former railroad administrator and Russia's energetic and ambitious minister of finance between 1892 and 1903, usually did not pay attention to peripheral regions, but he included the Kola Peninsula in his plans for accelerated economic development in Russia because of its potential economic and strategic importance. In 1894, his ministry of finance argued strongly in favor of a project then under discussion in government circles for the building of a railway connecting the ice-free Murman coast with Leningrad and Moscow. The ministers of war and navy and others opposed this project on the grounds that it was premature as long as this coast remained relatively undeveloped. In the years that immediately followed, its approval became all the more doubtful as a result of the Sino-Japanese War of 1894-1895 and the opening of China to all kinds of imperialist plans during the decade that followed for economic and territorial concessions to Japan, Russia, and the European powers.(24)

Between 1898 and 1909 a third major study of the resources of Arkhangel'sk guberniia was undertaken by the Murmansk Scientific-Practical Expedition. It discovered as early as 1899 that the Kanin fishing bank in the Barents Sea north of the mouth of the White Sea held great promise for large-scale trawler fishing of cod, haddock, and flounder. N. M. Knipovich and L. L. Breitfus, the successive leaders of the Expedition, published more than sixty scientific and practical articles or books on how Russia could take advantage of the newly found riches in the Barents Sea. The members of the expedition realized that the Pomory fishermen from the White Sea still were not prepared to conduct modern commercial fishing on the open sea. After 1906, however, several Russian entrepreneurs tried to exploit these riches with trawlers, but with limited success. By that time, however, German and English trawlers from Bremerhaven or Hull had already begun large-scale exploitation for the European market of the rich fishing resources of the Barents Sea. The northern Norwegians then had no trawlers, but they now, with improved equipment and decked motor boats suitable for fishing on the open sea, consolidated their position as the principal suppliers of fish for the northern Russian market. Pomory entrepreneurs and captains then increased the size of their sailing vessels, but not so much as to fish as to purchase fresh or salted fish in Vardo, along the Finnmark coast, and in northern Troms.(25)

The one way Russia could hope to meet the challenge of foreign competition for control of the resources of the Barents Sea region was to build a railway connecting the ice-free Murman coast with St. Petersburg. At the beginning of the twentieth century, there was strong support in government circles for the building of this railway. In June 1902 Nicholas II approved plans for a railway spur to Petrozavodsk, expressing his "firm will" that this spur should continue to the Murman coast as part of the "great road from ocean to ocean--Vladivostok and Port Arthur to Arkhangel'sk and the Murman." In 1903 and 1904 Nicholas authorized six million rubles for the construction of a connecting spur line to Petrozavodsk, but its completion was delayed for a decade by the outbreak and repercussions of an unnecessary war with Japan, precipitated in part by Russia's grandiose, imperial ambitions in the Far East.(26)

In the period 1906-1914, Russia's top priorities were the restoration of law and order in the empire's revolution-torn towns and countryside and the resumption of rapid industrialization and modernization in areas of central importance for strengthening Russia militarily and economically as a great power. Measures were taken to improve the lot of the Pomory fishermen and provide better steamship communications on the White Sea and along the Murman coast, as well as to modernize the Russian fishing fleet on the Barents Sea by purchasing several trawlers abroad. These efforts, however, fell far short of what was required to become competitive with foreign rivals in the north. This infuriated patriotic Russians familiar with the results of the investigations of the Murmansk Practical Scientific Expedition. In 1910 the Duma raised the question of establishing a twelve-mile zone along the Russian coast of the Barents Sea within which no foreign ships would be allowed to fish. The government chose not to regulate the movements of foreign trawlers in the Barents Sea near Russia, probably because it wanted to avoid offending the English, Russia's partner with France in the Triple Entente after 1907.(27)

P. A. Stolypin, Russia's forceful prime minister in the years 1906-1911 firmly opposed any adventures in the Balkans or elsewhere that could drag Russia into another unnecessary war and stand in the way of full recovery from the consequences of the Russo-Japanese War and the Revolution of 1905. After Stolypin's assassination in 1911, Russian leaders, like their counterparts in Austria-Hungary and Germany, blundered their way into World War I, which marked the end of conservative, monarchical rule in Central and Eastern Europe. It also obliged the Russian government, at long last, to build a Murmansk railway and to widen the tracks of the Vologda-Arkhangel'sk line, these two essential arterials for subsequent modernization in the north by the Soviet authorities after 1920.

The historicism paradigm of Sergei Solov'ev has been mentioned earlier in this essay, but the empire Solov'ev considered to be the culmination of all previous Russian history collapsed thirty-eight years following the historian's death in 1879. When the Bolsheviks assumed power in 1917, the most widely-accepted accounts of previous Russian historical development were still those provided by the multi-volume histories written by Solov'ev and his one-time student Vasilii Kliuchevskii. Clearly, Russian history had to be rewritten. Yet the Bolsheviks were no less historicists than Solov'ev had been. A. M. Sakharov, in a paper read in Munich in 1978 on "The Rise of Historicism in Russian Historiography of the Eighteenth and First Half of the Nineteenth Century," gave Solov'ev credit for having understood the significance of zakonomernost', that is, regularity in historical development governed by law. He faulted Solov'ev, however, for idealizing the state and for overlooking the significance of class conflict and revolution in history, emphasizing that Lenin's formulation of historicism was the only one that "combined knowledge of the past organically with revolutionary transformation of the present.(28)

This notion of "revolutionary transformation of the present" offers insight into what happened in the former tsarist guberniia of Arkhangel'sk after 1920, when its map was redrawn into smaller units, consisting of new Arkhangel'sk, Murmansk, and Vologda oblasti and Karelian and Komi Republics. These new territorial units provided the building blocks of the future Northern Economic Raion, which extended from the fifty-seventh to beyond the eighty-first degree of north latitude and from Petrozavodsk in the west to Vorkuta in the east. It is almost as large as Alaska, occupying an area of 1,466,300 square kilometers. In 1991 it had a population of over six million, about ten times as many as the present population of Alaska. The most remarkable development in the Northern Raion took place in Murmansk oblast', whose population grew from less than 20,000 in 1920 to 1,147,400 in 1991. The capital of the oblast' (first called Romanov na Murmane and, then, Murmansk after 1917) was founded in 1916 during the construction of the Petrograd-Murman railway. Between 1920 and 1991, it grew from a collection of a few thousand railway workers, soldiers, and administrators to an important commercial and fishing port city of 426,000 inhabitants, the largest in the world north of the Arctic Circle. In this same period, the Kola Peninsula became a leading metallurgical region, specializing in the mining of aluminum, apatite, coal, copper, iron, and nickel ores, and the refining and processing of these ores in large plants located in Apatity, Kandalaksha, Kirovsk, Kovdor, Monchegorsk, Nikel', and Olenogorsk.(29)

Another source of wealth for the greater part of the Northern Economic Raion comes from the forest. Half of the forest resources of European Russia are located in this Raion, which is the source of one fifth of the wood pulp and timber and more than half of the newsprint produced in Russia. Wood is a major export item as well as the raw material for a great variety of industries throughout the Raion. Arkhangel'sk oblast', by virtue of its million and a half inhabitants, vast timber resources, highly developed fishing industry, and centrally located port (which now is kept open throughout the year with the assistance of ice breakers) remains a key player in the north.(30)

These and other remarkable achievements of Soviet leaders in the Northern Economic Raion were made in the name of Marxism-Leninism. This new creed combined international, Marxist socialism with a deeply ingrained mode of thought and feeling inherited from an Eurasian empire that had been held together for centuries by force and an ideology that exalted the "supreme power" (verkhovnaia vlast') of the Russian emperor. Faith in the validity of Marxist laws of socioeconomic and historical development provided ideological justification for mobilizing Soviet citizens in constructing what their leaders considered a new and better society. Marxist ideology also justified purging Soviet society of elements deemed incompatible with the new, emerging socialist order. Solzhenitsyn's Gulag archipelago began in Karelia and on the Solovki islands and Kola Peninsula. Alienated socialists and intellectuals, dispossessed kulaks, former ship owners, bourgeois, and capitalists from the Karelian, Arkhangel'sk, and Murmansk areas joined other Soviet citizens among the original inhabitants of Gulag.(31)

In the 1920s, the Soviet authorities still proceeded cautiously in dealing with the population of the future Northern Economic Raion. Up to 1928 the Arkhangel'sk and Murmansk authorities (who welcomed commercial contacts abroad to facilitate the purchase of machinery, trawlers, motorboats, and gear for the modernization of their fishing fleets) permitted trade between the Pomory and the Norwegians of Finnmark. This trade ended in 1928 with the beginning of the First Five Year Plan and collectivization. Pomory did initially receive assistance from the government for the purposes of modernizing their boats and fishing gear, but the authorities concentrated their efforts on building a large-scale trawler fleet.(32) It seems certain that government planners saw in the Pomory an anachronism that belonged more to the past than the to the future of Soviet society.

The foundations for a new socialist society were laid during the first two decades of Soviet history. During these years involvement was avoided in the sort of unnecessary wars that had prevented tsarist Russia from carrying out projects intended to facilitate the development of the economy of Arkhangel'sk guberniia. After 1945 Soviet leaders were no longer so prudent. Even while they repaired the extensive ravages of war, they continued pre-war programs of rapid industrial development, took advantage of the collapse of Germany by expanding the Soviet Union's imperial sphere of control into east central Europe and the Balkans, and maintained one of the world's largest standing armies. Later, they competed with the United States in space and in the Third World and as a nuclear and naval power; simultaneously suppressing uprisings in Berlin, Budapest, and Prague and allowing themselves to get involved in a protracted, unnecessary, and costly war in Afghanistan. In short, overreaching Soviet imperialism was a heavy burden for a country whose standard of living was still well below that of Western Europe and North America, even below that of sovietized Eastern Europe. In last analysis, Party leaders sacrificed the interests of the rank-and-file Soviet citizen and consumer on the altar of Russia's Marxist imperial mission.

The study manual published in 1997 for the Murmansk State Pedagogical Institute by P. V. Fedorov offers interesting insights into the changing public attitudes in the Northern Economic Raion in the period separating the death of Stalin in 1953 and the end of the Soviet Union in 1991. The "Great Fatherland War" of 1941-1945 interrupted the implementation in Murmansk oblast' of ambitious Stalinist projects for further expansion in such areas of economic activity or production as fisheries, mining, and metallurgy. In 1944, nickel and copper mines developed by the Finns in the interwar years in the Petsamo/Pechenga area were added to Stalin's mining empire. The Soviet authorities found it difficult, however, to resume and expand production in the mines and factories in the interior of the Kola Peninsula without resorting to special emergency measures. The shortage of labor in the north was especially a problem. Forced labor performed by German prisoners of war and by Soviet repatriates returned from captivity in Germany somewhat alleviated this shortage in the first years after the war. In addition, after 1945 special benefits for workers in the north attracted new immigrants, and by 1951 the population of Murmansk oblast' had reached the prewar level of 318,000, a figure that increased by one to three hundred thousand inhabitants each decade up to 1990. As early as the 1960s, however, the local populace was disenchanted by Nikita Khrushchev's combination of de-Stalinization, cultural "thaw," unsuccessful economic reform, rhetoric about the future of communism, reduction of the level of "northern benefits," and irregularity in stocking store shelves with basic necessities. Khrushchev's successors, Leonid Brezhnev and Aleksei Kosygin, raised the level of northern benefits, but their economic reforms were no more successful than those of Khrushchev had been. Fedorov attributes the failure of these measures to the lack of technological innovation, stagnation in the political leadership, and inefficiency in mining, ore processing, and industrial production. And another problem was ignoring the ecological consequences of overfishing in the Barents Sea and of Soviet mining and industrial policies in the Northern Economic Raion. The pollution of the air, rivers, soil, and harbors in the interior and along the northern coast of the Kola Peninsula had become obvious to nearly everyone by the late 1970s and early 1980s.(33)

In 1984, the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR finally issued a decree calling for protecting nature in the "regions of the far north." This decree offered, however, neither openness (glasnost') nor protection for whistle-blowers, without which there was little prospect of revealing the full dimensions of Russia's ecological crisis. Fedorov notes the presence of knowledgeable potential whistle-blowers within Soviet officialdom long before senior Party politicians admitted the growing evidence concerning the results of industrial pollution in the north and overfishing in the Barents Sea. One such potential-whistle blower, Captain S. D. Kopytov (1886-1971), referred with scorn in his reminiscences to the common view that overfishing posed no threat to the "inexhaustible" fish stocks in the Soviet north. Kopytov had served from the 1920s into the 1950s in the Soviet trawler fleet before becoming deputy director of fisheries research in Murmansk. Another, G. M. Borodulin the former director of the Northern Transport and Refrigerator Fleet ("Sevrybkholodflot"), criticized the construction in the 1970s and 1980s of huge atomicpropelled trawlers as a form of "giantism," which he characterized as the "major misfortune of that period." These ships (the construction of which seems to have coincided with the first serious discussions internationally of a new two-hundred-mile fishing zone reserved for coastal nations) were provided with newly designed trawls that, in the words of Borodulin, "could shovel out of the ocean--and did shovel out--everything living." After 1978, when the new fishing zone was introduced internationally, the Soviet northern fleet lost about half of its traditional fishing grounds, forcing it to seek new areas for its predatory trawlers in the oceans of the world, among which were the south Atlantic and the Pacific. But fishing far from their home base was expensive and Third World nations began to defend their fishing rights. The crisis of Russian fisheries in the north became even more evident in the period after 1991, when the total catch of the Murmansk oblast' declined by more than sixty percent between 1991 and 1995.34

Nonetheless, the creation of a modern trawler fleet based in Murmansk and Arkhangel'sk and the ending of the dependence of the population of northern Russia on Norway for fish were among the more notable accomplishments of the USSR during the years 1917-1991. In the 1920s the first cautious steps taken by the Soviet authorities toward this goal included purchase abroad or domestic construction of trawlers and declaring in 1921 a new twelve-mile zone along the southern shore of the Barents Sea reserved exclusively for citizens of the RSFSR. Dependence on fish from Norway for northern Russia and on foreigners in general for the purchase of motorboats and trawlers, fishing gear, and machinery needed for the further development of the Soviet fishing fleet continued, however, up to the beginning of the First Five Year Plan in 1928. Until then the Soviet authorities allowed a reduced number of Pomory to sail to Norwegian ports, especially Vardo, where they bartered Russian wood, tar, birch bark, and grain for Norwegian fish.(35)

From 1920 to the second part of the 1930s, northern Norway experienced recurring periods of serious economic crisis that lasted until the second part of the 1930s. In the 1920s trade with the RSFSR/USSR benefited merchants in Vardo and Hammerfest and fishermen in Finnmark. The Norwegian Labor Party, whose leaders then sympathized with the cause of the Russian Revolution, advocated close trade relations with the RSFSR as a means of increasing the volume of fish exported eastwards. There is, however, little evidence that this coincided with the long-term plans of the Soviet leadership. At the same time, the introduction in 1919 of prohibition in Norway on the sale and import of alcoholic beverages resulted in a decline of exports to Portugal and Spain, which had retaliated for the loss of wine sales with new tariffs on the import of Norwegian codfish. In 1926 a new referendum approved the ending of prohibition in Norway, but too late to improve the economic position of codfish fishermen in northern Norway, for in 1925 the price obtained for Norwegian fish on the international market declined sharply and remained very low for an entire decade.(36)

In the second part of the 1930s Norway moved out of the Great Depression and into the new era of prosperity and well-being that followed World War II. Norway managed to do this partly because there was a general improvement in economic conditions in the other countries in Europe and North America with which she was closely associated and partly because of internal changes in the Norwegian economy and society. In the 1920s governments dominated by conservative and liberal politicians pursued monetary and economic policies that encouraged the expansion and modernization of shipping and whaling and that aimed at restoration of parity for the krone and more foreign investment in mining, metallurgy, and the electrochemical industry. The growing Labor Party opposed these policies and, between 1921 and 1923, even briefly joined the Moscow-dominated Third International, an affiliation that convinced many non-socialist leaders in the Storting that revolutionary rhetoric of the Labor Party's more radical members had to be taken seriously. Fear of a revolutionary coup somewhat abated after a moderate wing weakened the Labor Party by forming a rival Social Democratic Party in 1921; and two years later more radically-inclined members of the main party left it and formed a separate Norwegian Communist Party. In 1927, however, the two branches of the Labor Party reunited and won 59 of 150 Storting seats in the elections that took place that same year; and the Norwegian Communist Party, three seats. In the following year the Labor Party formed a government, but, internally divided, it still avowed that it was the party of the "working class" that looked to the future as a "transition to a socialist society." The first Labor government of Christopher Hornsrud lasted only several weeks.(37)

Again the specter of a possible socialist seizure of power aroused the fears of the non-socialist parties, which then joined forces in forming a coalition of the Agrarians, Conservatives, and Liberals that prevented the Labor Party from returning to power until 1935. The Labor Party, however, learned from its own mistakes and reinvented itself under the leadership of Johan Nygaardsvold as a party of reform with a clearly formulated program for moving Norway out of the Great Depression. The Agrarian, Conservative, and Liberal parties had nothing comparable to offer the voters, and the Labor Party came close to gaining a majority in the Storting in the elections of 1933 and 1936. In 1935 the Agrarians, once assured of subsidies for agriculture, helped Labor leader Johan Nygaardsvold topple the Liberal government of Johan Ludwig Mowinckel. Between 1935 and 1940 Nygaardsvold, a skilled and persuasive politician, kept his minority government in power and displayed considerable moderation in carrying out his social and economic programs. The economic upswing did not, however, eliminate unemployment. As Einar Lie has wryly commented: "The employment question was not solved until the Second World War. What concerns unemployment, it was first Hitler and Terboven who therefore managed to pull Norway out of the crisis."(38)

The coastal regions and fjords of Troms and Finnmark had been a stronghold of the Labor Party since the beginning of the twentieth century. In the 1920s and 1930s three representatives from northern Norway stood out: Aldor Ingebrigtsen from Troms, Kristian Berg from Finnmark, and Jens Steffensen, who came from Vesteralen in Nordland county but had worked for many years as a labor organizer in Finnmark. At first, they found themselves a small and isolated minority in the Storting, but, little by little, they gained the confidence of their non-socialist colleagues thanks to their diligent committee work and to the growing number of Labor representatives in the Storting. After the formation of the Nygaardsvold government in 1935, the Laborites managed to obtain Storting approval of measures to give fishermen a role in regulating the price of raw fish and in keeping foreign and southern Norwegian trawlers outside the fourmile line along the Norwegian coast. State support was provided as well for farmers to clear new land and for fishermen to buy medium-sized, modern fishing vessels (so-called "Nygaardsvold boats") for use on the banks of Bjornoy and Finnmark. Such state support was intended to stimulate "self-help" and economic activity in the traditional fisherman-farmer economy. In northern Norway, this economy had declined during fifteen years of economic crisis between 1920 and 1935, but its flexibility in fully utilizing local resources offered by large families and Arctic nature then helped these families to cope with economic crisis. The measures taken by the Nygaardsvold government were timely and marked the beginning of a new period of economic stabilization for the traditional northern Norwegian fisherman-farmer economy that continued until 1950. Even five years of German occupation (despite the isolation from the outside world and the devastating impact on Finnmark in the winter of 1944 of the German scorched-earth policy and evacuation of almost the entire population) did not stand in the way of further economic development in northern Norway. This was especially the case for frozen-fish fillet production and the expansion of telecommunications, electrification, roads, and airfields. Furthermore, working for 40% of the German army of occupation located in northern Norway created a new source of income, as did also selling fish at good prices in the Nazi-dominated European Grossraumwirtschaft.(39)

After 1945 the Labor government of Einar Gerhardsen in Oslo actively supported the expansion of industry in towns with loans to entrepreneurs and provided financial assistance for further improvement of communications and the reconstruction of war-ravaged Finnmark. The government coordinated these activities after 1951 with a general plan of development for northern Norway, which aimed at replacing the infrastructure of the decentralized fisherman-farmer economy with what government planners considered a more rational and productive modern economy. In accordance with this plan economic specialization and rationalization were expected to reduce the number of fishermen and farmers and to make possible the concentration of administrative and social services and industry in consolidated settlements called tettsteder with more than two hundred inhabitants.(40) Tens of thousands of northern Norwegians soon moved from the surrounding fjords, islands, and countryside to new jobs in Bodo, Tromso, and Hammerfest or in tettsteder like Mo i Rana in Nordland, Sommaroy/Brennsholmen, Tromvik, Vengsoy, Torsvag, and Kristoffervallen in Troms, and Alta and Batsfjord in Finnmark. Between 1960 and 1990, about seventy percent of northern Norway's fishermen and sixty percent of her farmers abandoned the sea and/or the land as the primary source of their livelihood. This reduction in the number of those in primary production was encouraged through state-supported loans for boats, improved fishing gear, tractors, machinery, and fertilizers intended for the rationalization of fishing or agriculture. After 1950 a reduced northern Norwegian workforce employed in agriculture and fishing caught more fish, produced more milk and meat, and grew more food for the local market than ever before.(41)

After Tromso was connected by bridge with the mainland in 1960, the decline of the traditional fisherman-farmer in the economy of Troms was accelerated through the incorporation of the communes of Tromsoysund and Hillisoy into a greater Tromso municipality. Only administrative, industrial, and service tettsteder served by the growing integrated road, bridge, and ferry system in greater Tromso and elsewhere in Nordland, Troms, and Finnmark counties stood a good chance of obtaining financial assistance from the state for the purposes of economic development.(42) Social, administrative, business, health, and educational services were concentrated in towns and tettsteder, especially in the urbanized areas of Tromso commune, which accounted for 86% of those employed among its 55,500 inhabitants in 1995. In 1950 28% of this commune's working population had been employed in farming and fishing, 25% in industry, and 48% in services; by 1990 employment in farming and fishing had declined to 4% and in industry to 17% of the work force, while services increased to 79%.(43) In a word, the service sector of the economy turned out to be the driving force that raised the standard of living in northern Norway to a level approaching that of the south, not industrialization as expected by Norway's post-1945 planners.

The establishment in 1972 of the University of Tromso, which then joined Oslo, Bergen, and Trondheim as Norway's fourth university town, illustrates the seriousness of the government's commitment to narrowing the cultural and material gap that still separated northern from southern Norway. For the first time Norway's three northern counties had their own university with higher education in the humanities, arts, and physical and social sciences. The number of faculty and researchers at the University of Tromso grew rapidly after 1972. In 1975 the incorporation of existing medical facilities in Tromso into an expanded University and Regional Hospital system was a major step in the direction of professionalizing medical care in northern Norway. Twenty-five years later this hospital employed more than 2,000 doctors and other medical professionals. At the same time, the government upgraded other specialized schools in Tromso that trained teachers, seamen, musicians, fisheries specialists, and nurses to the level of institutions of higher learning. In 1993 these schools were brought together under the umbrella of a single institution for higher learning to coordinate the training of teachers and health and social services personnel, enrolling 2,000 students and employing 250 instructors and staff. Skilled and knowledgeable teachers trained at the Hogskole were especially needed for the expanded and improved, northern Norwegian primary and secondary school system. In the 1990s Tromso commune employed 3,500 people in research and all areas of primary, secondary, and higher education and 4,939 in social and health services, or, together, about 30% of the working population.(44)

For some thirty years following World War II the dramatic recovery of the Western European and world economy provided the favorable economic environment that enabled Norway both to expand industry and exports and to finance a generous state welfare system. Industrialization and prosperity seemed to end poverty and unemployment; the welfare system offered old age and unemployment benefits, and better health care, housing, roads, schools, and telecommunications. After 1973 the higher oil prices imposed on the Western industrial nations by OPEC affected Norwegian industry and shipping adversely. As a result industrial production declined and could no longer be depended on as the major source of income for the support of the state welfare system. Fortunately oil had been struck in the Norwegian sector of the North Sea, and in 1984 oil accounted for almost 20% of Norway's national product. This bonanza was used to further expand and improve the state welfare system, but created few new jobs. Between 1983 and 1989, the number of unemployed in Norway increased from 70,000 to 100,000, and it exceeded 150,000 by the mid-1990s.(45) Since then the economy has again been on an upswing with higher oil prices and the discovery of new oil and gas fields, while unemployment has declined.

The unemployment problem and uncertainty concerning the future weakened, however, the position of the Labor Party in Norwegian politics. It remains Norway's largest party but has been internally divided and challenged on the right by the Conservatives and on the left by various splinter groups critical of the policies of its leaders. Criticism of these leaders is nothing new, for as early as the 1960s sociologist and agrarian economist Ottar Brox faulted them for their centralizing tendencies and their undermining of a fisherman-farmer household economy that had demonstrated its viability and flexibility during the depression and the Nygaardsvold and war years. By the 1970s and 1980s, the critics of one aspect or another of these policies included intellectuals and students in Tromso as well as many people engaged in primary production in the Balsfjord, Lyngen, and Storfjord communes and on the outer side and along the coast of Troms and Finnmark. Here fishing, farming, and the processing of fish and agricultural products remain dominant forms of economic activity. Fishermen, farmers, and others involved in the local economy distrusted the campaign of the political and business leadership to bring Norway into the European Union, fearing possible outside interference detrimental to their economic future and way of life. Northern-Norwegian fishermen, in particular, have been in the forefront of those who kept Norway outside the European Union in the referendums of 1978 and 1994. On both occasions, the rest of Norway was evenly divided but the issue was decided by the overwhelmingly negative vote in northern Norway, in 1978 reaching 70.2% in Troms county and 86.1% in Karlsoy commune.(46)

After 1978, recognition of a two-hundred-mile-fishing zone opened up in the Barents Sea a large new area reserved for the exclusive use of Norwegians. The large codfish catch in 1983 persuaded the fisheries authorities in Tromso to permit fuller use of the trawler fleet that had been built up there during the 1970s. Between 1985 and 1987 the trawler share of the total codfish caught increased from 34 to 47%. In 1988 came the shock that the codfish stocks had been greatly overestimated. Fishing quotas were cut drastically. In 1986-1988, Tromso fishermen harvested an annual average of twelve thousand tons of cod, compared with six thousand tons in 1990-1992.(47)

The cod crisis and decline of the fish processing industry that preceded the second referendum on joining the European Union in 1994 made its overwhelming defeat in northern Norway a foregone conclusion. In Tromso uncertainty about the future and distrust of the political leadership at that time was graphically illustrated by the split in the local Labor Party over the European Union issue, as well as by signs carried during May 1 parades demanding jobs instead of unemployment compensation and tax reduction and by the blockade of Tromso harbor in 1991 by approximately a hundred boats manned by angry fishermen. In 1990-1992, when trawler fishing was curtailed, these fishermen made rational and effective use of their well-equipped, modern boats, 80% of which were less than ten meters in length, to compensate for the drop in the cod catch by fishing for coalfish (sei) in coastal waters, fjords, and sounds. At somewhat higher prices, the amount of money received from the sale of cod and cod-related fish caught during these years was about two-thirds of that earned during the period 1986-1988. At the same time, improvements with the assistance of the University of Tromso and other research organizations in the farming, processing, and marketing of fish products have won new markets for the northern Norwegians. The lower fishing quotas enforced at the beginning of the 1990s resulted in a partial recovery of the cod stocks by 1993. After a very good cod harvest in 1997, fishing quotas were again lowered, but fishermen on the outer side of Troms and Finnmark seem to be reasonably optimistic about the future of cod fishing within the 200-mile zone reserved for them since 1978.(48)

Today northern Norway is clearly more developed commercially, politically, and socially than the neighboring Murmansk and Arkhangel'sk oblasti. In the twentieth century, the Norwegian state, like the former USSR, made a major investment in the development of natural resources, communications, the economy, and the modernization of society. In the Soviet Northern Economic Raion, this investment resulted in the rapid growth of population and ambitious expansion of mining, lumbering, fisheries, and the processing of raw materials related to the USSR's rise as a superpower. The Soviet modernization process did little, however, to close the gap in standard of living and political and social development that still separates Russia/the USSR politically, economically, and socially from Scandinavia and Central and Western Europe. After 1945 Norwegian political leaders followed a general program of social, cultural, and economic development for all parts of Norway that brought the standard of living in northern Norway up to a level comparable to that existing in more advanced countries. In carrying out this program, they were not hindered by costly commitments to ideologies of imperial power and expansion, as has been the case in Russia/the USSR.

Northern Norway belongs not only to Norway and Europe but also to what has been referred to as the "Barents-Euro-Arctic Region." Russians and Norwegians are the principal inhabitants of this region. The six million inhabitants of the Northern Economic Raion in 1991 outnumbered by far the 461,000 people living in the Nordland, Troms, and Finnmark counties. Jens Petter Nielsen, a historian at Tromso University, has played a leading role since the 1980s in organizing useful seminars on Russo-Norwegian relations during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the papers from which have been published by the Pomor University Press in Arkhangel'sk. Trade relations have been resumed with Northern Norway and Norwegian shipyards have benefited from contracts to build fishing boats for the Russians, while Russian trawlers have delivered fish to processing plants in Finnmark. Norwegians have been involved in the development of telecommunication services in the Arkhangel'sk region and in the bidding for oil and gas concessions in the Timan-Pechora gas and oil fields in the Komi Republic and in the extreme northeast of Arkhangel'sk oblast'. Norwegians have also been active participants in efforts to clean up the pollution from mining and ore processing on the Kola Peninsula and from the dumping of atomic waste into the Barents Sea. Only time will tell, however, how long it will take to restore in the north the more the normal commercial and human relations of the pre-1917 period and to overcome the legacy of insularity, fear, and insecurity inherited from the Cold-War period.(49)

NOTES

(1.) For general discussions of Norwegians and Russians in the north, see the following: Den menneskelige dimensjon i nordomradene.' Rapport fra symposiet "Norskrussiske forbindelser ca 1814-1917. Historie og kultur, Universitet i Tromso 6-8. november 1992, ed. Jens Petter Nielsen and Gunnar Opeide (Arkhangel'sk: Pornoruniversitetsforlag, 1994); Frykt og forventning: Russland og Norge i det 20. arhundre, ed. Vladimir Ivanovich Goldin and Jens Petter Nielsen (Arkhangel'sk: Pornoruniversitetsforlag, 1996).

(2.) On historicism, Sars and Solov'ev, and Norwegian and Russian historiography, see Narve Fulsas, Historie og nasjon: Ernst Sars og striden om norsk kultur (Oslo: Universitetsforlag, 1999); B. Falk, Geschichtschreibung und nationale Ideologie des norwegischen Historikers Johann Ernst Sars (Heidelberg: C. Winter, 1991); E. C. Thaden, The Rise of Historicism in Russia (Bern and New York: Peter Lang Publishing, Inc., 1999), pp. 1-6, 192-96, 249, 253-54, 264-67, 333-34; Sverre Bagge, "Udsigt og innhogg: 150 ars forsking om eldre norske historie," Historisk tidsskrift, 75 (1996):39-44; Making a Historical Culture: Historiography in Norway, ed. William H. Hubbard, Jan Eivind Myhre, Trond Norby, and Solvi Sogner (Oslo: Scandinavian University Press, 1995), pp. 53-59; Norway: A History from the Vikings to Our Own Times, ed. Rolf Danielsen, Stale Dyrvik, et al. (Oslo: Scandinavian University Press, 1998), pp. 124-57, 180-82, 189-90, 194-97; Steinar Imsen, Norsk bondekommunalisme fra Magnus Lagabote til Kristian Kvart, 2 vols. (Oslo: Tapir, 1990; Trondheim Skriftserie fra Historisk institut, no. 7, Universitet i Trondheim, no. 7, 1995).

(3.) Cf. Thaden, The Rise of Historicism in Russia, pp. 178-79, 253.

(4.) Harvard Dahl Bratrein, Karlsoy og Helgoy Bygdabok: Folkeliv -- Naeringsliv -- Samfunnsliv, 4 vols. (Hansnes: Karlsoy Kommune. 1989-1994), 1:173-78; Norway: A History, pp. 13-17, 20; Thomas S. Noonan and Roman Kovalev, "`The Furry 40s': Packaging Pelts in Medieval Northern Europe," unpublished MS, accepted for publication in State, Society, and Nationality: Festschrift for Jaroslaw Pelenski, ed. Janusz Duzinkiewicz (Boulder: East European Monographs), 29 pp.

(5.) Norway: A History, pp. 96-98, 149; Anne-Karine Sandmo, Reidar Bertelsen, Ragnhild Hogsaet, "Fra boplass til by opp til 1794," in Tromso gjennom 10000 ar, in 4 vols. (Tromso: Tromso Kommune, 1994-1996), 1:167-392.

(6.) Tromso, 1:291-92, 307-11; Arnved Nedkvitne, "Okonomiske modernisering og urbanisering i Nord-Norge 1500-1789," Historisk tidsskrift, 70 (1990): 566-67, 579.

(7.) M. M. Bogoslovskii, Zemskoe samoupravlenie na russkom severe, 2 vols. (Moscow: Sinodal'naia Tipogfrafiia, 1904-1912); Robert Crummey, The Formation of Moscow 1304-1613 (New York and London: Longman, 1987), pp. 17-19,32-35, 88-91, 168-70; Janet Martin, Medieval Russia 980-1584 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 40, 67-70, 225-27, 249-54, 367-68.

(8.) E. V. Anisimov, The Reforms of Peter the Great: Progress Through Coercion in Russia, tr. John Alexander (Armonk, NY, and London: M. E. Sharp, 1993), pp. 296-98; Thaden, The Rise of Historicism in Russia, pp. 181-88.

(9.) Bratrein, Karlsoy og Helgoy Bygdabok, 1:400-404, 441-43, 445-46, 551-62; 2:13-14, 17-24, 109-10, 141-43, 407-10; N. A. Ytreberg, Tromso bys historie, vol. 1 (Oslo: Tell Forlag, 1946), pp. 159-61; Astri Andresen, "Handelsfolk og fiskerbonder," in Tromso gjennom 10000 ar, 2:367-85.

(10.) Andresen, "Handelsfolk og fiskebonder," Tromso, 2:62-72, 80-81.

(11.) Arkhangel'skaia oblast': Ekonomiko-geograficheskaia kharakteristika, ed. S. A. Seleznev and P. M. Trofimov (Arkhangel'sk: Severo-Zapadnoe Izdatel'stvo, 1967), pp. 119-21; Lars Ivar Hansen, "Handel pa Nordkalotten ca. 1550-ca. 1750," in Historia Septentrionalia, no. 14: Nordkalotten i en skiftande varld (Jyvaskyla, 1987-1988), pp. 216-43; N. N. Repin, "Ot diskriminatsii k fritrederstvu cherez Arkhangel'sk v 20-60-e gody xviii veka iee rezul'tat," in Arkhangel'sk v xviii veke (St. Petersburg: Russko-Baltiiskii Informatsionnyi Tsentr BLITS, 1997), pp. 228-49.

(12.) Norway: A History, pp. 206-29, 255-70: Torstein Haaland, "Byrakrati, politikk of situasjonisme: Norsk statshistorie 1814-1900," Historisk tidsskrift, 79 (2000): 54-57.

(13.) Andresen, ""Handels og fiskebonder," Tromso, 2:140-45, 252-54, 263-64,276-77; Bratrein, Karlsoy og Helgoy Bygdabok, 2:506-10, 516-23.

(14.) Andresen, "Handels og fiskebonder," pp. 163-67, 368-73; Bratrein, Karlsoy og Helgoy Bygdabok, 2:439, 448-59; 3:204-30; citation, 3:221.

(15.) Bratrein, Karlsoy og Helgoy Bygdabok, 3:132-56, 463-515; Pal Christensen and Gunnar Pedersen, "Ishavsfolk, arbeidsfolk og fintfolk," Tromso: 1900-1945," 3:121, 148-174.

(16.) Bratrein, Karlsoy og Helgoy Bygdabok, pp. 144-47, 156, 299-308; Christensen and Pedersen, "Ishavsfolk, arbeidsfolk og fintfolk," pp. 67-93, 166-67; Ivan Kristoffersen, Aldor: Kystens fiskernes hovedsmann (Oslo: Tiden Norsk Forlag, 1993), pp. 12, 17-18, 28-38.

(17.) E. C. Thaden, Russia: The Making of a New Society (New York: John Wiley, 1971), pp. 30-36, 101-15, 119-20; N. M. Druzhinin, Gosudarstvennye krest'iane i reformy P. D. Kiseleva, 2 vols. (Moscow: Akademiia Nauk, 1946-1958), 2:235-44, 571-72.

(18.) A. G. Rashin, Naselenie Rossii za 100 (1811-1913): Statisticheskie ocherki (Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe Statisticheskoe Izdatel'stvo, 1956), pp. 21, 308, 311, 314; Thaden, Russia Since 1801, p. 330.

(19.) Thaden, Russia, pp. 198-200, 320-24.

(20.) "Arkhangel'sk, guberniia," Brokgauz-Efron, Entsiklopedicheskii slovar', 2:315; G. I. Prosvirina, "Sel'skoe narodonaselenie i krest'ianskaia sem'ia na severe na nachale XX veka," in Istoriia i kul'tura Arkhangel'skogo Severa (dosovetskii period) (Vologda: Vologodskii Pedagogicheskii Universitet, 1986), p. 117; P. T. Sinitsyna, "Iz istorii narodnogo obrazovaniia na Evropeiskom Severe (XVIII-XIX vv.),"), ibid., pp. 141-42, 144-45; T. A. Bernstam, Russkaia narodnaia kul'tura pomor'ia v XIX-nachale XX v.: Etnograficheskie ocherki (Leningrad: Nauka, 1983), pp. 89-90.

(21.) Arkhangel'skaia oblast', pp. 122-31, 332-35.

(22.) Bratrein, Karlsoy og Helgoy Bygdabok, 3:502-14; N. A. Korablei, "Arkhangel'skaia Magaritinskaia iarmarka vo vtoroi polovine XIX veka," in istoriia i kul'tura Arkhangel'skogo Severa (dosovetskii period), pp. 96-97; Randi Ronning Balsvik, "Pomorbyen Vardo og Russland," in Den menneskelige dimensjon i nordomradene: Rapport fra symposiet "Norsk-russiske forbindelser ca 1814-1917. Historie og kultur, Universitetet i Tromso 6-8. november 1992, ed. Jens Petter Nielsen and Gunnar Opeide, pp. 151-57; Jens Petter Nielsen, "Nordnorge som forbilde: Praktisk-politisk kooparasjon i russisk nordomradepolitikk ca. 1855-1917," in ibid., pp. 275-76.

(23.) The four articles Danilevskii published between 1860 and 1862 concerning his study of the fish and trapping enterprises on the White and Arctic Seas are listed by Robert E. MacMaster, Danilevsky: A Russian Totalitarian Philosopher (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1967), p. 315. In writing this paragraph, I have used a fifth article published in 1868 in the Pravitel'svennyi vestnik, which N. N. Strakhov reprinted in 1890: N. Ia. Danilevskii, "O merakh dlia obespecheniia narodnogo prodovol'stviia na krainem severe Rossii," in Sbornik politicheskikh i ekonomicheskikh statei, ed. N. N. Strakhov (St. Petersburg: Tipografiia Brat. Panteleevikh, 1890), pp. 503-4, 569-79, 591-97; G. I. Prosvirinova, "Sel'skoe narodonaselenie i krest'ianskaia sem'ia na severe v nachale XX veka," in Istoriia i kul'tura Arkhangel'skogo Severa, p. 117. On Danilevskii, cf. MacMaster, Danilevskii; Thaden, Conservative Nationalism in Nineteenth-Century Russia (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1964), pp. 102-15; Nielsen, "Nordnorge som forbilde," pp. 274-76.

(24.) I. F. Ushakov, Kol'skaia zemlia: Ocherki istorii Murmanskoi oblasti v dooktiabr'skii period (Murmansk: Murmanskoe Knizhnoe Izdatel'stvo, 1972), pp. 296-400; Nielsen, "Nord-Norge som forbilde," pp. 277-79; idem, "Den gamle Russland og det nye Norge (1905-1917): Et naboskap uten frykt," in Frykt og forventning: Russland og Norge i det 20. arhundre, ed. Vladimir Ivanovich Goldin and Jens Petter Nielsen, pp. 31-32.

(25.) Glavnoe Gidrograficheskoe Upravlenie Morskogo Ministerstva, Opisanie Murmanskogo poberezh'ia (St. Petersburg: Tipografiia Morskogo Ministerstva, 1909), pp. 43-44, 175-77, 209, 261-66; Ushakov, Kol'skaia zemlia, pp. 435-46, 483-93.

(26.) Ushakov, Kol'skaia zemlia, pp. 399-400.

(27.) Ibid., pp. 407-22; Arkhangel'skaia oblast', p. 28; Thaden, Russia Since 1801, pp. 316-24, 397-98.

(28.) V. I. Lenin, Collected Works, 21 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1964), p. 57; idem, Sochineniia (4th ed.; Moscow: Gospolitizdat, 1948) p. 41; A. M. Sakharov, "Die Entstehung des Historismus in der russischen Geschichtsschreibung des 18. und in der ersten Halfte des 19. Jahrhunderts," in K. O. Aretin and G. A. Ritter (eds.), Historismus und moderne Geschichtswissenschaft (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag Wiesbaden, 1987), pp. 29-59; Thaden, The Rise of Historicism in Russia, pp. 2-3; idem, "Der sowjetische Historismus und Ostmitteleuropa nach 1939," in Schriften des Bundesinstituts fur ostdeutsche Kultur und Geschichte, Bd. 8 (Zwischen Konfrontation und Kompromiss. Oldenburger Symposium: "Interethnische "Beziehungen in Ostmitteleuropa," ed. M. Garleff [Munich: R. Oldenbourg Verlag, 1995]), pp. 245-58; idem, "The Vocabulary of Russian Historicism," in Interpreting History: Collected Essays on Russia's Relations with Europe (Boulder: Social Science Monographs), p. 88.

(29.) Biznes-karta 92: Rossiia, Severnyi Raion, ed. O. V. Iuferov and V. E. Samusenko (Moscow: Agenstvo Delovoi Informatsii, 1992), pp. 43-48, 125-26, 128, 177-78, 213-14, 245-46; The Oulu-Karelia-Arkhangelsk-Komi Corridor (Oulu: Ministry of Transport and Communications of Finland, 1995), pp. 38, 42; A. A. Kiselev, Rodnoe zapoliar'e (Murmansk; Murmanskoe Knizhnoe Izdatel'stvo, 1974), p. 136.

(30.) Biznes-karta 92, p.45; The Oulu-Karelia-Arkhangelsk-Komi Corridor, p. 10.

(31.) Cf. David G. Rowley, "'Redeemer Empire': Russian Millinarianism," American Historical Review, 104 (1999): 1599; and Amir Weiner, "Nature, Nurture, and Memory in a Socialist Utopia: Delineating the Soviet Socio-Ethnic Body in the Age of Socialism," American Historical Review, 104 (1999): 1114-1155.

(32.) Arkhangel'skaia oblast', pp. 266-75; Kiselev, Rodnoe zapoliar'e, pp. 222-29; Ocherki istorii Karelii, ed. V. I. Mashzerskii, 2 vols. (Petrozavodsk: Karel'skoe Knizhnoe Izdatel'stvo, 1964), pp. 235, 363, 422-23; Vladimir Bulatov, "Episoder fra norsk-russisk samarbeid og strid i Arktis," in Frykt og forventning, ed. Nielsen; pp. 146-61. For population statistics concerning the Pomory and a map showing the location of their settlements, see T. A. Bernshtam, Pomory: Formirovanie gruppy i sistema khoziaistva (Leningrad: Nauka, 1978), pp. 82, 88.

(33.) P. V. Fedorov, Murmanskaia oblast' v poslevoennom SSSR (1945-1990) (Murmansk: Murmanskii Gosudarstvennyi Pedagogicheskii Institut, 1997), pp. 1-8, 13-15, 18-24, 32-33, 35-40, 44-45.

(34.) Ibid., pp. 12, 44-45; Gosudarstvennyi komitet Rossiiskoi Federatsii po statistike, Murmanskii oblastnoi komitet gosudarstnennoi statistiki, Murmanskaia oblast' v tsifrakh: Kratkii statisticheskii sbobrnik (Murmansk, 1996), p. 27.

(35.) Pal Christensen and Gunnar Pedersen, "Ishavsfolk, arbeidsfolk og fintfolk," in Tromso glennom 10000 ar, 3:272-74; Bulatov, "Episoder fra norsk-russisk samarbeid og strid i Arktis," pp. 159-60; idem, "Norges rolle da den okonomiske blokaden av Sovjet-republikken ble brutt (1920-1924)," in Den menneskelige dimensjon i nordomradene, ed. Nielsen, pp. 183-210: Anastasia and Waling Gorter-Gronvik, "Pomor-handelens siste fase," pp. 159-61.

(36.) Christensen and Pedersen, "Ishavsfolk, arbeidsfolk og fintfolk," pp. 328-32, 366-68; Norway: A History, pp. 319-33; Bratrein, Karlsoy og Helgoy Bygdabok, 4:15-22; Kristoffersen, Aldor: Kystens og fiskernes hovedsmann, pp. 46-61.

(37.) Norway: A History, pp. 334-40; Magnus Jensen, Norges historie: Fra 1905 til vare dager (3rd ed.; Olso: Universitetsforlag, 1965), pp. 56-60.

(38.) Norway: A History, pp. 341-50; Jensen, Norges historic, pp. 61-66, 78-85; Einar Lie, "Hva forte Norge ut av krisen i 1930-arene?," Historisk tidsskrift, 75 (1996):325-36; citation, p. 336.

(39.) Bratrein, KarlsCy og Helg#y Bygdabok, 4:48-53, 56-59; Kristoffersen, Aldor, pp. 80-85, 118-23; Knut Kjeldstadli, Et Splitted Samfunn, Aschehougs Norgeshistorie, vol. 10 (Oslo: Aschehoug & Co., 1994), pp. 206, 218-23; Nordnorsk kulturhistorie: Det gienstridige landet, ed. Einar-Arne Drivnes, Marie Anne Hauan, and Helge A. Wold, 2 vols. (Oslo: Gyldendal Norsk Forlag, 1994), 1:242-46.

(40.) Halvard Tjelmeland, "Fra byfolk og bona til Tromsovaering, 1945-1996," in Tromso gjennom 10000 ar, 4:31-45, 139, 147-80, 220-26; Jan Einar Reiersen, "Tettstedet--Bostedet for de fleste nordlendinger, in Nordnorsk kulturhistorie: Det gjenstridige landet, 1:307; 2;148-61.

(41.) Bratrein, Karlsoy og Helg#y Bygdaby, 4:124-27, 131-38, 147-52, 178-89, 192208; Tjelmeland, "Fra byfolk og bona til Tromsovaering," pp. 147-218, 360-86; idem, "Nordnorsk utakt og opprors-kultur," in Nordnorsk kulturhistorie: Det gjenstridige landet, 1:382-83.

(42.) Tjelmeland, "Fra byfolk og bona til Tromsovaering," pp. 98-115, 131-42, Bratrein, Karlsoy og Helgoy Bygdabok, 4:125, 132, 143-49; Ivar Bjorklund, Fjordfolket i Kvaenangen: Fra samiske samfunn til norsk utkant 1550-1980 (Tromso, Oslo, Stavanger: Universitetsforlaget, 1985), pp. 386-87.

(43.) Tjelmeland, "Fra byfolk og bona til Tromsovaering," pp. 360-61,499, 564-65.

(44.) Ibid., pp. 283-326.

(45.) Even Lange, Samling om felles mal, Aschehougs Norges historic, vol. 11 (Oslo: Aschehoug & Co., 1988), pp. 98-115, 202-21; Edgeir Benum, Overflod og fremtidsfrykt, Aschehougs Norges historic, volume 12 (Oslo: H. Aschehoug & Co., 1998), pp. 84-97, 172; Norway: A History, pp. 445-47.

(46.) Tjelmeland, "Fra byfolk og bona til Tromsovaering," pp. 176, 367, 380-85, 389, 409, 518-61; Bratrein, Karlsoy og Helgoy Bygdabok, 4:176-207.

(47.) Tjelmeland, "Fra byfolk og bona tii Tromsovaering," pp. 376-85; Benum, Overflod og fremtidsfrykt, pp. 107-9.

(48.) Tjelmeland, "Fra byfolk," pp. 384-86, 518-61; idem, "Nordnorsk utakt og opprorskultur," in Nordnorsk kulturhistorie, 1:381-85; Bratrein, Karlsoy og Helgoy Bygdabok, 4:196-98; letter of Per Engvik, Rebbenesoy, December 29, 1998.

(49.) Nordnorsk Kulturhistorie, 1:89; Edgeir Benum, Overflod og fremtidsfrykt, pp. 109, 209-10; The Oulu-Karelia-Arkhangelsk-Komi Corridor, p. 35-42. The last-mentioned study, published by the Finnish Ministry of Transport and Communications in 1995, outlines an ambitious program for the development of communications by air road, and railway connecting the Russian north with Finland, especially the port of Oulu. I have seen no evidence of serious Norwegian plans to connect Northern Norway by rail and improved roads with the interior of Russia via Murmansk or Rovaniemi and Oulu.

Edward Thaden University of Illinois at Chicago